(08-24-2019 01:17 PM)Almadenmike Wrote: (08-24-2019 11:35 AM)mebehutchi Wrote: (08-24-2019 09:22 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote: (08-23-2019 10:56 PM)Intellectual_Brutality Wrote: (08-23-2019 10:48 PM)owl40 Wrote: Vegas is in business for a reason. 2.5 is a great over/under #. Hard to see 0 or 1 W's and hard to see 4 W's or higher. Pessimist can take 2 and Optimists can take 3.
More than W's, will be competitiveness of team and record against-the-spread in Sept and Oct. Ability to go 4-1/5-0 ATS in first 5 games will be key to bringing crowds/interest back to HRS.
The spread is an appealing metric by which to judge season success. But problem is it adjusts during the season, so if we come out stronger than expected, the spread will become lower and tougher to beat
Spreads are meant to get 50% of the wagering on each side, nothing more. Beating the spread just means we did better than most of the betting public expected
That may be but given what's at stake it also behooves Vegas to start with as accurate a figure as possible - at least for our games which are unlikely to draw any odd LA foot traffic action or what have you.
I've long wondered about the makeup of college football bettors: What's the typical fraction of partisan fans vs. professional (or near-professional) analytics-driven bettors?
In the former category, I'd think that we might have far-far fewer fans who would bet big money on the Owls, regardless of our success, than our opponents (whose fans would tend to bet more heavily on their team). Such a betting $$ imbalance should tend to move the line in the Owls favor as gametime approaches (at least compared with any initial Vegas line that did not anticipate subsequent betting volumes).
Does anyone here have any data on Rice's historical success ATS, and in particular about the motion of the line during the week before our games?
It is taking all my willpower not to nerd out in response to your post, and like most Rice people, I'll (happily) give in.
College football betting has long been a hobby of mine and I am literally in my 24th year of running a couple of pick-em contests that Rice friends and I developed that have had up to 300 people in them (if anybody wants more info, PM me - it's not too late to join!).
Anyway, my sense is that especially over the last decade-plus, while there are still tons and tons of "square" bettors, betting syndicates based on analytics have become quite prominent, and there is, quite simply, no contest too obscure to escape major action if the line on that game were to be deemed exploitable. So even though (as you've intuited) the public does generally tend to bet favorites and better-known teams and increasingly we are neither
, it is not necessarily the case that the line typically moves against us over the course of the week.
There are sites where you can see the percentage of bets on each side, the percentage of money on each side, and a graph of the line movement. For instance, for Rice @ Army, I am seeing 56% of the action so far is on Army, but the line has actually come down from -24.5 to -23.5. The line for our game at LSU last year opened at -44 and came down to -41.5 at game time (we covered easily anyway!).
Also, just generally (took a hit at the end of the Bailiff era), Rice has a good ATS record over the years when getting points, even more so when you drill down into certain situations, and you might be surprised at how widely that sort of stuff is known by and influences even casual bettors. The public does like favorites but there are plenty that think of Rice as a "live dog" too.
Anyway, I know I haven't produced comprehensive longitudinal data that would disprove your hunch but that sort of data on line movements is out there and I would be surprised if it showed any significant pattern for our games. I would guess that it moves for and against us fairly evenly. If anything, the lesser prominence of our games would mean that with fewer square bettors, lines on our games would likely be even more sensitive to "smart" money, which does not have a bias for or against favorites or the name on the front of the jersey, and simply responds to whether there is perceived value, which the oddsmakers strive mightily to minimize. And when the oddsmakers are wrong about us (or perceived to be wrong), I don't see any reason why they would miss in one direction more than the other.
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To return the thread to its topic: I "predict" 4 wins, because CUSA rosters are fungible and you would "predict" a coin flipped 8 times to come up heads 4 times. I
expect 2 wins -- an improvement of one 1 FBS win over last year. By "expect" I mean the minimum it will take for me not to call for putting a for sale sign in Bloom's yard.