Wednesday, 26 August 2015
Monday, 24 August 2015
Wednesday, 19 August 2015
Saturday, 6 June 2015
The Temple Owls and their 2015-2016 College Football Betting Season
Temple
might seem an obscure team to profile for a college football preview. After
all, they have never won a National Championship in football; they are not a
traditional powerhouse (by any stretch of the imagination), and they play in
the American Athletic Conference- a so-called “Group of Five” conference (which
means they are excluded from the “Power Five”). In the college football picks betting
sphere, however, there just might be something intriguing about the Temple Owls
and their upcoming 2015-2016 season: In this world of up-tempo, no-huddle,
“NASCAR” offenses, the Temple Owls have been slowing things down and playing
serious defense. They might be fairly accused of playing a boring game (unless
you love low-scoring defensive struggles), but they are both scoring less themselves,
and preventing opponents from scoring. That combination suggests betting Under
the Total might be an attractive betting proposition. In this article we will
explore what has happened to Temple and scoring, and we will look to some
possibilities for their sports-betting future.
Because fast-paced offenses in
college football have been trending in recent years, it is no surprise that
more points are being scored, per-game, than ever before. For the first time in
history, these past two seasons have witnessed a per-game average of more than
57 points scored. In fact, the actual points scored per-game in recent seasons
has risen at a rate greater than the rate at which bookmakers have raised
Totals betting lines. The proof is in the ratio of Overs to Unders. It has long
been the case that there are more Unders than Overs in college football
betting. For the 10 seasons leading up to the last two, on average, there were
3.75% more Unders than Overs. For the past two seasons, that percentage dropped
to just 1.65.
The information on rising
scoring is all exposition to the anomaly that is the Temple Owls since Matt
Rhule took over the team as their head coach for the past two seasons
(2013-2014). At a time when all college football games average more than 57
points per game, in 2014, games involving Temple scored an average of just
40.58 points. In 2014, Temple ran just 772 offensive plays, which meant that
119 (of the 128) FBS teams ran more. Their defense played more often- 876
plays- and that was closer to college football’s median average (895 plays).
What made the defense exceptional, however, was how many yards per play they
allowed- 4.75. That figure was good enough to be ranked 11th-best in
the nation. The Under was 7-4-1 (63.64%) in 2014. In Rhule’s first season as
head coach, the Under was 7-5 (58.33%).
If Rhule’s Owls continue to
produce very few offensive plays while his defense continues their excellence
on the field, either bookmakers will put the Total on Temple games so low that
they might average three standard deviations below college football’s mean
Total, or else Temple will continue to go Under the Total in 2015. Adding more
momentum to that charge is the fact that Temple appears to be returning more
defensive starts for 2015 than any other school in the country. Time will tell, but keep an
eye on Temple’s Totals; if they hover anywhere near college football’s average,
2015 could be another opportunity to make money betting Temple to go Under the
Total with profitable consistency.
Tuesday, 5 May 2015
Totals Week 7 College Football Picks 2014
Week 7 Totals Results
College football bettors love to bet the Over when wagering on Totals. The reasons for that betting propensity can be debated, but the data is objective, lopsided, and undeniable. For the 10 prior seasons leading up to this one (2004-2013), the Over had the public majority (more than 50% of the betting) in 86.2% of all college football games. Now that more college football teams are running fast-paced, no-huddle offenses, betting that already-popular Over might look more appealing than ever before. In Week 7 of this season, the Over went 24-25-1- nearly a perfect split.
From 2003-2013, the average betting Total in college football was 53.33 points. Last season (2013-2014), that average went up to 56.77 points. In Week 7 of this season, the average Total was 56.66 points, exactly 1.25 points per game BELOW Week 6's average. That leap is noteworthy, since the Under was correct in nearly 59% of Week 6's games. It appears that bookmakers may have been concerned that bettors were aware of that profitable figure and would try to bet more Unders in Week 7. We did not stop our Totals analysis at those figures, however. Each week, we consider some extremes. At the low end, when the Total closed under 50 points, the Over was 7-5 (58.33%). At the high end, when the Total closed at or above 65 points, the Over was just 3-6 (33.33%).
Week 7 Public Totals Betting
From the moment betting lines are posted, right up to kickoff, the college football betting market is always changing. Studying how the public bets can be useful. Many sports bettors advise betting against the public, but is that sage advice for college football? We let the data tell the story: Stated earlier, betting the Over is tremendously popular. Week 7 was no exception. The public majority was on the Over in 88% of all games. Here again, we considered the extremes. Overs that had a majority of at least 70% on their side were 9-10-1, nearly an even split. Overs that had a minority of the public betting on their side (in other words, games where the majority bet the Under) were 5-1, so the public was wrong about Week 7's Unders to the tune of 83.33%.
Week 7's Final Analysis
Week 7 seems to be another example of €cat-and-mouse' between bookmaker and
bettor. In general, it was hard for either side to find a significant edge.
When the public did think the Under was the right choice, the bookmakers truly
won that battle. It will be interesting to study the next Totals battle, Week
8, in what tends to be a less decisive war than that waged in picking against
the spread.
Friday, 24 April 2015
The Debate on Legalizing Sports Betting in the United States
As this
article is being written in 2015, there is a significant debate in the United
States generally, and in various state legislatures specifically, on the
legalization of sports betting. Since the issue relates to legalization, it should not be surprising that semantics play an
important role in the debate. This article is, by no means, a comprehensive
look at the subject, but it aims to serve as an introduction to some of the
main elements surrounding in the debate.
Even a simple discussion of
sports betting is immediately subject to semantics. For example, betting on
horse racing, dog racing, or jai alai is NOT included in the debate on sports
betting, even though most consider horse and dog racing to be sports (after
all, horse racing is the so-called sport of kings), while everyone knows jai alai to be a sport. Dog racing
is legal in 12 states, and horse racing is legal in 32 states. Non-race sports betting is legal in
Nevada, Delaware, Montana, and Oregon- the four states “grandfathered in” as
exceptions to PASPA, the Professional Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992. Of
the four states, only Nevada allows the full compliment of sports wagers to be
placed on individual events.
Further complicating the
matter, but central to some of the hypocrisy surrounding federal government
policy is playing fantasy sports for real money. Even playing daily fantasy sports for money is not
considered “gambling” thanks to a “carve-out” in the Unlawful Internet Gambling
Enforcement Act of 2006 (UIGEA). Without devolving into the “legalese” and
minutia of the law, that carve-out differentiates fantasy sports play for money
and sports betting primarily by stating that, “All winning outcomes reflect the relative
knowledge and skill of the participants and are determined predominantly by
accumulated statistical results of the performance of individuals ... in
multiple real world sporting or other events.”
The federal government wants us to believe that playing
fantasy sports for real money is not “gambling” or “betting” because the
outcome (winning or losing) depends on skill and knowledge. The suggestion is
that the outcome of other forms of non-race sports betting are dependent on
luck, as opposed to skill or knowledge. Truly, any professional sports bettor is
living proof that successful sports betting is the result of knowledge and
skill since they could not continue to make money from sports betting if the
matter were relegated simply to sheer luck.
We could play around with the semantics of the law ad infinitum (or at least ad nauseam), but the real issue, as we
see it, is money. The leagues that lobbied together against the legalization of
sports betting (in places like New Jersey) had no immediate way of profiting
from that legalization. The continued federal prohibition on non-race sports
betting (everywhere but in the grandfathered-in states) and the carve-out to
UIGEA was, according to an article in the New
York Post, influenced by a National Football League (NFL) “...big bucks lobbyist to ram through Internet gambling-curbing
legislation in the final minutes of the legislative session ... [but the] NFL broke the rules when
it fast-tracked legislation that never even got a vote in the Senate - a trick play that provided a big exemption for fantasy football. The NFL runs its own fantasy football site, and gets royalties from others.”
Conclusion
If we
include lotteries, racing, poker, fantasy sports, and every other form of
staking one’s money on the outcome of an uncertain event or series of events
with the possibility of either losing one’s stake or adding to it (i.e.
gambling), some form of gambling is legal in all 50 states. The sports-betting
debate that the United States is now just beginning
to have in earnest, is fraught with inconsistencies at best and hypocritical
positions from unsound jurisprudence and unethical federal policy-making at
worst.
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