2016 NCAAF (College Football) Summary

The Church of Betting blog had a post from the end of last year which I hadn't seen until today, on the subject of T-tests for evaluating tipsters. 

I am following an American Football strategy from the Green-All-Over blog, which is about backing away underdogs on the spread. So far this year it has performed pretty well with a yield of 5.83% with average odds of 1.954 from 177 bets. Placing these inputs in the formula gives me a t-score of 0.7967 and a p-value of 21.33%. So according to the t-test the chance that there is some merit to the system is lower here than in the first example, but still high enough for me to continue to follow it and give it a chance. If anyone is interested, I might report on those numbers later in the season again.

I'd like to emphasise that I am not a tipster. The systems I share are generic and highlight trends, but any individual game should be evaluated on its own merits. 

My records for the Small Road 'Dogs systems this season for both the College and NFL regular seasons are as follows:

As previously mentioned in this blog, I use Pinnacle Sports 1.952 binary market price when calculating returns. 

This strategy has been profitable in College Football since the 2001 season, with 110.12 points profit in those 16 seasons, an ROI of 7.3%. 

Only two seasons have seen losses, and both of those were modest - 2003 saw a loss of 0.97 points and 2010 a loss of 1.11 points.

I can find nothing that changed in College Football in 2001 that might account for little 'dogs starting to perform better than expected. That "charged team time-outs were reduced to 30 seconds if the team taking the time-out requests it" hardly seems a likely cause, but what is strange is that the market has failed to correct, nor does it show any sign of doing so.

College Football has plenty of mismatches, with handicaps sometimes as high as 64.5 points as seen in the 2012 Savannah State @ Florida State game.

Some readers may have noticed that 2016 would have been profitable backing bigger road underdogs too, but this was the first season since 2001 when this strategy would have been profitable. On the other side of the coin, 2016 was the first season since 2011 when backing small road favourites was not profitable.

The National Championship game is tomorrow (Monday 9th January), a repeat of last season's Clemson v Alabama game when the Crimson Tide were favoured by 6.5 points but Clemson covered losing 40-45. The total line was 50.5 and this year both the handicap and totals are a repeat.

Alabama have won by fewer than 10 points just once this season, and are 9-4-1 against the spread while Clemson are 6-7. Alabama are looking to add to their National Championships of 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2015 with the same Head Coach, if not the same players.     

I'll post a summary of the NFL Regular Season, and how my systems fared, in the next few days.