CFB Forum

season picks

Posted By: rcdavies
Date: 3 Aug 02, 9:48 am

Last year 0-0 on posted picks, 2-1 on all picks. I'm trying the NCAA out for fun and hopefully development into future success, so don't put a great deal of stock in my picks. I think there might be money to be made still. I know certain conferences pretty well, mainly the ACC and Big East. Also follow the Big 10 a good bit, but so do a lot of people.

I'm going to focus this year on smaller conferences, but will look at all conferences.

I kept season win bets to a minimum. I think my knowledge of football will prepare me well to find matchup mismatches, which should help with game handicapping, but saw few teams that caught my eye for season longs.

Virginia Tech Under 9.5 (-140)
The Big East is much stronger this year other than Miami and Syracuse. Boston College is a much better team than VA tech this year, and they have to go to BC. They also have to travel to Syracuse, a very tough place to play, and travel to face Texas A&M. Pittsburgh and West Virginia are both gonna be tougher this year, and even Temple and Rutgers are no longer automatic wins. The out of conference schedule is tougher than usual. UVA probably won't be a big problem, but Marshall and LSU are both potential losses.

The team is certainly not better than last year, when they went 8-3, but they will have to be much better with the tougher schedule to come up 10-3 or better. They have 11 returning starters, and the defense, last year's strong point, is weaker all around.

I tried to be generous and came up with a season record of 8.15-4.85 when I added all the probabilities together.

Ohio St Under 10 (-135)
I see that Colin picked this one so I feel pretty good about it. The Big 10 is loaded from top to bottom this year. OSU does luck out and miss Michigan St, but they have 4 losable road games and a home game against Michigan that I consider a probable loss. Penn St, Wash St, and Texas Tech add up to at least 1 loss, possibly more.

The team probably will be better than last year, but they face a tougher schedule and I see a turnaround from 7-4 to 11-2 as highly unlikely. They could improve upon last year's record (7-4 to 9-4) against a tougher schedule and still cover the under.

Texas Under 10 (-115)
They face 3 extremely tough games this year, as they play Oklahoma in Dallas, and go to Lincoln and Kansas St, 2 of the toughest places to play in college football. In order to go 11-1, they will not only need to come out of those games 2-1, but also sweep the remaining 9 games, which include trips to North Carolina and Texas Tech and games against Texas A&m and Iowa St. Make special note of that Iowa St game, which is very losable sandwiched between OU, KSU on 1 side and Nebraska on the other. A&M and Tech are both much improved so both of these games is certainly losable.

I'm still unimpressed with Chris Simms. Until he actually shows up for a real big game, I have my doubts about this team as a true national title caliber team. I consider them a dog against Oklahoma and a heavy dog against Nebraska for that very reason. When I ran through the probabilities for this team, I came up with 9.2 wins and 2.8 losses. It isn't a huge EV bet, but I think it's very unlikely to come out a loser.

Other teams that I wanted to bet against but didn't see much of an edge: Oregon under and Iowa St under. I was ready to load up on the under for both teams, but in both cases the lines seemed to adjust appropriately to the differences in personnel/schedules.

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