Betzig Sports

The opening weeks of college football season always present the biggest discrepancies between my model and Vegas. Most college football models converge towards each other as the season goes along- in September, there's a handful of games each week where my spreads are a touchdown different from Vegas, there's only about one such game a week once we get into November. Thus, most of the good betting opportunities happen early in the season. This week, and every other week this season, I'll break down the biggest discrepancies between my projected lines and my model's lines. Utah State @ Michigan State -23.5 As I mentioned in my  Big Ten preview , Michigan State is a bit overrated this year. Utah State looks to be a solid bowl team that has an outside shot at winning their division in the Mountain West. My computer set this number at 14.5, so I'm picking the Aggies here. Pick: Utah State +23.5 UNLV @ USC -26 UNLV is one of the most experienced teams in the G...

Today, I'm breaking down my college football model's projections for the Group of Five conferences. It'll be a bit briefer than the last post breaking down the Power Five, and it'll be followed up by a week 1 betting preview. Unfortunately this is coming out after the week zero games- so a few of these teams have already played a game. All predictions are from the preseason, before the week 0 games occurred. See my previous post for a preview of the power conferences. Numbers before a team indicates their rank out of 130, the numbers after a team indicate my projected amount of regular season wins, followed by Vegas' projected win total. American East 10. UCF 10.4 9 70. USF 7.0 8.5 79. Temple 6.6 6.5 107. Connecticut 4.1 3.5 117. Cincinnati 3.4 4 129. East Carolina 1.0 3 The American East is the most clear division in the FBS in my model's mind, with UCF 3 wins ahead of everyone else. My model doesn't care much about coaching changes, which...

Last post I took a look at my model's preseason top 25, this time I'll break down my projections for all the Power Five conferences. Numbers before a team indicates their rank out of 130, the numbers after a team indicate my projected amount of regular season wins, followed by Vegas' projected win total. SEC East 4. Georgia 10.6 10.5 30. Missouri 7.1 7 32. South Carolina 7.6 7 46. Florida 7.3 8 75. Vanderbilt 5.5 4.5 87. Kentucky 4.4 5 102. Tennessee 3.8 5.5 My projections are pretty in line with the consensus here. Georgia's biggest tests will be Auburn (8.5 point favorite), @Missouri (10 point favorite) and @South Carolina (10 point favorite) but a down division overall helps them. I'm a little bearish on Florida and quite bearish on Tennessee, where Jeremy Pruitt has inherited a pretty bare roster, I only have the Vols as favorites against East Tennessee State, UTEP and Kentucky. West 1. Alabama 11.2 11.5 9. Auburn 8.3 9 14. Mississi...

This year, I'd like to talk more about my college football model on here. I have primarily used this space for my bracketology in the past with only a little bit of college football coverage, and I'd like to make it more of a 50/50 split going forward. Also, in the past I posted my computer's top 25 on cfbfanpoll.com. Even though the site has shrunk a lot in recent years, I had been putting my top 25 there weekly for a decade and now that it's gone under I need a new place to keep a historical record of my top 25s. So every week on here I'll aim to post the week's rankings, as well as some thoughts about what my computer's favorite bets of the week are. A good summary of how my college football model works can be found in this post from last June . Some of the details of the model have changed in the last year but the skeleton is largely the same. My Model's Top 25 1. Alabama 2. Wisconsin 3. Oklahoma 4. Georgia 5. Clemson These five are the lea...