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.

Vegas CFB Futures Odds

I uploaded the all of the CFB futures data I collected to Google Docs. The families can be found here. I stopped by Wynn and Planet Hollywood, but didn't get printouts of their odds so their data is missing. There was nothing spectacular at either shop. The juice is awful across town except at the Plaza, where the sum of the expected probabilities is 152%.

The CFB Futures Positions

I'm glad I did quite a bit of price shopping while I was in Vegas, because I think I got decent value with these picks. We'll see. I'm not entirely settled on my unit size for football, so these are in current units, but I don't think it makes a huge difference for record keeping purposes.

Georgia Tech 75-1 4x to win 300x at the Plaza Hotel and Casino
Michigan State 125-1 2x to win 250x at Four Queens Casino

The rationale for these picks are somewhat square, but in college football, where there are no good metrics, there will be some squareness to any future pick. In my opinion, in college football, schedule analysis plays some role in determining how teams will do, and that was a driver in both these picks.

Georgia Tech is returning 17 starters from a middle of the pack ACC team last year, though everyone except Duke was middle of the pack last year. Their schedule is set up somewhat favorable, getting North Carolina, Virginia Tech, and Georgia at home. Their hardest road game will be in Tallahassee on October 10th.

While those are decent reasons for liking Tech, I have to admit that my opinion of them is driven strongly by the Flexbone offense they run. I'm a bit of a Smart Football fanboy and think GT will thrive in Year 2 of Paul Johnson's offense. With teams only seeing the flex once a year, it gives a strategic advantage to the offense (see: 2008 Georgia game).

The big question mark for Tech will be do they have the talent to compete for the MNC? North Carolina continues to amass talent and Virginia Tech always has a strong defense. Even if they get through the ACC unscathed, they would be heavy dogs to Florida, Texas, or USC in the national title game. Still, 75-1 is the best price I've seen on the Jackets since futures opened and that represents value in my mind.

Michigan State loses Brian Hoyer and Javon Ringer, but neither are big time losses. Hoyer was a typical mediocre Big Ten quarterback, while Ringer got a lot of touches but wasn't particularly explosive when he had the rock.

This pick is basically like Jonny's Penn State future on steroids. Ohio State is universally regarded as the Big Dog in the Big Ten, but have a lot of holes to fill on both sides of the ball and Terelle Pryor was not particuarly impressive throwing the ball in his freshman year (not because he was a freshman, either; the guy had the worst throwing motion I've seen from a D-1 QB). Penn State is regarded as their closest competitor, but again, faces big holes at WR, OL, and DB. Sparty has been picked mostly third in the conference this year and Dantonio has been bringing in good recruiting classes somewhat quietly, but like Tech, faces a talent disparity with the UFs and UTs of the world.

Michigan State's schedule sets up somewhat favorably. I'm not on the Notre Dame bandwagon yet, but the two Directional Michigans will be difficult non-conference tests. Once getting to the Big Ten schedule, they miss Ohio State and get Penn State and Iowa at home, so they couldn't have asked for a better set up heading into the season.

Obviously, all of what I have written is stuff that the books have likely considered in setting these lines, but the fact that I saw GT as low at 40-1 at many books and Sparty as low as 45-1 at one leads me to me think that these plays have value going into the season (or, at least, someone who matters banged these teams down).

I've got some cleaning up to do after getting back from Vegas, but I hope to put up a basic analysis of the futures I found in Vegas which maybe will illuminate some value at offshore books looking forward (or not, but it will be fun to play with numbers anyway).