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August 28, 2012 - by David Hess
As if you didn’t know, college football is back, and the first regular season game is Thursday evening. That means it’s time to email your Week 1 pick’em picks to the guy in accounting who runs your office pool. You should probably send him that PayPal payment he’s been pestering you for, as well.
To help you get back in the swing of things, here’s a little assistance on those picks. We’ll be doing this every week, all season, just like we did last year. Our conservative picks ended up finishing in the 94th percentile in ESPN’s game winner based college pick’em last year, after finishing in the 97th percentile in 2010, so it’s a good bet that following this column won’t be a waste of your time.
Also, we enjoy answering questions, so if you’ve got any specific pick ideas of theories you want feedback on, by all means, fire away in the comments.
If you’re a new reader of this column or new to TeamRankings.com (or just need a reminder), here’s where you can find our computer generated picks for college football office pools:
A few notes on these pages:
Before we go much further, we’re going to assign you some recommended reading. If you haven’t checked out our college football pick’em strategy series, do yourself a favor and go absorb that knowledge. It’ll ensure our choices here make a lot more sense.
Done reading? OK, good. As you now know, the best picks in your particular pool are not always simply the teams that have the best chance to win. If you’re in a very small pool, safe picks are great because all you’re aiming to do in those cases is make par, and hope your opponents shoot themselves in the foot. But in larger pools (think hundreds or thousands of people) the winner will be someone who took some risks, and got a bit lucky. Your goal in larger pools, then, is to take smart risks that are justified by the expected returns.
To that end, we’ll present this handy table each week, which summarizes a few teams that look like they could be smart Game Winner picks for people that need to take some risks. It’s based on our detailed pick’em analysis page, with only a couple tweaks.
| Team | Opponent | Adj Win Odds | Public % | Value | Spread | Pick Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Florida | vs. Bowling Grn | 96% | ~90% | 6% | -29.5 | Odds-On Value |
| Stanford | vs. San Jose St | 95% | ~90% | 5% | -26 | Odds-On Value |
| Boston College | vs. Miami FL | 44% | ~15% | 29% | +2.5 | High Risk Upset |
| Florida International | at Duke | 41% | ~20% | 21% | +3.5 | High Risk Upset |
| NC State | Tennessee (N) | 43% | ~30% | 13% | +3 | High Risk Upset |
| Boise State | at Michigan St | 34% | ~10% | 24% | +6.5 | Long Shot Upset |
| Ohio | at Penn State | 35% | ~15% | 20% | +6 | Long Shot Upset |
| Colorado St | Colorado (N) | 32% | ~10% | 22% | +6.5 | Long Shot Upset |
This week, there aren’t any slam dunk contrarian value picks, as our adjusted win odds (a combination of our college football game winner picks and the Vegas line) agree with the public on the winner of every game. The biggest “safe” advantage you can gain this week, if you’re in a pool with confidence points, is by bumping up the confidence points for Florida and Stanford. That move will most likely put a little more ground between you and the people who are rashly picking a crazy upset in Week 1.
If you’re in a large pool, it might be worth spending a pick on Boston College. They’re only slight underdogs against Miami, but very few people are picking them. If your slight gamble comes through, you’ll be starting off with a small lead against 85% of your pool. Not bad.
If you’re in one of those enormous pools with a thousand or more entries, you might consider taking a flyer on Florida International. If you pick all favorites except for Boston College and FIU, you’ll have about an 18% chance to take a 2-game lead on everyone who picked all favorites. Better yet, only about 3% of your opponents will have done the same thing, so you’ll have really differentiated yourself from main pack.
Still, that’s only a wise strategy in huge pools. In smaller pools, that’s too much risk to take at this point in the season.
In a spread-based pick’em, there are two main ways to find value.
First, you can look for a game where the official spread in your contest is different from the current spread offered at most sports books, and take the “free points.” A lot of point spread based pick’em contests publish the games and associated point spreads at the beginning of the week, but give you until the end of the week (or close to it) to submit your picks. In terms of generating edge, exploiting this opportunity is like taking candy from a baby.
In general, the edge you get from those free points is going to be stronger than any lean you have on who is favored to cover. So your best bet is to wait until the very last minute to submit your picks, and give top priority to sides where you are getting the most free points.
We list the biggest line movements from early in the week on the right side of our college football odds page, and will also highlight them in this column each week. Here they are for Week 1, as of Tuesday evening.
| Team | Opponent | Opening Line | Current Line | Movement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Iowa | N Illinois (N) | -6.5 | -10 | 3.5 |
| Miami FL | at Boston College | +1 | -2.5 | 3.5 |
| Rutgers | at Tulane | -17.5 | -20.5 | 3 |
| Nebraska | vs. Southern Miss | -17.5 | -20 | 2.5 |
| USC | vs. Hawaii | -38 | -40 | 2 |
| Alabama | Michigan (N) | -12 | -14 | 2 |
The second major source of value in spread-based pick’ems is finding a game where a huge majority of your opponents are picking one team, when the official contest line is equal to the current Vegas point spread. In this case, you just pick against the majority.
The rationale here is that there is almost never a game where a team has, say, an 85% chance to cover. Most Vegas point spreads are pretty efficient — at least, more efficient than the vast majority of other methods of predicting games. So if 85% of your opponents are picking a certain team to beat the spread this week, that team is almost certainly being severely overvalued. And that means you’ve got roughly a 50/50 shot of pulling ahead of a huge chunk of your opponents by picking against them, no matter what your personal opinion is of that game.
It’s a smart gamble in most pool sizes, as long as you aren’t already comfortably in the lead. (In that case, picking along with the crowd does provide some lead-protection insurance, and you’d need to do some math to figure out the likely best option.)
This week, the public seems to be going wild for several teams, which means their opponents are ripe for the picking. For the following five teams, the lines for the Yahoo! ATS pick’em are the same as those found at leading sportsbooks on Tuesday evening, yet under 15% of the public is selecting these teams to cover:
| Team | Opponent | Public Pick% | TR Cover Odds | Current Line |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| N Illinois (N) | Iowa (N) | 13% | 54% | +10 |
| Toledo | at Arizona | 8% | 53% | +10 |
| Hawaii | at USC | 14% | 52% | +40 |
| Georgia Tech | at Virginia Tech | 10% | 51% | +7.5 |
| Colorado St. | at Colorado | 14% | 50% | +6.5 |
If the lines in your pick’em contest are the same as those shown above, and if you think your competitors will be picking teams in roughly the same manner as the general public (e.g., in line with the Yahoo! contest picking trends), we’d recommend playing all five of these teams.
For advice on other games in your spread-based pick’em pool this week, check out our college football office pool spread picks page, or our college football ATS picks page.
As always, please feel free to ask questions in the comment section below. We’ll do our best to answer as many as possible, and we look forward to a fun and interactive college football weekly pick’em advice column this season.
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