Week 2, 2023 NCAAF College Football Betting details:
- Last Saturday the model finally did it’s thing and had a big return to shoot the overall season to profitability. It was Week 1, but there was some testing in Wk0 and the days leading up to the big Saturday.
- I’ll post whenever I play a game each day, just none of the games on Monday thru Friday this week qualified for action so I didn’t have anything to add.
- Today’s Saturday slate features 82 FBS-1-A NCAAF games. Like last week I will be splitting the day in half as not all lines are available early.
- Afternoon Slate: 38 games starting between 11AM – 5:15 PM (Eastern Time)
- Evening Slate: 44 games starting between 6PM – 11:59 PM
Season Tracking:
I’m 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.
1 unit bets equal to $10 as my baseline bet for each game This money equivalent will not change throughout the season on what my units are worth. But the Unit sizes will be adjusted accordingly based on bankroll performance and model confidence.
Season Results:
- ML/Spreads: 19-15-1 | +3.07 units | 8.5% ROI
- Round Robin Parlays: 20-39 | +1.4 units | 39.6% ROI
- Total profit: +4.46 units | 11.3% ROI
Unit sizes:
- The unit sizes were previously set to 1 unit and the rough equivalent of a churn of 100 games of bankroll.
- This is ultra conservative and not an efficient use of bankroll. In MLB I’ve currently got churn set to 30 games as a hard floor before lowering unit sizes.
- What is Churn? Churn represents how many games I can bet before exhausting my bankroll if I were to lose each one. It’s the inverse of the percentage bet and I think it provides a clearer picture to help visualize the impact of each bet.
- Due to college sports having more volume the bankroll is more exposed to game volume at one time and one bad turn of the model could hurt results. For that reason I will be setting my bankroll floor to 40 games before lowering unit sizes.
- The Bankroll is a tool and I want to try to use it as efficiently as possible while not being overexposed on risk. I had no idea how well my College Football model would be to start out, hence why I was conservative with 1 unit games to start, but due to the recent successes over the larger volume I feel more comfortable getting the unit size to where I’d like it.
- Week 2 the unit sizes are set to 2 units a bet.
- Based on my current bankroll of $1044.6 this means I currently have 104.5 units and 2 units of bet sizes represents 52.3 games of churn,
- This unit size is a relatively safe amount, especially compared to my MLB sizes, yet allows me to be more aggressive with the wager total.
- The hard floor of 40 units means I will need to lose a net of 13 games and have my bankroll drop down to $800 or -20 units on the season before I need to safely reset it back to 1 unit in size.
- On the flip side, I will be able to scale up if the model continues to perform. I want a hard floor of 40 units before lowering, but I want a floor of 50 units on the next size up before raising it. In order to raise the bet sizes up to 3 units I will be looking for the bankroll to get up to 150 units before making this leap up.
Round Robin Parlays:
Now you’ve been told that Parlays are suckers bet, but that’s not necessarily true. Parlays are like options in the stock market. They are a way to provide leverage to your betting. It can lever up or lever down. Since most sportsbettors are making longterm -EV bets than the leverage is more often working against them. However if one is making +EV bets, proven out by postive results straight betting than the leverage will work in their favor.
This is why I’m including small unit amount each day on the card for RR Parlays. Round Robins are just a quick way to get a parlay going for every game on the card as the combinations can be quite large.
I’ll try to include the full slate of a card into a RR package equal to 10% of the main card’s total wager amount.
I will also look to increase this ratio if profitability continues upward.
The Model:
Check out my commentary in Sunday’s Card last week for full details on the model. Currently I’m running the power rankings based on Recruit Star talent and starting next week I’ll look to incorporate current season stats to provide adjustments based on differences to expected talent levels. NCAAF is kind of a crapshoot here because of the limited sample size. There are only 13 games or so to evaluate teams for the season, so the insights really have to be on point to assist in forecasting future performance. With the transfer portal being a thing and team’s reshaping themselves each year I would say that most of the previous stats the prior year can be thrown out the window. It’s the talent that drives success, look at Colorado’s upset win againt TCU last week.
DAILY CARDS:
Saturday 9/9/23:
AFTERNOON SLATE:
- There are 12 games on the Afternoon docket.
- 4 ML bets ( I really like VIrginia here)
- 8 Spread bets (lots of big underdog points to cover)
- The Round Robin is set to 37 cents per combination of 66 different pairings here of all games on the card. A total of $24.42 extra leverage to the card.
Round Robin Units Profit: -$16.48 / -1.65 Units
*Tulsa lost in RR as line had moved to +32.5 at time of placement
- Total Afternoon Profit = -$66.53 / -6.65 Units
EVENING SLATE:
- There are 14 games on the Evening docket.
- 4 ML bets
- Sam Houston looks is a big underdog bet, but my model looks at Roster talent and the Service acadamies have none. I’m giving them some benefit of the doubt for their military discipline and shipping all 3 of them 10 3-Star recruits level of bonus in the model. Sam Houston has 1 4-Star player and 13 3-Star players. On top of the Home Field advantage, I really like Sam Houston tonight.
- 8 Spread bets
- The Round Robin is set to 31 cents per combination of 91 different pairings here of all games on the card. A total of $28.21 extra leverage to the card.
- 4 ML bets
Round Robin Units Profit: -$4.01 / -0.40 units
Total Evening Profit = -$5.10 / -0.51 units
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FULL DAY Recap:
Round Robin Units Profit: -$20.49 / -2.05 units
Total Saturday Profit = -$71.63 / -7.16 units
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