History Becomes Tradition
It has been nearly 90 years since the Associated Press held its first vote among sportswriters to determine just how the best college football teams in the country stacked up against one another.
Another way to put it is that it has been nearly 90 years since college football bettors and fans have discussed, debated, hailed and pooh-poohed the rankings. The sportswriters no longer have a monopoly with the polls, and computers have replaced much of the old eye-test rankings.
But while there are still disagreement with the polls and rankings, everyone can agree that those lists and calculations do impact college football betting lines at the top NCAAF betting sites.
Bettors Can Drown in Too Much Information
Anything that influences the betting public’s opinion regarding college football teams is of interest to the top sportsbooks, such as BetOnline (check our BetOnline Review). Polls, power rankings, and indexes come in all shapes and sizes, with popularity changing from one season to the next, or even within the same season.
None of the polls and rankings do bettors any good if they don’t understand the dynamics behind the ratings, be it a simple eye test or a complicated mathematical formula. And that can lead to them being a detriment to the end user if they’re fooled or swayed by the proverbial shiny object.
The mere fact there are so many different rankings now can make for a daunting task for bettors, making the KISS rule something to keep in mind – Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Rankings Impact College Football Schedules
The first real impact that rankings have on college football is determining which matchups get rotation numbers on NCAAF odds boards to begin with. Projected rankings play a role in how schools contract with each other for some of the early-season interconference contests.
Rankings were used to decide which two teams would meet in the 2023 Mountain West Conference Championship. The three-way tie between UNLV, Boise State and San Jose State went to the computers before setting the Rebels and Broncos up for the showdown. Those rankings were many of the same used for BCS positioning in the not-so-distant past.
The present-day College Football Playoffs Selection Committee will use a combination of their own eye tests and computer rankings to send a quartet into the grinder for the 2023-24 National Championship. From that gridiron version of the Final Four, the rest of the dominoes will fall into place for the remaining bowl games.
Turnabout is Fair Play: Odds Influence Rankings
Not one member of the CFP Selection Committee will ever admit it – not and keep their job, anyway – but the betting lines impact their final decisions.
There may be one or two on the committee who don’t ever look at spreads and totals and moneylines, but the polls and rankings they use to reach their conclusions are already influenced by those figures.
Oddsmakers use various power rankings to determine a spread or total for a given game, and the CFP committee members certainly understand when a team does not “live up to expectations.” Again, they won’t admit it, but the expectations were the spreads for those games.
With purely subjective polls such as the AP, “living up to expectations” is a huge factor in where a team falls in the top 25. And, yes, some of those expectations were oddsmakers factoring in betting trends and tendencies of John Q. Public and Paulie the Whale.
When Rankings & Odds Disagree
Occasionally, the rankings don’t have any impact on the odds…or at the very least, don’t have much of an impact on the betting lines for a college football game. Case in point: The 2023 Pac-12 Championship.
An unbeaten Washington team, ranked No. 3 in the CFP index heading into the tilt, was a 10-point underdog to an Oregon Ducks team ranked No. 5. The Huskies have been about as fortunate as a team can be to own a 12-0 record at this stage of the season, and while it would be wrong to suggest they are doing it with smoke and mirrors, it wouldn’t be totally incorrect.
Most of the country, however, has been waiting on the odds to catch up to Washington, and the Ducks have been playing very well. Even the CFP committee sort of assigned Oregon the role of a vulture sitting just outside the top 4 for the playoffs.
It’s easy to make a case for the subjective polls such as the AP not factoring into the odds for this game at all, while the computer rankings correct the mistake made by human voters. But then, oddsmakers have been aware of that phenomenon for a long time, and their college football picks have the last laugh more times than not.
