2009 CFB Average Odds From Vegas

The average odds from Las Vegas show Florida with a 36.3% chance of winning the national championship this year. That seems pretty high to me, but given what they lost from last year, I suppose it could be reasonable.

I'm surprised that OU is the consensus number two team out there. Even with Bradford et al. coming back for another year of school, they have a much harder non-conference road than Texas. While Texas gets UTEP, UCF, UL-Monroe, and at Wyoming, the Sooners play BYU at the House That Jerry Built and Miami at Joe Robbie. For two teams that are otherwise similar (though I would put Texas slightly above OU anyway), it's hard to imagine that OU should be higher than the Horns.

The ACC Coastal Division race should be a dogfight according to Vegas, with Virginia Tech slightly ahead of UNC, Tech and Miami. Obviously, you know who I think is going to come out on top. Throw in Free Shoes and Clemson and the ACC has six teams in the Top 21. In taking GT, I am playing the same game The Saw does with golf plays. VT, Miami*, FSU, and to a lesser extent Clemson all have name value, whereas GT and UNC are up and comers in the ACC. The market is likely overvaluing the first four and undervaluing the latter two.

The only other team worth mentioning is Ole Miss. They are ranked tenth in average odds rankings. I strongly believe they are going to be overrated at the beginning of the season. Judging by their position on the sheets I brought home with me, this is not an opinion of Vegas, but a market reaction. Ole Miss was often 15th to 20th down the list, meaning their lines have move up relative to the rest of the teams. I guess it's only a matter of time before I lose money fading them.

At the moment, I am leaning towards shutting down baseball betting. I clearly derive no pleasure from it and it's not like I am turning a profit, either. In the meantime until football, I plan on approaching team by team analyses based on schedules and anticipated spreads, similar to what Moneyline did last year. I've got some Excel programming to do for Bernoulli trials in order to get expected win distriubtions**, but I'm hoping to compare the lines I come up with to the information Jonny posted last week. I'm not expecting my analysis to be terribly accurate, in fact I'm hoping to get some constructive criticism as I post the lines, but hopefully, it will stimulate some good CFB discussion before the season gets started.

*I realize Miami is up and coming at the moment, but they still have name value to the average square.

** Since I need the entire population of W-L probabilities, I need to find the probability of a team losing to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th (and the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 7th, etc.) teams on their schedule exactly, then summing over all to get the probability of six losses. 12-choose-6 is 924 and 12-choose-5 (or 7) is 792, so I have a lot of copying and pasting in Excel ahead of me.