Every handicapper has their own style, their own methodology in handicapping games. I look at each sport using different variations to my style. In one sport I might have a stronger emphasis on fundamentals or statistics. In another sport, perhaps a teams’ specific angles or trends carries the most weight. College football has different quirks than the NFL does. There is no way I can handicap the NBA in the same manner as I do college basketball. Baseball is a different animal all together.
One aspect I use in every sport is situational handicapping. This can be on a macro level looking at data in very general terms to all the way to drilling down on a specific key player. Normally, I will start with a basic situation and refine it hoping to find the spot with the highest winning percentage. You always need a large enough sample size for the situation to have credibility in my mind, but finding a situational trend early can be very profitable.
Let’s start with a very basic situation and look at teams in college football non-bowl games where their previous game went into overtime. Since the 2000 season, teams off of an overtime game covered against the spread 47.6% of the time in their next game. I am not yet using any other qualifiers or filters, just a very basic database query.
Taking it to the next step, let’s look at how those teams did in their previous game. If the team won their previous overtime game, they don’t do quite as well as if they had lost it covering 44.8% versus 50.3% of the time respectively.
Now, let’s take those winners in overtime last week and see if where they are playing makes any difference. If those teams are now playing at home their cover rate is 52.3% versus a poor 36% if they are now the visiting team. That is quite a large difference.
Let’s see if we can drill down even more to discover even a larger advantage for us. In looking at those visiting teams off of a win in OT, if their previous game was played at home and they are still home, they cover at a 52.6% rate. That obviously is not a large enough edge for us to put our hard-earned money on. But, if that team that won in OT at home is now on the road, they only get the ATS win 31.5% of the time!
When looking at situations I always like to see if they are logical, if they make sense. This one definitely does. It is very understandable that a team that won last week at home in a hard-fought overtime game would be due for a letdown going out on the road. The ATS results prove this to be correct.
How about one last tweak to our overtime situation? Making the game a conference game slightly reduces the historical ATS rate to 29.3% for those road teams off of an overtime win at home.
This is one of the angles I used in my Gold 5 Star winner on BYU over Air Force. And, guess what, it shows up again next week with a play on Duke over Wake Forest.
This does not mean I am automatically betting on Duke, I still need to look at the myriad of other factors that I use but one thing I can definitely say is I am not betting on Wake Forest over Duke!
