A Look at Point Spreads and the Top 25

I used to be a betting man. Used to look through the point spreads with a fine-tooth comb. I would start my weekend off making my college football picks and anxiously see if I actually ended up on the positive sides of things. It wasn’t big money bets by any means. Just small bets here and there, but I definitely enjoyed it. Over the course of the 2006 college football season, One Eyed Willy (with whom I bet) under up with three times what we put in. A more than decent return if I do say so myself. We had no system. Just simply looked through the games and decided what we liked the best. In hindsight, it we had stayed away from parlays, we actually might’ve ended up with a bigger return than we did. But I’ll definitely take what we got.

I’ve read a lot about making picks lately. Things such as never bet on emotion and real gamblers don’t parlay. But one thing was consistent through everything I read. If you want to be successful when it comes to sports betting, you have to develop a system and stick to it. I wonder what my system might be. Picks teams based on mascot strength. Allow uniform colors and designs to make an impact. Make my selections based on the best former player I can name. As you can see, I shouldn’t be doing this unsupervised.

This week, I looked at something simple. How do the top 25 teams fare against the spread? If I were to bet, it would be on games involving at least one big team. I’m not going to spend my week worrying too much about some small school matchup. And it’s always easier to find information about the top teams so you can feel at least a little more educated when making picks. So here’s what happened this week:

• There were 19 matchups between teams ranked in the top 25 of the AP Poll. Only seven of the 19 favored teams covered the spread (based on lines found on Doc’s Sports Service) and one other pushed. The big winners were BYU – favored by 18.5, won by 51 – and Virginia Tech – favored by 19, won by 42.

• On the other hand, that means 11 of the 19 favored teams didn’t cover or push. The biggest losers were of course the teams that lost: Oklahoma State – favored by 16.5, lost by 10 – and Notre Dame – favored by 3, lost by 4. Of the remaining nine, they were all actually very close to the point spread. Those remaining nine teams (the ones that won, but didn’t cover the spread) only missed the spread by an average of 4.9 points.

• Only one of the top eight ranked teams covered, not counting Ohio State, who wasn’t the favorite in their game.

• Of the seven teams that did cover, four of them were ranked between #8 and #16. The push – LSU – also fell within that range.

So what does this tell you? Hell if I know. I’m no statistical analyst, but I’m guessing 11 out of 19 not covering the spread isn’t clearly significant enough to tell you to go that way on a regular basis. And I’m not betting expert so you should never take any advice I offer anyway. But it is interesting to see that only one of the top eight teams covered and overall, more often than not, ranked teams didn’t cover. If this keeps happening, it might be something worth looking into. For right now, it’s just something for me to pass the time with while wasting a Sunday afternoon.