How to Know When to Hedge Your College Football Futures

College Football Bowl Season can provide us with some very valuable insight, as to how our futures markets might play out. We offer up our top tips for betting on the College Football Playoff.

The market to win the National Championship will get underway on December 31st with the College Football Playoffs. 

So how can we use the earlier bowl games to educate ourselves heading into the marquee matchups? Several bettors are holding large tickets on Alabama, Georgia, Michigan, and/or Cincinnati to win the title on Monday, Jan. 10, 2022. 

They are now faced with difficult decisions on how to maximize the value of these futures bets. Cash-out, hedge, or let them ride? 

Although the other bowl games leading up to the College Football Playoff have no impact on the futures market, they can help us paint a clearer picture of what might happen in the playoff.

How good are Alabama and Georgia?

The teams in the SEC consistently get away with playing very light non-conference schedules and they rarely, if ever, travel. Alabama is the only Power 5 school to not play a true road non-conference game since 2014.

The conference is also the beneficiary of preseason rankings. With so many teams in the Top 25 at the start of the year, it allows SEC teams to stack wins against inferior ranked opponents. If an unranked team defeats a ranked team, then the unranked team becomes ranked, and the cycle continues.

Let’s look at some notable non-conference games played by the SEC this season:

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What do you notice when you see these non-conference scores? What grabs my attention is how different a lot of these victories look now after seeing the whole season play out. 

A lot of bettors perceived Georgia as one of the best teams in the nation because of its victory over Clemson. We were even more impressed with the Bulldogs when they demolished Arkansas after it had a convincing victory against Texas. It turns out those victories were not as strong as we thought they were at the time.

So just how good are Georgia and Alabama? That is the question several futures bettors will be wondering, as they determine what to do with their National Championship futures.

Games to watch before the College Football Playoff

If you are holding futures tickets on Alabama, Georgia, Michigan, or Cincinnati, there are three bowl games that are appointment television for you leading up to the playoffs:

Florida vs. UCF, Gasparilla Bowl, Dec. 23Houston vs. Auburn, Birmingham Bowl, Dec. 28Tennessee vs. Purdue, Music City Bowl, Dec. 30

These are three bowl games that put the American (Cincinnati), the Big Ten (Michigan), and SEC (Alabama, Georgia) against each other. Players sitting out, transfers and COVID-19 protocols could end up impacting the quality of these games, but they are still a worthwhile gauge of prior competition.

These bowl games are not the be all end all, but they will help you in your evaluation of the playoff games.

SEE ALSO: College Football Bowl'd Predictions

Cincinnati has the best non-conference win in college football from its win at Notre Dame. The only knock against Cincinnati is that the Bearcats' conference is weak, and they don’t come from a Power 5, but the preseason Top 25 rankings often trick us into being wrong in the perceptions we create about each conference.

Avoid the narrative and pay attention to how the conferences are performing in the bowl games. This should give you a better idea of what to do with your National Championship futures leading into the semifinals on New Year's Eve.

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