August 26, 2023 NCAAF College Football Betting Cards deta
It’s a brand new sport today with me starting my foray into College Football betting. This is going to be a little tougher than I expected, but follow along if you want to see how I develop winning betting strategies.
This is Week 0 of College Football. Aptly named as I have no clue where to begin here and luckily it’s a small slate. I was hoping College Football would be like College Basketball where I could find some KenPom type ratings and plug in some Home/Away split records along with Strength of Schedule and get the 1st model out the door. For whatever reason there doesn’t seem to be consenus on what constitutes actual Home/Away games as I checked a few different sources and I got different totals for each amongst the 2022 data. And the Away games were higher than the Home games usually, which doesn’t make much sense to me as the Division IA teams should have teams travel to them if they are from lower divisions. Either way further research will have to be done to get a solid base of data going for the model.
Unfortunately I had to start somewhere and I eventually settled on using ESPN’s FPI 2022 ratings, although I loathe ESPN’s WP% model on games. I used that FPI as a baseline and kind of made my own ranking system of team’s off the 2022 results. Then I set the model to give me a relative WP% based on team matchups. It’s nowhere near where I want it to be, but due to time constraints it’s the best I’ll have to start the season.
Also a little background I haven’t really paid much attention to College Football the last 10 years aside from a few BCS CFP (As I said, it’s been awhile lol) games and the OSU/Michigan games so It should be a fun time getting back into following the sport again.
Season Tracking:
In MLB I used a baseline of a $1, but I’m just going to be fully transparent here and highlight everything I’m doing. I’m going to be using a starting bankroll of $1,000 to start the season here. I don’t plan on replacing this with extra funds during the season, so this is all we will be playing with. Unit sizes will be adjusted accordingly based on bankroll performance.
Since there are so many unknowns in Wk 0 I feel very uncomfortable risking anything meaningful, so I will be starting the season with 1 unit bets equal to $10 as my baseline bet for each game. A whopping $20 at risk, but to me action is action and once the system gets going I’ll start to rise the units up and pressing the edge.
So there you have it. Expect a lot of updates as we get more games going throughout the season and I spend more time figuring out how to get better data in place for the model.
DAILY CARD:
*See Glossary for details to help explain terms and other recent model changes.
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