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Where to find an edge in early season CFB betting ✅
Connelly: Where to find an edge in early season CFB betting
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Diving into the advanced stats can be a great way to both feel more informed about college football and spot some potential betting trends and value before they fully emerge. Better yet, it can make you feel more informed about the college football landscape as a whole. Let's dive into the sea of advanced stats and see what we can find.
Pitt might finally have a defense
The Pittsburgh Panthers enjoyed their biggest win of the season on Saturday, becoming the first team since November 2016 to beat the UCF Knights in the regular season. The score was 35-34, but don't be misled: The Panthers' defense was a primary driver of success.
Success rate is my go-to efficiency measure. It is an on-base percentage for football, tracking how frequently you're gaining 50% of necessary yardage on first down, 70% on second and 100% on third or fourth. The national average for non-garbage time success rate is generally around 42%.
During UCF's 27-game regular-season winning streak, the Knights posted a success rate higher than 42% 22 times. On Saturday, it was 30%. They finally found some big-play success in the second half, which allowed them to mount a comeback, but Pitt stymied the Knights in a way that few teams have. They held Penn State to 17 points the week before and held Ohio to 10 the week before that.
A massively successful defensive coordinator at Michigan State, Pitt head coach Pat Narduzzi engineered some first-year defensive improvement, but over the past three years, the Panthers averaged just a 58.7 ranking in defensive SP+. Through four weeks in 2019, they're 26th. The national scoring average is a hair more than 28 points per game right now, but my SP+ ratings don't project Pitt to allow more than 25.3 points in a game the rest of the season.
Granted, the Panthers probably aren't going to score much either. They're 111th in offensive SP+, and they've shown no consistent level of either efficiency (100th in my marginal efficiency rating, which adjusts a team's success rate for down, distance and field position) or explosiveness (119th in marginal explosiveness). This is a team built to play in low-scoring games.
Gambling relevance: Watch the Pitt unders in October. The Panthers play FCS' Delaware this week, which doesn't do much for gamblers, but if that Duke-Pitt game on Oct. 5 comes out with an over/under above 48 or 50, hop on that. Duke scored a combined 86 points on NC A&T and Middle Tennessee but only three on Alabama. The Panthers aren't Bama, but they also aren't MTSU.
The same goes for the rest of Pitt's October slate: Syracuse (Oct. 18) and Miami (Oct. 26) don't exactly have glitch-free offenses.
Also defense-happy: Mizzou and Memphis
Based on the current AP rankings, maybe the two most underrated teams in the country are Tiger squads that reside about six hours apart. The Missouri Tigers are 3-1 with a No. 15 SP+ ranking, and the Memphis Tigers are 3-0 and 17th. Expanding the AP votes beyond 25 teams, however, they would rank 35th and 30th, respectively.
Mind you, it isn't hard to understand what's holding them back. Missouri lost at Wyoming to start the season, and though that outcome was determined by a pair of amazingly costly fumble returns, it threw voters off the scent. Memphis, meanwhile, has beaten only Ole Miss, Southern and South Alabama, and it came into the season having lost seven of its past eight games against teams that finished with winning records.
Maybe that creates some betting value for you. While the Wyoming loss represented a 24-point underachievement versus the spread, Mizzou overachieved by a combined 27.5 points against West Virginia and South Carolina.
Gambling relevance: I'm not here just to tell you these two sets of Tigers are undervalued, though. I'm also here to tell you that they're neither scoring nor allowing as many points as you think.
Missouri ranks 11th in defensive SP+ and has suffered basically three defensive breakdowns all season: two long runs against Wyoming and a long screen pass against South Carolina. The Tigers are fifth in marginal efficiency allowed, and they're high-level against both run (eighth in marginal efficiency) and pass (seventh). They're also playing things pretty safely offensively, running and throwing semiefficiently but not pushing the ball downfield very much. This is a ball control team, and ball control equals unders.
Memphis, meanwhile, is third in defensive SP+. Third! Is that sustainable? Perhaps not, but the Tigers have been all sorts of stingy, especially against the pass. They're allowing just a 41% completion rate, and they're keeping the completions they do allow in front of them. They've given up a combined 16 points to two FBS opponents, and though they allowed 24 to Southern, seven came on a fumble return, and the Tigers allowed only 3.6 yards per play after the first two snaps of the game.
Navy visits Memphis (-10.5, 54) on Thursday. The Midshipmen have caused plenty of existential defensive crises through the years. But the bottom line is Memphis games averaged 75 points per game last season and are averaging fewer than 51 so far this season. Keep that in mind.
Navy Midshipmen have (forgive me) righted the ship
Speaking of Thursday night's Navy-Memphis game, it is fascinating for a number of reasons. For one, it's a key battle in what is currently the best division in the Group of Five. The AAC West's average SP+ rating is currently higher than the ACC Coastal's! For another, it's going to provide a lot of info about not only Memphis but also Ken Niumatalolo's Midshipmen, who have begun the season looking infinitely stronger than the team we saw last season.
Granted, they've played only two games against subpar competition, but Navy beat Holy Cross and ECU by a combined 87-17 in Weeks 1 and 3, and they rank in the top 25 in both offensive and defensive success rate. There is far more predictive value in utterly dominating bad teams than we think -- just see Wisconsin's performance so far this season -- and Navy has done that. Accordingly, the Middies are up to 47th in SP+ after starting 114th in the preseason.
Gambling relevance: Vegas could be slow to realize how much the Midshipmen have improved, and though that might not matter this week against a Memphis team that is also undervalued, I'm curious to see where the line starts for upcoming games against Air Force (Navy is a projected 2.8-point favorite), Tulsa (6.1) and USF (13.9). I'd be surprised if the line isn't a few points off from that. Remember, the line against ECU was -7, and Navy won by 32.
Charlotte 49ers like points
First-year Charlotte coach Will Healy patterns his style after Clemson's Dabo Swinney in a lot of ways, and maybe there's something to the simple fact that the 49ers scored as many points as Texas A&M did against the defending national champs on Saturday. But ignoring that game, you might have noticed that they've averaged 47 points per game in their other three games.
Charlotte was projected 126th in offensive SP+ this season after averaging fewer than 18 points per game in 2017-18. But the 49ers are currently up to 42nd. A trio of running backs -- Benny LeMay, Ishod Finger and Aaron McAllister -- have combined to average 6.8 yards per carry, and though the passing game isn't amazing, it's far more effective than it was last season.
Gambling relevance: Charlotte isn't very good defensively, either. The Niners are 122nd in defensive SP+, showing signs of life against the pass but getting steamrollered by opposing run games. Both Charlotte and its opponents will be in position to score quite a few points moving forward.
If it feels strange to think about taking the under in Memphis games, here's your overs outlet: SP+ doesn't project any of the next six Charlotte games to feature fewer than 62 points. Saturday's home game against FAU (+1, 65), in fact, is projected at 65.4 points. The over/under started around 65-66, but check on how it moves the next couple of days. Better yet, watch the totals on the FIU game in a couple of weeks. FIU has been mostly miserable offensively this season, but quarterback James Morgan is back in the lineup after an ankle injury, and Charlotte's a pretty QB-friendly team to face.
(Either way, you should watch Charlotte games if, you know, you enjoy fun.)
Wait? Cal is 15th??
By simply winning football games, you will move up in the polls. That's how it has always worked, of course. After Saturday's narrow win at Ole Miss, the 4-0 California Golden Bears moved up to 15th in the AP poll. The Golden Bears are currently -6 against Arizona State this weekend.
Gambling relevance: SP+ projects the game as a toss-up. For as good as Cal might have looked in grinding out a second straight upset of Washington a few weeks ago, the Bears have since beaten North Texas (50th in SP+) and Ole Miss (54th) by one score each. They currently rank just 44th overall (ASU is 39th). They have improved a hair offensively, but they are still dreadfully inefficient and are currently relying on big pass plays on passing downs to put points on the board. That is not a strategy that pays off long-term.
I define standard downs as first downs, second-and-7 or less, and third- or fourth-and-4 or less. I define passing downs as everything else. The national average for success rate on standard downs is 46%. For passing downs it is 31%.
On Saturday in Oxford, Cal posted a 29% success rate on standard downs (dreadful) and a 58% success rate on passing downs (unsustainably brilliant). Chase Garbers averaged 4.5 yards per pass attempt, including sacks, on SDs but went 12-for-17 for 245 yards (13.5 per attempt) on PDs. That's not going to hold up. ASU's passing downs defense isn't the best in the world, but the Sun Devils are probably still going to have an excellent shot at an "upset."
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