2024 College Football Analysis, Part Seven: Bad Betting Advice

Over the past few weeks, I have taken you on a journey across the college football preseason landscape. I have reflected back on the data from 2023 and conducted a detailed analysis of the schedule for the Michigan State Spartans. I have analyzed the races in the Big Ten, the rest of the Power Four, and in the Group of Five. Most recently, I have made some predictions regarding the new 12-team college football playoffs.

In the first six installments of this series, I have discussed a multitude of odds that I have generated using a simulation of the full college football season. In today's final installment of our college football preview, we will explore whether or not these odds might just help us win a bit of money. 

That's right, it's time to officially kickoff the 2024 edition of Dr. Green and White's Bad Betting Advice.

The Big Picture

The results of my full season simulation provide a variety of odds that can be compared to common betting lines available from any common sports book. These include the odds to win a division and/or qualify for a conference championship game, the odds to win the conference, make the playoffs, and win the National Championship.

Table 1 below summarizes the odds for all of these events for each of the top 25 teams in the country, based on the consensus of preseason publications explained in Part One.

Table 1: Summary of the conference championship, playoff, and national title odds for the top 25 teams in the 2024 season. The odds from my simulation are compared to the odds from Draft Kings in order to generate a potential return on investment.

Table 1 includes the preseason rank and strength of schedule (and SoS rank) for each team. It then lists the odds for each event based on my simulation results. The middle of the table shows the Draft Kings money line odds for each of those bets. I have converted those money lines to the equivalent odds so that they can be easily compared to the simulation odds.

Finally, the right side of the table gives the return on investment (ROI) for each potential bet of $100, assuming the odds from my simulation are the true odds. I have shaded each potential bet with a positive ROI as green.

Despite the fact that my disruptive scenario and official prediction has Oregon beating Texas for the National Title while Georgia, Ohio State, and Alabama all miss out on the playoffs, the overall odds to win the national title correlate very closely with the preseason rankings.

Preseason No. 1 Georgia has the best odds to win the National Championship (10.5%), followed by No. 2 Ohio State (8.4%), No. 3 Oregon (8.3%), No. 4 Texas (7.5%), No. 5 Alabama (6.8%), and No. 6 Penn State (6.0%). However, the sum of the playoff odds for those six teams (3.15) suggest that only half of those three teams will make the playoffs. In other words, my disruptive scenario is one very feasible way that the season could play out.

Note that around two-thirds of these bets have a negative ROI. This is not surprising, as the folks in Las Vegas are experts at setting the line just above the real odds such that the house always wins.

But, there are a few teams that have a positive ROI for at least one of three events captured in this table. Alabama, Penn State, Michigan, Missouri, and Oklahoma all stand out.

Suggested Conference and Division Champion Bets

The information in Table 1 is a just a small sample of the potential bets that my simulation generates. It is also possible to estimate which specific bets look the most promising (have the highest ROI) in several different categories. 

Table 2 below lists the top 25 highest ROI wagers for teams that either win the conference championship or make the championship game (which is noted throughout this series as "win division" even if the conference no longer has divisions).

Table 2: 2024 Conference and Division (or other conference championship game participant) wagers with the highest ROIs, based on a comparison of the results of a 100,000 Monte Carlo simulation and the betting lines from Draft Kings.

In general, this table lists high risk, high reward bets for teams with odds below 5%. But there are a few potential bets that catch me eye. In general, my analysis is more bullish on Missouri in the SEC, both to make the conference championship game (ROI = $35.99) and to win it ($73.72). 

Utah State with an ROI of $52.22 and odds over 10% to make the Mountain West Championship Game is also compelling.

That said, the expected value of correct picks in this table is only 1.12. So, most likely only one pick out of the top 25 will hit this year.

Playoffs and National Title Bets

Table 1 above summarized some of the returns on investment for National Title wagers. Table 3 below gives the top 30 list of the most promising bets for teams to either make the playoffs or to win the whole thing.

Table 4: 2024 Playoff and National Champion wagers with the highest ROIs, based on a comparison of the results of a 100,000 Monte Carlo simulation and the betting lines from Draft Kings.

Similar to Table 3, there are a lot of high risk and high reward picks on this table. The expected value of correct picks in the top 30 is a little better than in Table 2. The table above should yield between one and two correct predictions (1.76). 

The picks that stick out to me are once again the ones with slightly higher odds. A wager on Florida, Oklahoma State, West Virginia, Oklahoma, or SMU to make the playoffs looks reasonable. Although SMU's performance in Week Zero, barely squeaking by Nevada, does give me pause.

Win Total (Over/Under) Bets

A lower risk approach lies in betting on season win totals. Table 4 below summarizes the top 25 best over/under win total bets on the board according to my computer.

Table 4: 2024 Season win total wagers with the highest ROIs, based on a comparison of the results of a 100,000 Monte Carlo simulation and the betting lines from Draft Kings.

The money lines and returns on investment are lower for these bets, but the odds are also much better than any of the potential wagers discussed thus far. The expected value for correct wagers in this table is 14.85, so a respectable number of these bets should work out.

Interestingly, two of the biggest ROI bets on the board are the under bets on win totals for both Georgia and Ohio State. Both teams do have tough schedules, but my simulation often tends to favor the under for the teams that are projected to be elite in any given year. 

Basically, I assume that there is an equal chance that each team will overachieve or underachieve. For the teams at the very top (or bottom) of the rankings, there is only one way to go. So, the odds tend to favor every team regressing to the middle.

For this reason, I find some of the higher probability bets on teams with winning percentages near .500 to be the most compelling. For example, I would consider taking the under on Utah at 9.5 wins, the under on Colorado at 5.5, the under on Washington State at 7.5, the over on Northwestern at 4.5, the over on Kent at 2.5, and the over on Florida at 4.5.

As an aside, I would also like to point out how close the expected wins totals from my simulation compare to the adjusted over/under totals from DraftKings. By "adjusted," I mean that I used the money line data to estimate fractional win totals. Figure 1 below shows this comparison.

Figure 1: Comparison of the adjusted DraftKings win totals for all 134 FBS teams to the expected win totals from my Monte Carlo simulation of the full regular season.

By simply using preseason rankings, I was able to predict the win totals with a high level of accuracy. The standard deviation is just 0.44 and only two win totals out of 134 are over one game. Note that the farther away a data point is from the line, the larger the ROI in Table 4 above.

Most Promising Big Ten Bets

For Big Ten fans, it is reasonable to wonder which bets involving Big Ten teams have the best potential payback. Table 5 below provides my computer’s answer to that question.

Table 5: 2024 Big Ten bets with the highest ROIs, based on a comparison of the results of a 100,000 Monte Carlo simulation and the betting lines from DraftKings.

With the expansion of the playoffs to 12 teams, there is a greater chance that a team such as Minnesota, UCLA, or Wisconsin is a lot better than expected, finds a way to a 10- or 11-win season, and ends up in the playoffs bracket. Hence there are eight potential bets in Table 5 with a positive ROI in which a surprise Big Ten team makes the playoffs, including the Michigan State Spartans.

In addition, it is also somewhat likely likely that a surprise team such as Iowa or Rutgers could make a run and winds up in the Big Ten Championship Game or that a team like Michigan, Iowa, or Penn State wins the National Title. All of these potential bets have a strong ROI.

That all said, the highlighted Big Ten bets above are also all high risk and high reward bets. The expected value of correct wagers in Table 5 is just 1.65.

Bettor Beware

As I put a bow onto this piece and on this preseason analysis series, I feel obligated to give the following warning. Despite the fact that this entire piece centers on betting, I do not personally bet on sports. I find the mathematics behind betting lines fascinating, but my interest ends there.

I personally view this analysis to be for entertainment only. I will track the performance of these picks over the season, but I mostly just find this data interesting.

As for the accuracy of these picks, I do believe the odds to be correct. However, the returns on investment listed make the assumption that the preseason rankings I used in my analysis from Phil Steele, Lindy's, Athlon, SP+, and ESPN are on average slightly more accurate than the preseason rankings used by the experts in Las Vegas. This may or may not end up being true.

If you are a serious bettor, I would recommend using this information as a mere piece of your overall analysis. If you have a few bets in mind already and are looking for confirmation, I think that the data above may prove useful

In any event, the dawn of the next college football season is nearly upon us. Welcome back, college football, we have missed you. 

Social Media:

All that #math is cool and all, but can we use it to make a little money? We attempt to answer this question as Dr. Green and White (@PaulFanson) wraps up the preseason college football analysis series with this season's first does of Bad Betting Advice.

https://michiganstate.rivals.com/news/dr-green-and-white-preseason-football-analysis-bad-betting-advice