Paratroopa1 posted...
SmartMuffin | Posted 9/10/2011 3:30:32 PM | message detail | quote
I feel like people are psychologically predisposed to pick the Over because you're more likely to win by a lot. Like, theoretically, teams can exceed the over by any possible amount. We've seen college football games where the total ended up being well over 100.
Meanwhile, to pick the Under, the lowest it can possibly go is zero.
I think this is partially true - it's more optimistic to go over, because every time a team scores, you're getting closer to your goal, not further away from it. I was comfortable betting on my own team's game for this reason - I knew that Washington's offense was better than its defense, and that they'd easily carry their own weight in the over bet, which they did.
I think that college football games tend to be pretty high scoring though, and I'm really surprised by how low a lot of these over/unders are. I feel like they must know better than I do what they should be set at, but they don't feel quite right, it's weird. I did just absolutely nail three overs right on the head, and I wouldn't have felt comfortable taking the under on most of these games, except maybe Alabama/Penn State.
Yeah, that's the other part of it. I did end up taking one under, because both of the teams involved had been underwhelming--Central Michigan and Kentucky had both scored 21 points or fewer last week and won, so a low-scoring game seemed likely--but it was kind of weird flipping in to that game and trying to root against points being scored.
But as for college football games being pretty high scoring, I actually had been tracking that for the past couple of years (for no particular reason other than that I like to make spreadsheets tracking things--yes, I know I'm weird), and the past two years, 50-59 points has been the most common range for FBS games with 40-49 just barely behind, and 60-69 not too far ahead of 30-39. In FCS games, this is actually reversed--40-49 leads, and 30-39 is easily third, ahead of 60-69 (which in 2009 barely exceeded 20-29). Games in which an FBS team faced an FCS team were counted to both lists.
Of course, that's just which particular ranges were most common. Obviously, 70+ games easily exceeded games with fewer than 30 points--hell, on the FBS side,the 70-79 range alone exceeded the number of games with 0-29 total points both years I'd been doing this. Also, for some reason it looks like I only had up through Week 14 last year. But nevertheless, those over/unders in the 40s and 50s seem reasonable, as 40-59 accounted for nearly half of all games (and while I still apparently need to finish out the 2010 data, the 50-59 range had 205 total in 2009, out of 808 total--over 25% of the games.)
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