A radical theory for next trip out to sports book

By Jeff Haney

Saturday, Sept. 5, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Matt Cilley / The Associated Press

Boise State’s Austin Pettis rushes against Oregon during the season opening college football game Thursday in Boise, Idaho.

College football bettors, particularly those in Las Vegas, tend to exhibit symptoms of hipper-than-thou syndrome.

They take pride in their knowledge of the most obscure teams and conferences that appear on the betting board.

They would no sooner back a so-called public team, a top BCS title contender, at the window than they would wear a sandwich board proclaiming, “I’m a square.”

They might very well have the wrong idea.

On a tip from a local bettor, who said he delights in outsmarting the wiseguys by happily laying points with college football’s powerhouses on a regular basis, I decided to take a closer look.

The bettor’s formula was simple: Bet on the bullies, college football’s high-profile, highly publicized teams, regardless of the point spread.

Talk about a basic strategy.

But he insisted he found success following it in recent years.

The bettor sent along a list of national brand-name college football teams he likes to bet on.

I knew I would have to start over with an unbiased approach, though. No matter how good his intentions were, there was still a possibility he had cherry-picked the teams on his list to retrofit his theory.

I discounted the major preseason Top 25 polls. They’re fraught with various flaws and have nothing to do (directly) with gambling.

Attach a betting line to a proposition, anything, and allow real people to bet real money into it. Ah, now you have something of value.

So I looked at the season-victory over/unders from the past three years as posted in Las Vegas sports books. I focused on teams with season-victory totals listed at 10 or higher by oddsmakers. These teams are the real punishers of the sport, likely to be heavy favorites in the point spreads of many of their games as well as leading contenders for the national championship or fancy bowl games.

That gave us a roster of 19 teams — six from 2008, seven from 2007 and six from 2006.

Overall, those teams went 134-97 against the point spread, according to a consensus Las Vegas line, in the past three seasons. That’s an impressive winning rate of 58 percent against the spread.

Only games with widely available betting lines were considered. Pushes against the spread were ignored. In the few games in which the teams played each other, I presumed a bet on the favorite — naturally, given the nature of our working hypothesis.

Two teams, Oklahoma and USC, made the cut in each of the past three years, with the Sooners compiling a record of 26-14 (65 percent) against the point spread and the Trojans going 21-18 (54 percent) against the number. The best record in the sample was Florida’s 11-2 mark against the spread last season. The worst was Louisville’s 4-7 ATS record in 2007-08.

It’s no shock these elite teams took care of business by winning outright. It’s more than a little surprising they performed so well against the spread. After all, the point spread is sometimes called the “great equalizer.”

By no means is this a recommendation to blindly fire away on every team projected to win 10 or more games this season. (The list includes usual suspects Boise State, Florida, Oklahoma, Texas and USC.)

Oddsmakers and the betting marketplace have a tendency to adjust and neutralize these patterns.

Then again, Boise State, the first member of this year’s 10-plus club to play a regular-season game, won its opener against Oregon on Thursday by a score of 19-8 ... good enough to cover the point spread.