College Football Betting: Five Season Win Totals That Defy The Data

College Football Betting: Five Season Win Totals That Defy The Data

August 26, 2019 – by Jason Lisk

Projecting a college football team’s season win total before it has played a game is a difficult challenge, and you can approach it in many ways.

At TeamRankings, we take a stats-heavy angle. First, we analyze years of historical data to identify statistical factors that correlate strongly with upcoming season performance. Then, we use an algorithmic model to rate all 130 FBS teams based on those predictive factors.

Finally, we simulate the upcoming college football season thousands of times using our preseason predictive ratings for each team. The results, along with a dose of market-driven adjustment, lead to our official 2019 college football preseason predictions.

In this post, we’re going to highlight some of the 2019 college football team win totals that stick out for being extra difficult to project in a data-driven way.

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The Limits Of Data In Predicting College Football Season Win Totals

Some of the stat factors that we’ve identified as predictive and included in our preseason prediction model are pretty obvious. How good was a team last year? What has been the general legacy of a program’s success in recent history? Those metrics are usually solid indicators of future performance.

Other factors we use are more nuanced, like measures of returning player production in certain offensive categories, or the likelihood of a team having better or worse turnover luck than it did last season. (You can read our detailed explanation of the methodology that goes into those rankings.)

Still, at the end of the day, even stats-lovers like us realize that you can’t use data to analyze everything. For example, if Nick Saban quit Alabama and took the head coaching job at UMass next year, how much better would the Minutemen be in their first Saban-coached season, with a team full of players he didn’t recruit?

Good luck using only historical data to accurately predict that outcome.

2019 College Football Win Totals: 5 Outliers To Note

We’ve crunched the preseason numbers on all 130 FBS teams. And for some teams, the AP voters and/or betting markets are expecting a very different 2019 season outcome than historical data trends alone would imply.

Often, there’s a logical reason behind that sort of discrepancy. It could be a relatively unique coaching change situation (e.g. a first-time head coach with a great track record as an offensive coordinator in a less competitive conference replaces an experienced coach that had clashed with the team’s underperforming but highly touted quarterback), an unusually large influx or exodus of key players, or some other “outlier” type event.

In such cases, it’s impossible to analyze a large number of obviously-similar past occurrences, because not many of them exist. As a result, deciding whether to bet that team’s win total over or under largely comes down to a judgment call on whether you agree with the betting market’s assessment of the “intangibles” at play.

With that in mind, here are some of the college football win totals of 2019 that have stat geeks throwing their arms in the air in frustration.

Note: The win total lines below represent the general consensus of a sampling of sports books we checked at publication time. Also, remember that season win total lines do not count possible bowl game wins.

Nebraska Cornhuskers

Line: 8.5 winsLast year: 4 wins

Nebraska won only four games in coach Scott Frost’s first year back in Lincoln, matching the win total from Mike Riley’s final season in 2017-18. Optimism is high, though, for Frost to turn the program around this year.

Frost’s UCF team took a big leap in his second year with that program, going from six wins to an undefeated season. The win total line for Nebraska this year, representing an increase of 4.5 wins over last year, suggests that plenty of folks think Frost can work his second-year magic again.

A win total of 8.5, however, ties Nebraska with Wisconsin as the highest in the Big Ten Western Division. That’s a very big jump for a program that has averaged a No. 54 ranking in our predictive ratings over the last four years.

On the one hand, Nebraska’s non-conference schedule is forgiving, and the Cornhuskers draw all three currently-ranked opponents (Iowa, Ohio State, and Wisconsin) at home.

On the other hand, the Big Ten West looks balanced this year. Minnesota projects well with lots of returning experience. Purdue and Northwestern, which we project to finish 5th and 6th respectively in the West, both made bowl games last year.

Outside of the Frost effect, there’s really nothing glaringly positive about Nebraska’s stat profile. They had only slightly below average luck last year in higher variability stats like turnovers and red zone defense, and returning player stat production in key areas is nothing to get excited about.

Ride the Frost wave, or take the under? It’s a tough call when a significant improvement to 7-5 or 8-4 still goes below the number.

Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets

Line: 4 winsLast year: 7 wins

Paul Johnson is out as Georgia Tech’s coach. With his departure, the school is making a drastic change away from the triple option attack. A program that averaged fewer than seven completed passes per game over the last 11 seasons, and threw a total of seven touchdown passes all last year, will look a lot different in 2019.

In comes new head coach Geoff Collins, who went to a bowl game in two straight seasons after replacing Matt Rhule at Temple. 

Georgia Tech has been one of the most consistent college football programs over the last 16 years. Of course, that consistency has been as a good, but not great team.

More specifically, Georgia Tech has finished between No. 35 and No. 50 in our final college football predictive ratings 12 times over that 16-year span. Their worst finish during that time was a No. 57 ranking in 2010. They ranked in the AP Top 25 only three times at season’s end, but they also won fewer than six games only twice. 

The market appears to be quite pessimistic that Georgia Tech’s transition will be successful in its first year. Tech’s win total of 4.0 puts the Yellow Jackets above only five other Power Five schools: perennial also-rans Oregon State, Kansas, Rutgers, and Illinois, plus Louisville.

We have not yet studied in detail how transitions like this have gone in the past. Given the context of a team of players largely recruited to run a triple-option offense having to make a significant scheme change, there’s probably very little data to go on.

It’s no doubt a big change, but assessing its value in terms of an expected wins decrease is very tough — especially when Georgia Tech has been a remarkably consistent six-game winner for an impressively long time.

Texas Longhorns

Line: 9.5 winsLast year: 9 wins

Texas is back — or at least, based on last year, things appear to be trending upward for coach Tom Herman and the Longhorns. Although last season started with a crushing loss to Maryland, it ended with a trip to the Big 12 title game and then an upset of AP No. 5 Georgia in the Sugar Bowl.

However, Texas’ No. 9 AP poll ranking at the end of last year was significantly higher than the No. 21 ranking they earned according to our predictive ratings. Texas played in a whopping 10 different one-score games last season, going a favorable 7-3 in those close games. And according to media reports, at least, Georgia’s motivation for the Sugar Bowl appeared low.

So our preseason ratings see a team that was good — but certainly not elite, and most likely somewhat lucky — a year ago, to go along with a program that was sliding downward before last season.

The Texas program, at its best, can contend for national titles. But the last time Texas won 10 regular season games was a decade ago, when the Longhorns went all the way to the BCS Title Game with Colt McCoy at quarterback. That’s the number that Over bettors would need them to hit this year.

The schedule includes games against LSU (at home) and Oklahoma (in Dallas). Texas also plays three Big 12 “next tier” teams on the road (Baylor, Iowa State, and TCU).

West Virginia Mountaineers

Line: 5 winsLast year: 8 wins

The betting market thinks the “Country Roads” will be rockier for West Virginia in 2019.

Head coach Dana Holgorsen made a surprise bolt to Houston after last season, and the incoming Neal Brown, who won 10+ games in each of his last three seasons at Troy, replaces him. The team will also have to replenish plenty of departed offensive production, including starting quarterback Will Grier.

By recent West Virginia standards, though, this win total is very low. The only time the program has won fewer than seven regular season games in the last 15 seasons was back in 2013.

West Virginia’s non-conference schedule is relatively tough, including a road game against preseason Top 25 team Missouri and a home game against North Carolina State. Much like with the Georgia Tech line, however, the best explanation for this year’s win total is that the market expects a big downturn in short-term performance because of the loss of an offensive-minded head coach.

Army Black Knights

Line: 10 winsLast year: 10 wins

Army achieved their highest win total ever in 2018, winning 10 regular season games, and then crushing Houston in a bowl game. The Black Knights also came within a few plays of winning at Oklahoma in what would have been a season-altering upset.

In short, coach Jeff Monken has the Army program at heights it hasn’t seen in most of our lifetimes, thanks to impressive execution of the triple-option attack and optimizing fourth down strategy to coincide with his run-heavy ball control approach. (Historical footnote: Army went undefeated five times in six seasons from 1944 to 1949, when schedules were nine games long.)

We highlight Army in this post just to show how extreme their schedule is, and what you need to consider before taking a side on this win total.

Army’s win total is at 10.0 at most sports books. Keep in mind that Army plays a 13th game this year because of the Hawaii exception, so they need to go 11-2 or better to hit the over. And Army has to travel to Ann Arbor to play TR preseason No. 4 Michigan, where the Black Knights will be a significant underdog.

On the other hand, eight of the games on Army’s 2019 schedule are against non-FBS teams or teams outside the TR preseason Top 100, so they will be heavy favorites most of the year. By our numbers, Army projects to have one toss-up game (at Air Force), and will likely be favored by less than two touchdowns in three others (Tulane, at Hawaii, and the final game against Navy).

So the outcome of any win total bet on Army will likely come down to whether Army can survive the entire non-Michigan portion of their schedule with only one loss.

If you’re in a football pool or planning on betting some games this football season, check out our Football Pick’em Picks, NFL Survivor Picks and College Football Betting Picks.

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