2009 CFB Preview: West Virginia

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West Virginia clearly took a step back last year. There's no reason to think that the Mountaineers won't fall back to their historical place in the college football landscape as an above average program in a second tier conference. The sportsbooks agree with me.



The median spreads above were taken from the spreads already posted by Sportsbook and the Golden Nugget and then interpolating those around college football to come up with games not listed. Worst case scenario spreads gave WVU three or four more points than the median, depending on how confident I felt in the lines I set. The best case lines gave points to WVU's opponent.

Once probabilities were assigned to each game, xlssports provided me with a Monte Carlo calculator to determine the probability of every outcome on WVU's schedule.



With West Virginia's aggressive non-conference schedule, the 'Eers look like a 7-5 to 8-4 team this year. Their total at 5Dimes is 8.5, and if you take the median spreads, the under will hit 77% of the time, which is kind of surprising that there is that much difference. Even for West Virginia's Best Case, under 8.5 comes up 57% of the time. I'm not big on tying up money in futures, but those seem to have fairly high EV.




I can't find any value in West Virginia to win the conference given that half the time they finish under five wins.

Again, I chose a decent Big East team to start out with because I'm not sure if my methodologies are correct, so errors are not terribly important, so feel free to let me know where I screwed up.

(Special thanks to xlssports for providing the Monte Carlo calculator)

4 comments:

moneyline said...

FWIW, You can get -120 on the WVU under at the Greek.

moneyline said...

Out of curiosity, I just went through and did WVU myself. You did a pretty a good job, although I differed from you on a few. I definitely think your spread for the Uconn game needs some rethinking.

am19psu said...

Indeed. The only line I have for UConn is USF -6.5. On my sheet, though, I have the game in Tampa. I just double checked and it's in Storrs, which obviously makes a huge difference. I'll make the changes.

am19psu said...

The numbers didn't change too much, but thanks for the heads up. That was clearly wrong.