We’ve had a lot of questions about our college basketball as we ease our way into hoops.  As background, I completely changed my college hoops methodology in 2006 and the results have been noteworthy. The past two years we’ve won both years in both the regular season and March Madness.  The overall winning percentage for my Strategic Sports Publishing college hoops selections is in excess of 58% against the spread over more than 375 plays in college baskets over those two years.  That’s our record as documented by the Sports Monitor of Oklahoma City. After juice that’s nearly 50 units of profit (all plays are a single unit, no “5 star”, “10 star” variable unit BS).  If you’re interested in subscribing to my basketball service call my office at 1-770-649-1078.

The college success somewhat obscures the fact that we’ve also won 5 of the 6 years that I personally have been doing the NBA (I had an “NBA guy” doing it for a couple of years before that), and I wanted to share an NBA strategy that has worked out for us in the past, and over the past couple of nights as well.

The style of play of NBA teams can change pretty rapidly as their personnel changes.  Let’s look at a couple of examples.

KG Suspended: On Tuesday night the Celtics were playing without Kevin Garnett, who is their heart and soul defensively.  We expected the defense to suffer and the Celts offense to be a little smaller and play a little quicker.  And since Boston was playing the Knicks, the fastest paced team in the league, it looked like the scoring would be higher than would be the case with Garnett in the lineup.  The line had moved to accomodate Garnett’s one-game suspension, but the total did not, and over 204 cashed in the 111-101 Celtics victory.

Billups In, Parker/Ginobili Out:   With Chauncey Billups arriving recently in a trade for Allen Iverson, Denver is being led in a more disciplined and deliberative manner, leading to slower play.   Meanwhile, the Spurs had slowed things down considerably due to the absence of Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili, and are playing at a high level of defensive intensity in an effort to make up for the resulting decline in guard play. With the new-look Nuggets taking on a Spurs team playing at a snail’s pace (among the three slowest teams in the league), the total was substantially lower than the 200 and change that these teams were lined at last year.  But we didn’t think the adjustment was enough (some scheduling factors favored offensive inefficiency).  Under 180.5 came through for us in a 91-81 Denver win.

Information Interpretation: Personnel changes can influence these NBA teams pretty quickly, and it can be hard for the linemaker to keep up.  Paying attention to the playing style and injury/suspension situations in the NBA can pay off if you have the time to keep up with it and apply it to matchups and other handicapping factors.

Doesn’t Always Work:  It so happens that these games won, but even if they had lost they would have been pretty good examples of melding injuries and personnel situations with style of play analysis.  Fortunately, we did happen to win both of them.  Obviously we’ll lose plenty of games this season, but our record over the years in basketball is pretty good.  If you’d like to benefit from our hard work call me at 1-770-649-1078 for more information on how a subscription to our daily basketball selection program works.

Some of the best sports wagers you’ll make involve a team that both has matchup advantages, and is either more motivated or somehow in a better situation than their opponent.   Unfortunately, you find more instances where handicapping figures conflict than when they agree. There are two pretty good illustrations of that on Wednesday’s card.

College Football: Ball State is playing spectacular football in the MAC.   They’re undefeated and have outgained every opponent they’ve played. And tonight they visit Mount Pleasant, Michigan to take on Central Michigan, a team that has won the past two MAC titles and is also undefeated in the conference.  Road favorites on a long winning streaks can be a play-against when facing a solid opponent and two-time defending MAC champ CMU is certainly that.   So why aren’t we interested in taking +6.5 with homestanding Central Michigan?

A look at the statistics tells us why.  Ball State is crunching people, and are ranked at the top or near the top in nearly every major statistical category in the MAC. Their average win against conference opposition is 37-15, while CMU’s average win is 29-25.  How has CMU stayed undefeated?  Their conference wins have been by 3, 1, 10, 10, 2, and 3.   BSU averages 6.9 yards per play in conference, giving up 5.0.   CMU allows 5.7 and gives up 5.9. A team undefeated in conference play giving up more per play than they gain?  Amazing.

Can we become more comfortable with Central Michigan in lieu of those stats?  QB Dan LeFevour missed some time midseason, but his backup was excellent.   And CMU has a couple of major weaknesses.  They allow 8.2 yards per pass attempt in MAC play, second worst in the conference, and they run for only 3.6 yards per carry in MAC play, also second worst.  I couldn’t overcome those stats and stayed off the game despite trying to make a case for CMU.

College Basketball:  St. Louis’ players are motivated to beat Kent State in the Billikins new building tonight.  SLU senior Tommie Liddell told the St. Louis Post Dispatch, “Barry, Kevin and I have already explained the situation with Kent State to the freshmen. They know how big the game is to us. … I told them we have to win.”

We’re always looking for a motivated foe in early season college hoops, so did we pull the trigger on St. Louis?  Nope.  The problem here is that there are seven of those freshman.  And the reason the upperclassmen are motivated is that Kent State beat them 81-40 last year.  And they just have to beat them by 2 this year, as the line is 1.

With all that youth on SLU and Kent State still having a good team, and likely some of the same matchup advantages they had last year, we just can’t pull the trigger on St. Louis this evening.

Always More Confict than Agreement:  I’m not action hungery, I just want to make good bets.  So as is the case in these two games tonight, I find a lot more conflict than I do agreement.   A lot of work ends up appearing to be wasteful.   But doing all the work makes you familiar with the teams and familiar with what constitutes a good play when you find an opportunity when the matchups, the situation, and motivation end up in agreement.

By now you know that the return of a Chargers fumbled lateral by the Steelers on the last play of the game should have counted, and at 18-10 instead of 11-10, the Steelers would have covered the spread instead of the Chargers. The pointspread implications make for an interesting story, but like most sports betting news items, it is one that is being sloppily and inaccurately reported.

In his popular Monday Morning Quarterback feature, Sports Illustrated’s Peter King led with the following:

No, I don’t believe the final play in the Steelers-Chargers game is scandalous. The referee, Scott Green, made a mistake. A $66 million mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.

King goes on to “report”:

The problem is the Steelers were very heavy betting favorites in this game. One Vegas bookie said last night that $100 million was bet on this game alone, with $66 million of that bet on the Steelers. The Steelers were four-point favorites. Instead of winning 17-10 or 18-10, the Steelers won 11-10. Thus they didn’t cover, much to the angst of gamblers around the United States. The call led to the conspiracy theory that somebody must have been in on the action to influence such a gigantic swing in the betting line.

There are only three problems with King’s story:

1. There’s no suggestion by any credible source that any official at any point in the process was part of a gambling scandal. Yet King initiates his column seeking to disprove a “scandal” that nobody else is talking about.
2. No Las Vegas bookie stated that there was $100 million wagered on the game, nor that the money was 2-1 in favor of the Steelers, nor would a Vegas bookmaker, or anyone at all, have access to industry-wide information like that.   A bookie would know what the figures were at his shop, or his chain of books, but that’s it.  But around the world?  Please. The $66 million figure is a complete fabrication.
3. There was no “gigantic swing in the betting line”.  In fact the sentence, “The call led to the conspiracy theory that somebody must have been in on the action to influence such a gigantic swing in the betting line.” makes no sense on any level.  The betting line can’t change after the game has started, and certainly can’t change as the game ends.  I guess King’s meaning to say something like “nobody involved in the process made an intentional decision to influence the betting result.”  But instead, the most influential NFL writer in the business spews out some sort of gobbly goop that doesn’t make a lick of sense, and it flies right past his editors.

King wasn’t the only news source to irresponsibly treat these made up figures as fact. The Los Angeles Times web site “reported“:

No, the real story is that $100 million was bet on this game, two-thirds of it on the Steelers, who were five-point favorites.

At least the Times didn’t try to manufacture some sort of scandal out of the odd result.  But who says that those betting figures are the “real story”?

Let’s examine what’s being reported as news, and  compare it to what is actually known here.

Who’s Riding the Steelers? The Steelers are popular, and have a national following, but what would cause such a surge in betting on the Steelers?  After all, Pittsburgh is a team that had failed to cover four of their last five as a favorite and hadn’t covered a home game since their season opener September 7th against the Texans.   It’s not like people were riding their success, instead Steelers bettors would have been licking their wounds from their recent lack of pointspread success.

Line Moves Indicate Wagering Action on the Chargers: There’s no immediate source for wagering volume, and certainly no industry source for wagering volume on a game-by-game basis.  But importantly, the line movement suggests no such wave of play on the Steelers.  The vast majority of NFL betting takes place on gameday, and the line movement on this game suggested there was late money on the Chargers. The Steelers were a 5-point favorite in Vegas on Sunday morning, and were bet down to 4.5 at most spots, with the Hilton properties moving the game as low as 4 a half-hour before game time. Line movement at influential offshore sports books was nearly identical. If the casinos and offshore books were getting pounded with Steelers money, the line would have been moving up, not down.

Bob Scucci, who runs sports betting operations for the Boyd Gaming casinos in Las Vegas, told media outlets that his properties needed the Chargers, but other Vegas properties report average betting volume and a mixed results. A couple of offshore sources told me the action on the game was reasonably balanced for them.

Was $100 Million Bet on the Game? The $100 million figure is made up, like the 66% figure apparently tossed out there.  It is likely that a few million was bet on the game in Vegas.  Outside of Nevada, who knows? And it wasn’t all on the side.  Over/under wagers and teasers were unaffected by the officiating error.  $100 million in volume worldwide isn’t a bad guesstimate, but there’s no way of knowing.

Real Figures Impossible to Know:  Despite no background for these numbers, the $66 million figure has quickly becoming an established fact among media types who are either too lazy to do a little legwork or simply too unsophisticated to know how to get to the bottom of a story involving sports betting.  It is certainly illuminating to see influential media people reporting as fact stuff that is simply made up, which makes you wonder what else we see reported in these venues is simply tossed out there with no concern as to it’s accuracy and validity.

Weather appears to be a potential factor in many, many games east of the Rockies today.

Rain in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest: The weather appears to be worse than yesterday’s forecast in a lot of places.  Games at Penn State, Michigan, NC State, Maryland, Navy (in Baltimore) are among those that look to be both wet and windy, but not to an extreme.  Worth noting that the stadium at Maryland is much more susceptible to wind than is the Ravens Stadium in Baltimore, where the seats go much, much higher.

Wind in the Boone Pickens Belt:  In the Great Plains States and down into Texas, it looks windy.  Games at Kansas and Kansas State may be among those affected.   Showing how dicey this can all be, the game at Baylor has winds forecast from 22MPH early in the game, and then from 10MPH in the second half.  Move that up an hour and wind isn’t a factor at all.  Have the winds hang around later than expected and it’s potentially a big factor.

Thunderstorms in Florida: There’s a bunch of games in Florida with thunderstorms forecast today.  Obviously, that’s hit and miss.

Watch and Listen: Best thing to do if you’re looking to play a “weather under” is to be tuned in right as the telecast starts.  Or find their radio broadcasts on the internet. And then see what conditions are like.  Conditions change, which is why I like first half unders and first quarter unders.  Might be worth riding the radar before gametime for the games in Florida today as well.

Hour By Hour Forecasts: Games often take place in places with poor weather forecast, but not during the time that the poor weather is happening.  Games in all regions today, like at Marshall (4:30PM EST), at Iowa State (6:30PM EST), and at Kentucky (8PM EST) take place after the worst of the day’s weather is forecast.

Be Careful:  It’s impossible to be definitive with all these potential weather games.  Some of these games may be influenced.  Most of them likely won’t be.  But there’s a chance you’ll get a couple of good under plays if you put the work in, listen to the radio pregame, and are ready to move quickly as the game telecasts begin today.

Good luck, and if you live someplace where there’s a good under play due to weather, stay inside.

With the top five teams in the BCS rankings are the only two powerful SEC teams and half of the Big 12 South, maybe it’s just a mediocre year in college football.  Is the power really that concentrated in those two conferences?  Apparently so. Consider that….

• 10 of the 12 ACC teams are still eligible to win the conference and every single team has between 2 and 4 conference losses.  Boston College, 2-3 in conference play, actually controls it’s own destiny.
• Everyone was terrified that Penn State would be the third straight overhyped Big Ten outfit to get crushed in the  BCS title game.  An Iowa team that has lost to Pitt, Northwestern, Michigan Stte, and Illinois eliminated that fear.
• The general consensus is that the Pac Ten is so weak that USC doesn’t have a quality win, including their September wipeout of Ohio State.
• The Big East is controlled by Cincinnati, who lost by 24 to UConn,  and Pitt, who has lost by double digits at home to Bowling Green and Rutgers.

And similar points can be made about the Big 12 North and every SEC club not named Florida or Alabama.  Take away those top five clubs, and it may simply be a year of parity, or a year of mediocrity.

Excepting when they play one another, the pointspread record of the top four teams in the Big 12 South, Texas Tech, Texas, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State, is a combined 23-4-1.   Not bad.  Not bad at all.

One team that was supposed to be a SEC powerhouse that is coming up short is the Georgia Bulldogs.  While UGA still only has a pair of losses, their defense is in steep decline.  In their first 7 games, the Bulldogs allowed 124 points, or 17.7 points per game.  In their last 3, they’ve permitted 125 points, or 41.6 points per game.  It is the first time that UGA has given up 38 points or more in three consecutive games since 1900, though at least they’ve won 2 of those 3.  Since wiping out Arizona State in what proved to be a phony win (the Sun Devils are terrible), UGA is 1-5 against the spread.

Although he could just teach his quarterback to recognize a Cover 2 scheme and instruct him to not throw deep into it,  Charlie Weis is heroically swooping in to save his offense by taking over the play calling duties.   Pretty good timing to do so.  Jimmy Clausen looked lost against BC’s impressive pass defense, which allows 5.8 yards per pass attempt (#15 out of 120 Division 1-A teams). Clausen is much more likely to show some competence against a Navy team that gives up 8.8 yards per pass attempt (#116), so it’s certainly a strategic time for Weis to pick up the call sheet and take credit for this week’s improvement in the passing game.  And though his offensive coordinator does have a personal commitment that will cause him to miss a practice day this week, Weis strongly hinted at this change immediately following the BC loss, before any such scheduling conflict was apparent.

It was easy to remember from Day One of the Big 12 who was in the North and who was in the South.  The Texas and Oklahoma teams are in the South.  Everyone else is in the North.  Same thing when the SEC expanded to include Arkansas and South Carolina and went to divisional play, everyone east and north of Alabama was in the East, the rest were in the South.

But several years into divisional play in the ACC, despite having looked at the standings dozens of times, I still have a hard time remembering who is in the Atlantic and who is in the Coastal.   The odd divisional arrangement in the ACC was highlighted when Duke and NC State, less than a half-hour drive from one another, played football for the first time since 2003 last Saturday.  In the interim, Duke had played Miami four times, and NC State had played Boston College four times.   But the neighbors had not played one another.

It’s just been a very weird year in college football, hasn’t it?

Each November, the Mid-American Conference makes the decision to play games in the middle of the week for a little bit of TV exposure.  Of the 19 games remaining involving MAC teams, including the conference championship game, only 3 of those games are on a Saturday.

Exposure is important in college football, but how much does it help these schools to show a limited ESPNU audience half-empty stadiums of shivering fans on a cold Tuesday night in November?   Is the “exposure” of an ESPN360.com webcast really worth taking away a football Saturday from Kent State’s campus and making Temple players lose a couple of days of classroom time to travel to and from a Wednesday night game?

The MAC Conference answers “yes” to those questions.  So let’s take advantage of the MAC’s midweek “exposure” to explore some “conference only” handicapping.

MAC, Sun Belt, and lower level WAC teams use “paycheck games” against BCS conference schools to help fund their programs.   Some schedule more aggressively than others (for the second straight year, Central Michigan is playing three road games at BCS conference locales), but most play two paycheck games per season.

The results of those games aren’t always meaningful.  Sometimes the teams are simply outclassed, and don’t really care.  Central Michigan was much more concerned with their conference title hopes when they lost at Clemson 70-14 last season. Do you really want to punish a team like the Chips by using those stats when they step back into conference play?  Last October Kent State’s Doug Martin rested his starters when the Golden Flashes visited Ohio State, using the visit to Columbus as an opportunity to freshen his most important contributors for the conference season. Martin’s reserved were, of course, waxed by the Buckeyes.

As a result, in the minor conferences, using statistics generated only in conference play can be a worthwhile tool.   Let’s look at the MAC games this week using only stats generated in conference play.  We’ll look at average points and yards per play, both offensively and defensively. Pointspreads are noted, and at the time of this update only the Tuesday night game has a total on it.

Tuesday:  Ball State (-19.5, 54) at Miami.  Ball State has significant advantages in all phases of the game.  Scoring within the conference is 39-15 for BSU vs. 18-31 for Miami.  Yards per play is 6.8-5.1 for BSU and 4.7-5.8 for Miami.

Wednesday: Temple (-2.5) at Kent State.  Temple is a much lower scoring team, with an average result of 17-16 vs. 30-33 for Kent State.  But the underdog Golden Flashes look pretty good from a yardage standpoint.  Temple’s yards per play averages are 4.3-4.5, to Kent State’s 5.9-5.4.  Interesting that home dog Kent State is +0.5 per play in conference play, while road favorite Temple is slightly negative at -0.2.  The injury to quarterback Adam DiMichele hurt the Temple offense for a while, but he’s back now.

Wednesday: Central Michigan @ Northern Illinois (-3). Both teams average a solid win in conference play, CMU 29-24 and NIU 25-18.  But statistics favor the favorite, with Central Michigan 5.6-6.1 and Northern Illinois 5.5-5.3.   That 6.1 defensive yards per play number for CMU may indicate a significant weakness.

Thursday: Buffalo at Akron (-2.5). Scoring stats favor Buffalo, with an average result being a 30-25 win vs. a more narrow 35-34 win for Akron.  Yards per play numbers favor the Zips however, as Buffalo gains and gives up an identical 5.8 yards per play, while Akron is a positive yardage team at 6.1-5.7.

Obviously you have to take a look at how these numbers were earned.  Did an injury to a player that has now returned influence the numbers?  Did a single game where a team either dominated or was blown out skew the averages?  Is a team wearing down and in poor form, or are they improving?

Such questions need to be addressed with all statistical handicapping, but in the “mid-major” conferences it makes good sense to look at conference-only stats at this time of year.

Did you know that when Congress passed anti-sports gambling legislation years, ago, it didn’t apply to Delaware?  Along with Nevada, the state was grandfathered out of the ban due to an ill-fated legal parlay card program that existed for a little while in “the First State”.  Some in Delaware want to take advantage of that exception and are clamoring for sports betting to keep up with a feared exodus of revenue from the state now that Maryland has legalized slots.

Of course with Republicans largely (but not entirely) responsible for legislation limiting online wagering, the entire issue may be revisited at a federal level now that revenue-hungry Democrats control the Senate, House, and White House triumverate.

I’ve got some “teams that start 0-4″ underdog angles in the NFL, as the public doesn’t want to back these teams, opponents tend to let down against them, and, in theory at least, the players should be motivated to turn their season around.  But the Houston Texans are a very odd example of an 0-4 team.  After their 0-4 start, Houston has won 3 of 4, yet are only 1-3 against the spread in those games. While most 0-4 teams are getting copious points, the Texans were actually favored games 5, 6, and 7, as their offensive talent maintained the respect of bettors who realized that the Texans had a tough schedule early and deserved favoritism at home over bad teams like the Lions and Bengals.

The Cleveland Browns keep finding new and innovative ways to lost ballgames, as we saw on Thursday night.  Tough to see Romeo Crennel lasting there.   Crennel inadvertantly gave the Broncos some bulletin board marterial when Denver picked up on the Browns’ coach saying “we’ll beat Denver” as a way of cutting off some reporter’s questions about his quarterback change in a news conference. Broncos defensive lineman Ebenezer Ebuban said, “All week we were keying off what Romeo Crennel said about how the Browns were going to beat us. In that fourth quarter, we told everybody, ‘Hey, can’t let him beat us.’ So thanks to Romeo Crennel.”

“Poll position” may not be as meaningful as you think among top-ranked college football teams in November. As tempting as it is to say “this team will destroy their opponent to impress the pollsters,” the end of the season simply hasn’t worked out that way all the time. The teams that made the last four BCS Championship games have a combined 13-17-1 pointspread record in their last four regular season games (Florida had a non-lined game against Western Carolina late in 2006).  And those were the teams that succeeded in making it to the championship game.   Interestingly, the only team of that octet that had a winning spread record is the one that has earned the fans utter disdain, as last year’s Ohio State Buckeyes closed 3-1 to the number.

The Breeders’ Cup handle was up only marginally despite the increase from 11 races to 14 and much better weather this year.   But that handle did include the money of one Marian Hinnant.  Hinnant, a juror on Alaska Senator Ted Stevens’ corruption trial, bailed on deliberations with the story that her father had passed away.   In fact, she had a plane ticket from Washington DC to Los Angeles to see the Breeders Cup and simply didn’t want to miss it.

Good luck this weekend.  And be careful.

Here’s a mini-preview of each of the three Thursday games.  Weather shouldn’t be a factor anywhere tonight, as the forecasts for Cleveland, Blacksburg, and Salt Lake City are for dry air and calm winds in all three locales.

Denver at Cleveland:  Browns are favored by a field goal laying -115 or -120 with a total of 46.  Brady Quinn, who has thrown only eight passes in games that count in the last 22 months makes the start for the Browns. In August, Quinn was 41-62 for a shade under 7 yards per attempt with a TD and an interception against vanilla preseason defenses.  Books should probably set a line on Braylon Edwards drops as a prop for Browns games.  Would Cleveland have outgained only two opponents on the season if Edwards made catches?  Speaking to their inconsistency, 3-5 Cleveland has seen only two games fall within the 6-point teaser all season.

The 4-4 Broncos scored 114 points in their first three games and 76 points in the five games since.  The enormous production early and the subsequent dropoff leads to the odd situation of the NFL’s #3 team in total offense having scored fewer than 20 points in each of their last five games.   Turnovers are a big issue, as in those five games Denver has a 16-6 turnover disadvantage. Short week doesn’t favor the road team, but at least the Broncos were home last week and had a bye before that.

Maryland at Virginia Tech: Virginia Tech is favored by 3 with a total of 41.5. These border state rivals are hardly rivals at all, as they’ve played only twice since the expansion of the ACC, with the schedule keeping them apart each of the past two years.  Maryland is highly dependent upon Da’Rel Scott, the ACC’s leading rusher, but even the Terps beat writers sound clueless about his availability.  His lead blocking fullback is questionable as well.

Virginia Tech is down their third string quarterback tonight.  But he wasn’t bad when pressed into service against Florida State, and the Hokie offense has been so horrid he could hardly be worse than Sean Glennon or Tyrod Taylor.   Whether you use raw yards or yards per play, with Division 1-AA stats or without, Virginia Tech’s offense is ranked 111th or lower out of 120 1-A teams.

TCU at Utah: Winner has a live shot at a BCS Bowl bid.  The loser is likely Las Vegas Bowl bound. That makes this a big game. The visiting Horned Frogs are favored by 1.5 with a total of 42.5.  Using yards per play as a guide, these are the #2 and #3 ranked defenses in all of college football, but before leaping on the under, realize that they each average 36 points per game on the season as well.  TCU has allowed more than 14 points only at Oklahoma.  Despite permitting only 4.3 yards per play, Utah has seen five oponents go for 21 points or more, and the TCU D is visually more impressive as well.  But the Utes have a strong home field and this is being called the biggest game ever in Salt Lake City.