[h=1]An early look at bowl season betting opportunities[/h]
- Will Harris, Special to ESPN.com
ESPN INSIDER
The favorites won all eight college football title games, covering five. But that was so last week.
Now we turn our attention to a record 40 postseason bowl games, including the two playoff semifinals. Join us below for an early look at the lines, matchups and futures odds on the CFB Playoff, as well as some promising early bowl leans, plus the winners and losers from Selection Sunday.
Note: Lines and futures are from the Westgate Las Vegas as of Wednesday morning except where otherwise specified.
[h=2]Early CFB Playoff outlook[/h]Throughout Las Vegas, Alabama is a 9.5-point favorite over Michigan State, while Oklahoma is laying Clemson 3.5 points. The latest championship odds from the Westgate are set at:
Alabama EVEN
Oklahoma 9-4
Clemson 5-1
Michigan State 7-1
Our betting order looks a lot different, in that Clemson is last by a mile and Oklahoma is on top by virtue of drawing the Tigers first. Clemson whipped Oklahoma 40-6 in last year's bowl game and will find it very tough to get past the revenge-minded Sooners in the rematch, to say nothing of the Tigers' chances of winning a second game as well. Clemson at 5-1 is<offer style="box-sizing: border-box;"> the dead money in this lineup.
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We're open-minded about the others as we gather more information between now and kickoff, but all three are to be taken seriously. More on the matchup later, but Michigan State profiles well in all three phases as a team that could beat Alabama. This is closer to a fair fight than a near-double-digit number suggests, and the gap between these programs has narrowed a whole lot since Alabama whipped Sparty 49-7 in the 2010 Citrus Bowl.
As the only returning playoff participant from a year ago, the Tide certainly have an experience edge. If you watched ESPN's bowl reveal show, you saw Clemson holding a pizza party in the stadium, while Oklahoma and Michigan State players gathered to watch the announcement. Meanwhile, Kaylee Hartung was reporting from a near-empty football building on the Alabama campus. The phrase she used was "business as usual," but she could just as easily have called it "acting like you've been there before." The Tide have indeed been here before, and that's a significant edge that Alabama will need to leverage in order to get past some national title-caliber opponents in Michigan State and Oklahoma.
[h=2]Games of interest[/h]TCU (EVEN) vs. Oregon in the Alamo Bowl
Both offenses obviously have the best of it, but TCU has by far the better defense. This is also the biggest coaching mismatch on the board. If TCU gets Josh Doctson back completely healthy and Oregon can score fast enough, the Frogs could see enough possessions to reach the 70s. Oregon has no hope of stopping Trevone Boykin, and no hope of winning beyond knocking him out of the game.
BYU (+2.5) vs. Utah in the Vegas Bowl
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This was the final year of a three-year hiatus for the Holy War, which is scheduled to resume next September. Now an unexpected -- and from Utah's perspective, unwanted -- edition of the rivalry is about to be played. Utah fell all the way down the Pac-12 bowl order to the game in which it beat Colorado State last season, and like last year it must summon the motivation to play a former MWC rival that the Utes feel they left behind when the Pac-12 called them up to the big leagues.
It's true that BYU isn't just any old now-scorned former MWC mate, but the Utes have won four straight Holy Wars and are 6-3 in the Kyle Whittingham-vs.-Bronco Mendenhall era. The latter will now try to earn his 100th win as BYU coach in his last game, and the Cougars are naturally more excited about an extra crack at this rivalry than the Utes. Whittingham is one of the very best active bowl coaches, but this will require all of his powers.
Nebraska (+6.5) vs. UCLA in the Foster Farms Bowl
One of the best bowl preparation staffs faces one of the worst, and we're looking forward to the in-game coaching edge Mike Riley enjoys as well. It's early, but at this point we have no hesitation in thinking that Nebraska should win this one outright, especially since there don't seem to be any metrics other than the most important yet least predictive one -- win-loss record -- that say the Bruins should be a touchdown favorite here.
[h=2]Bowl selection winners and losers[/h]Winner: Iowa
Iowa earned the Moral Victory of the Year in the Big Ten final, judging from the outpouring of support for the committee's apparently not-close decision to award the Hawkeyes a Rose Bowl berth. And it should have been an easy call. The league's provision that a non-division winner may be chosen over the title game loser in the bowl pecking order exists to prevent 7-5 division winners from taking precedence over teams with 10 wins or so. It's certainly not there to punish the teams that have represented the conference the best -- like the 12-1 Hawkeyes -- just so the bowl can get a bigger name in its game.
Winner: Oklahoma State and the Big 12
Props to the Big 12 for using on-field results -- the conference standings -- over the committee's ranking in determining the bowl pecking order. Oklahoma State was the big beneficiary of both that policy and Baylor's loss to Texas, as now the second-place Cowboys will face Ole Miss in the Sugar Bowl instead of the Bears.
Winner: Teams that kept their APR scores up
The inclusion of 5-7 teams adds a new wrinkle to handicapping the bowl season. It will be interesting to see how many of these teams play with something to prove after having to hear how they don't really deserve a bid, or backed into it, and so forth. We guarantee that the coaches and players of all the 5-7 teams will be asked about this by media, family and campus acquaintances over and over during the lead-up to the game. They'll be asked how they feel about it, whether they think they deserve it, whether it will be a motivating factor and put a chip on their shoulder, and even whether it's frustrating to be asked about it repeatedly. At least one team will get mad about proving its worth because of this, and it's the handicapper's job to find it.
Loser: Utah
The Pac-12 tapped a five-loss USC that ended the season with a thud in the title game for a repeat performance in the Holiday Bowl, which is the league's third-most desirable bowl position. The Trojans did beat 9-3 Utah to claim the South Division, but having the Utes fall all the way to the Las Vegas Bowl, the Pac-12's sixth-best bowl, is no way to make an expansion member feel welcome, especially in its first year really contending for league honors.
Loser: the Mountain West
Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson bemoaned the NCAA's decision to allow 5-7 teams into the bowl mix on "equal footing" with six-win teams by allowing the 5-7 teams the full privileges of bowl-eligible teams in fulfilling conference tie-ins, rather than accommodating all six-win teams first and filling in the final open spots with the lucky APR ringers. The result of that decision was a complete disaster for the MWC, which is seeing two of its members -- Nevada and Colorado State -- square off in a bowl (the newly formed Arizona Bowl) that the league itself lobbied to create in order to gain another bowl tie-in.
Loser: Oregon
Oregon drew a prominent bowl and a marquee matchup but can be assured that its Alamo Bowl game against nearby TCU is nearly a true road game, as Ducks fans are being asked to holiday in Texas for a third straight year. We'd expect Oregon to eat nearly all of its ticket allotment.
[h=2]The Big 12's future[/h]One takeaway from playoff committee chair Jeff Long's remarks on the final standings was the reiteration of the message that conquering the additional challenge of a conference championship game at year's end is a very significant résumé booster. The Sooners made the cut this year, but if Notre Dame hadn't allowed Stanford to march into field goal range in the game's final seconds, the Big 12 champ could have easily found itself left out again this year.
Given that there is now Big Ten-led resistance to efforts by the Big 12 and ACC to deregulate the way conference championship games must be matched, the Big 12 could soon come to see expansion as a necessity. When that happens, we're not buying the talk of BYU, Cincinnati or Memphis. The move that makes the most sense is to add both USF and UCF. That would turn the tables on the SEC's heist of Missouri and Texas A&M by expanding the league's footprint into the Southeast and opening the fertile recruiting grounds in Florida with the promise that Florida kids coming to school in Texas or Oklahoma would now get to play back home in the Sunshine State more than once in their college careers.
[h=2]The coming trend in postseason coaching[/h]In recent times, most coaches moving up the job ladder -- both sitting head coaches and assistants landing their first top job -- have left their team's bowl game in the hands of an interim coach and started work at their new school immediately. Tom Herman and a few others updated a precedent last year for the playoff era. The unwritten rule now seemed to be: Don't skip out on the playoff or a conference title game; otherwise you're free to go.
This year, though, several coaches are not only coaching their team's bowl game, they're seizing the high moral ground about it in their introductory press conferences at their new gigs. Kirby Smart's Alabama team is in the playoff, but the new Georgia head coach made it clear that it wasn't just about the significance of the game. Like Smart, current Ohio State defensive coordinator and new Rutgers coach Chris Ash was adamant that staying on for the Buckeyes' bowl was "right" and spoke of "finishing" and "commitment." Even Seth Littrell, who isn't even coaching North Carolina's bowl, got a little pious when explaining why he wasn't announced as North Texas' new coach until after he fulfilled his duties as offensive coordinator in the ACC championship game.
By far the biggest statement was made by incoming Virginia coach Bronco Mendenhall, who made it very clear that he would not have accepted any job offer that required him to start work before BYU's season was complete. And unlike Ash and Smart, Mendenhall is not splitting duties. His trip to Charlottesville for the presser is his only concession to a full commitment to BYU until after the Vegas Bowl. Mendenhall was also much more direct in asserting what Smart and Ash suggested, that there was an outright moral obligation to finish the drill with the former team. He cited the example he's setting for his children.
With transitioning coaches who are staying put for the postseason basically calling out those who leave early as morally deficient, it's not hard to predict what's about to happen here: The coming few years will see a backlash against coaches who tip out on their team's bowl game to devote full attention to the new job, and there will be a lot fewer of them doing so. And administrations that try to put the heat on their candidates by suggesting that they need to land a coach willing to start recruiting hard right away? They'll find their bluffs called, since coaches can't afford to look like anything less than a guy who does things "the right way."
The athletic directors will be forced to put a positive spin on it by saying stuff like, "He really showed his character when he explained why he didn't feel right about starting full time until after the game. That's when I knew for sure he was the right fit for the culture of excellence we have here at Old State U."
A sharp uptick in the percentage of coaches who stay to coach their team's bowl game is coming, maybe with it a few more fan bases complaining about wrecked recruiting classes and possibly even some first-year regimes starting the engine a little slower than they otherwise would have. There will also be fewer coaches who gain the experience of being the interim boss for a bowl game, something that in the past has been not only a career booster but occasionally -- as in the case of West Virginia's Bill Stewart -- an unexpected springboard into the head-coaching job.
[h=2]Chalk bits[/h]Only Auburn (3-9) and Penn State (4-8) made it into the postseason with ATS records worse than 5-7.
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</article>Connecticut is the only bowl team of the four schools that had 10 games go under the total this year. (Vandy, Missouri and Boston College were the others.) Indiana is the only bowl team of the three (Syracuse, New Mexico State being the others) that had 10 games go over the total.
This year's example of why it's not enough to correctly predict a breakout season that almost no one else saw coming: the New Mexico Lobos. Had you been convinced in August that New Mexico would turn in a historic season that saw the team challenge for the league title and earn its first bowl berth since the Rocky Long era, you would have been well ahead of most, but you would still have had to find the right spots in what turned out to be a 6-6 season against the number.
Reconciling outstanding big-picture predictions with the timing of capitalizing on the correct matchups is one of handicapping's biggest challenges.
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