CFB betting look for Week 11: Reason to believe in Duke
Will Harris
ESPN INSIDER
11/6/17
Our college football look-ahead is the essential grab bag of numbers, trends, reads and concepts each Monday throughout the season. In Week 11, we give a lesson in handicapping turnovers, explain why we're buying a team on a five-game losing skid and examine the troubles of a Conference USA power in decline.
Our college football look-ahead is the essential grab bag of numbers, trends, reads and concepts each Monday throughout the season. In Week 11, we give a lesson in handicapping turnovers, explain why we're buying a team on a five-game losing skid and examine the troubles of a Conference USA power in decline.
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Portfolio checkup
Which teams we're buying and selling and why.
Buy
Duke Blue Devils
Duke opened the season 4-0 but has lost five straight since, dropping below .500 on the season. The Blue Devils offense has averaged 292 yards and scored just five touchdowns in that span. The Devils will be an underdog or near pick 'em in all three of their remaining games, but there's reason to believe this team could snag two wins and return to the bowl season in David Cutcliffe's 10th year at the helm.
Duke is coming off an open date this week and will face Army, Georgia Tech and Wake Forest to close the season. Few teams embrace defending the option like Duke. The Yellow Jackets are an annual ACC Coastal Division opponent, and service academies make regular appearances on the schedule. Duke was 3-3 ATS in defensive coordinator Jim Knowles' first six looks at Army, Navy and Georgia Tech but is 6-0 since then for an overall ATS record of 9-3 against that trio dating back to when Knowles replaced Mike MacIntyre in 2010. The Devils have held Army to 189 and 214 yards in the past two seasons, winning both contests.
We like this team's overall chemistry, coaching, defensive talent, track record after open dates and approach to defending the option. The five-game skid with scant offensive output has been ugly, but the schedule has been tough. We're not ready to give up on this outfit's bowl hopes, especially given the prices that Duke will see down the stretch.
Sell
Louisiana Tech Bulldogs
We like this 4-5 team's bowl chances a lot less than Duke's odds, despite a much weaker schedule. The Bulldogs have three big issues.
The first one was a problem right out of the gate this season, as the offense had to replace ace passer Ryan Higgins (4,600 yards, 41-8 ratio) and his top two targets, who combined for 31 touchdowns and more than 3,300 receiving yards. Despite the return of the key run-game components, Tech has been unable to forge a consistent offensive identity without the core of last year's prolific passing attack.
Then there is the team's poor health. Louisiana Tech has been one of the nation's most injury-prone teams this season, with a whopping 70 players missing game time so far. The linebackers, offensive line and receiving corps have been hit especially hard, and that has led to a lot of shuffling and players playing out of their normal positions or even pulling double duty. The lack of game-ready depth has hurt, as the Bulldogs have given up fourth-quarter leads in three of their losses.
Finally, there are deeper signs of program decline. Increased fan and media apathy, diminishing resources within the athletic department and multiyear slippage in recruiting rankings are all things pointing to a darker future than five winning seasons in the last six tries would suggest. Skip Holtz has fashioned three straight seasons with nine straight-up wins and a positive ATS ledger, winning two division titles in that span, but with six of the top seven teams in the standings led by first- or second-year coaches, the balance of power in Conference USA is in flux. Holtz's Tech program will not be one of the winners in the shakeup.
Slate standout
A game we'll be studying closely this week and what we're looking for.
Washington Huskies (-7) at Stanford Cardinal
Two weeks ago, Washington led UCLA 44-16 with two minutes remaining when Bruins defensive lineman Osa Odighizuwa returned a Washington fumble 51 yards for a touchdown. The significance? It marked the first time since the Huskies' reserves gave up a fourth-quarter field goal in a blowout win over Fresno State back in Week 3 that Washington had allowed its opponent to eclipse its team total.
Of course, totals are not posted yet, but we certainly won't be betting on Stanford to crack its mark Friday night. The Cardinal have had trouble finishing drives even in David Shaw's better seasons, and they haven't been getting anything close to league-average quarterback play recently from anyone in the signal-caller rotation. That leaves star running back Bryce Love, who's accounting for nearly 75 percent of the team's rushing production and has been a one-man wrecking crew as one of the nation's most exciting players. "Sweet Feet" has a rush of at least 52 yards in each of his games this season and has at least one 50-plus-yard touchdown run in his last seven games. He missed the Oregon State game, and the Cardinal really struggled without him, needing last-second heroics to get past the lowly Beavers 15-14. This is an inefficient offense that hasn't been particularly successful on a down-to-down basis, relying heavily on Love's explosiveness for production.
The Huskies have been playing even stouter defense this year, despite heavy personnel losses to both the NFL and the injury bug. Advanced and traditional statistics agree that Washington is the No. 1 anti-big-play defense in the nation by a healthy margin. No team gives up fewer big gains, especially long rushes -- and that's about all Stanford has right now. We'll be watching this one not so much to see if Stanford can win the game but whether Love and the Cardinal can avoid the first shutout of the Harbaugh-Shaw era.
Handicapper's toolbox
A different concept every Monday, and how to apply it on Saturday.
Teams that turn the ball over will often continue to turn the ball over.
We don't trust teams that turn the ball over at a high rate and don't like backing teams that we can't trust not to beat themselves, so we devote some attention to forecasting that difficult-to-predict aspect of the game. When teams are or are not turnover prone, we want to know why and whether that quality is confined to this year's squad or likely to persist into future editions. There's a lot to consider, even talking just turnovers, rather than takeaways or margin. Here are four places to look for clues.
Culture
Trying to understand where turnovers fit into a team's culture is difficult, since all coaches claim to emphasize it, but the truth outs itself over time. Coaches and players speak publicly dozens of times each year, and with enough exposure, it's often obvious what the real program values are. We've written a lot in recent years about Bo Pelini's turnover issues at Nebraska, and we'd list Jay Hopson of Southern Miss as another coach whose culture doesn't make ball security a priority. Penn State's James Franklin and Minnesota's P.J. Fleck are two coaches with teams that exhibit good ball security over time, thanks to the strong emphasis on that value within the program's ethnology.
Players
Watching offensive skill players to see how they generally handle the ball is important. Do only the upperclassmen carry it high and tight, or do the freshmen also secure the rock? Is the attentiveness to ball security consistent, or does it seem to vary from week to week? How do the players react when they come to the sideline after committing a turnover? How about the coaches?
It's important to be aware of individual players who might be turnover-prone. Ball-security issues in practice and scrimmages are often a harbinger of things to come. The quarterback is an obvious variable, which is why fumbles (not just lost ones) are a better indicator of program emphasis over time than interceptions. Many teams have turnover stats that fluctuate wildly from one quarterback era to another, but interception-prone quarterbacks often require at least an offseason to grow out of it, if they ever do. It helps to understand whether a quarterback's interceptions come mostly from inaccuracy or poor judgment.
Michigan State running back LJ Scott has had well-publicized turnover issues. Air Force's turnovers have cost Falcons backers more than one cover this year, a problem we diagnose as not endemic to the program at large but related to specific offensive players with less than stellar ball-security habits, including but not limited to quarterback Arion Worthman. Sometimes a team's backs have good ball security but the receivers tend not to tuck it away when running in the open field. When that's true for one position group across seasons but not throughout the program, it often reflects on the position coach. A team that's interception-prone but not fumble-prone over a large sample might signal an issue in quarterback tutelage.
Luck
Chance plays a role. The frequency with which a team puts the ball on the ground is more important than the frequency with which it loses those fumbles. Knowing what percentage of its own fumbles a team recovers can tell you whether it has been dealt more or less than its fair share of fortune. In the case of fumbles, that share is half of recoveries overall, although the probabilities are different for fumbles at the line of scrimmage and downfield fumbles, as well as fumbles against strong and weak competition. The ratio of interceptions to passes broken up is also a measurable constant from which conclusions of good or bad fortune on both sides of the ball can be drawn.
Scheme
Teams that run a lot have more carries in traffic and tend to fumble more. That goes double for option teams that pitch the ball a lot. Teams that throw more often naturally toss more picks. That's why rate stats are typically so much more useful than counting stats. Interceptions per pass attempt or fumbles per game are more useful metrics than the raw totals. Knowing what percentage of a team's possessions end in a turnover is helpful, as is contextualizing turnovers given the takeaway ability of the opposing defenses faced.
Hundreds of coaches at all levels believe that turnover margin is the single statistic that correlates most closely with wins and losses. A team's ball-security performance is super tough to predict game to game, but being attuned to all the related factors and causes can give you a sense of ball-security habits and the consequent probabilities.
Will Harris
ESPN INSIDER
11/6/17
Our college football look-ahead is the essential grab bag of numbers, trends, reads and concepts each Monday throughout the season. In Week 11, we give a lesson in handicapping turnovers, explain why we're buying a team on a five-game losing skid and examine the troubles of a Conference USA power in decline.
Our college football look-ahead is the essential grab bag of numbers, trends, reads and concepts each Monday throughout the season. In Week 11, we give a lesson in handicapping turnovers, explain why we're buying a team on a five-game losing skid and examine the troubles of a Conference USA power in decline.
ADVERTISEMENT
Portfolio checkup
Which teams we're buying and selling and why.
Buy
Duke Blue Devils
Duke opened the season 4-0 but has lost five straight since, dropping below .500 on the season. The Blue Devils offense has averaged 292 yards and scored just five touchdowns in that span. The Devils will be an underdog or near pick 'em in all three of their remaining games, but there's reason to believe this team could snag two wins and return to the bowl season in David Cutcliffe's 10th year at the helm.
Duke is coming off an open date this week and will face Army, Georgia Tech and Wake Forest to close the season. Few teams embrace defending the option like Duke. The Yellow Jackets are an annual ACC Coastal Division opponent, and service academies make regular appearances on the schedule. Duke was 3-3 ATS in defensive coordinator Jim Knowles' first six looks at Army, Navy and Georgia Tech but is 6-0 since then for an overall ATS record of 9-3 against that trio dating back to when Knowles replaced Mike MacIntyre in 2010. The Devils have held Army to 189 and 214 yards in the past two seasons, winning both contests.
We like this team's overall chemistry, coaching, defensive talent, track record after open dates and approach to defending the option. The five-game skid with scant offensive output has been ugly, but the schedule has been tough. We're not ready to give up on this outfit's bowl hopes, especially given the prices that Duke will see down the stretch.
Sell
Louisiana Tech Bulldogs
We like this 4-5 team's bowl chances a lot less than Duke's odds, despite a much weaker schedule. The Bulldogs have three big issues.
The first one was a problem right out of the gate this season, as the offense had to replace ace passer Ryan Higgins (4,600 yards, 41-8 ratio) and his top two targets, who combined for 31 touchdowns and more than 3,300 receiving yards. Despite the return of the key run-game components, Tech has been unable to forge a consistent offensive identity without the core of last year's prolific passing attack.
Then there is the team's poor health. Louisiana Tech has been one of the nation's most injury-prone teams this season, with a whopping 70 players missing game time so far. The linebackers, offensive line and receiving corps have been hit especially hard, and that has led to a lot of shuffling and players playing out of their normal positions or even pulling double duty. The lack of game-ready depth has hurt, as the Bulldogs have given up fourth-quarter leads in three of their losses.
Finally, there are deeper signs of program decline. Increased fan and media apathy, diminishing resources within the athletic department and multiyear slippage in recruiting rankings are all things pointing to a darker future than five winning seasons in the last six tries would suggest. Skip Holtz has fashioned three straight seasons with nine straight-up wins and a positive ATS ledger, winning two division titles in that span, but with six of the top seven teams in the standings led by first- or second-year coaches, the balance of power in Conference USA is in flux. Holtz's Tech program will not be one of the winners in the shakeup.
Slate standout
A game we'll be studying closely this week and what we're looking for.
Washington Huskies (-7) at Stanford Cardinal
Two weeks ago, Washington led UCLA 44-16 with two minutes remaining when Bruins defensive lineman Osa Odighizuwa returned a Washington fumble 51 yards for a touchdown. The significance? It marked the first time since the Huskies' reserves gave up a fourth-quarter field goal in a blowout win over Fresno State back in Week 3 that Washington had allowed its opponent to eclipse its team total.
Of course, totals are not posted yet, but we certainly won't be betting on Stanford to crack its mark Friday night. The Cardinal have had trouble finishing drives even in David Shaw's better seasons, and they haven't been getting anything close to league-average quarterback play recently from anyone in the signal-caller rotation. That leaves star running back Bryce Love, who's accounting for nearly 75 percent of the team's rushing production and has been a one-man wrecking crew as one of the nation's most exciting players. "Sweet Feet" has a rush of at least 52 yards in each of his games this season and has at least one 50-plus-yard touchdown run in his last seven games. He missed the Oregon State game, and the Cardinal really struggled without him, needing last-second heroics to get past the lowly Beavers 15-14. This is an inefficient offense that hasn't been particularly successful on a down-to-down basis, relying heavily on Love's explosiveness for production.
The Huskies have been playing even stouter defense this year, despite heavy personnel losses to both the NFL and the injury bug. Advanced and traditional statistics agree that Washington is the No. 1 anti-big-play defense in the nation by a healthy margin. No team gives up fewer big gains, especially long rushes -- and that's about all Stanford has right now. We'll be watching this one not so much to see if Stanford can win the game but whether Love and the Cardinal can avoid the first shutout of the Harbaugh-Shaw era.
Handicapper's toolbox
A different concept every Monday, and how to apply it on Saturday.
Teams that turn the ball over will often continue to turn the ball over.
We don't trust teams that turn the ball over at a high rate and don't like backing teams that we can't trust not to beat themselves, so we devote some attention to forecasting that difficult-to-predict aspect of the game. When teams are or are not turnover prone, we want to know why and whether that quality is confined to this year's squad or likely to persist into future editions. There's a lot to consider, even talking just turnovers, rather than takeaways or margin. Here are four places to look for clues.
Culture
Trying to understand where turnovers fit into a team's culture is difficult, since all coaches claim to emphasize it, but the truth outs itself over time. Coaches and players speak publicly dozens of times each year, and with enough exposure, it's often obvious what the real program values are. We've written a lot in recent years about Bo Pelini's turnover issues at Nebraska, and we'd list Jay Hopson of Southern Miss as another coach whose culture doesn't make ball security a priority. Penn State's James Franklin and Minnesota's P.J. Fleck are two coaches with teams that exhibit good ball security over time, thanks to the strong emphasis on that value within the program's ethnology.
Players
Watching offensive skill players to see how they generally handle the ball is important. Do only the upperclassmen carry it high and tight, or do the freshmen also secure the rock? Is the attentiveness to ball security consistent, or does it seem to vary from week to week? How do the players react when they come to the sideline after committing a turnover? How about the coaches?
It's important to be aware of individual players who might be turnover-prone. Ball-security issues in practice and scrimmages are often a harbinger of things to come. The quarterback is an obvious variable, which is why fumbles (not just lost ones) are a better indicator of program emphasis over time than interceptions. Many teams have turnover stats that fluctuate wildly from one quarterback era to another, but interception-prone quarterbacks often require at least an offseason to grow out of it, if they ever do. It helps to understand whether a quarterback's interceptions come mostly from inaccuracy or poor judgment.
Michigan State running back LJ Scott has had well-publicized turnover issues. Air Force's turnovers have cost Falcons backers more than one cover this year, a problem we diagnose as not endemic to the program at large but related to specific offensive players with less than stellar ball-security habits, including but not limited to quarterback Arion Worthman. Sometimes a team's backs have good ball security but the receivers tend not to tuck it away when running in the open field. When that's true for one position group across seasons but not throughout the program, it often reflects on the position coach. A team that's interception-prone but not fumble-prone over a large sample might signal an issue in quarterback tutelage.
Luck
Chance plays a role. The frequency with which a team puts the ball on the ground is more important than the frequency with which it loses those fumbles. Knowing what percentage of its own fumbles a team recovers can tell you whether it has been dealt more or less than its fair share of fortune. In the case of fumbles, that share is half of recoveries overall, although the probabilities are different for fumbles at the line of scrimmage and downfield fumbles, as well as fumbles against strong and weak competition. The ratio of interceptions to passes broken up is also a measurable constant from which conclusions of good or bad fortune on both sides of the ball can be drawn.
Scheme
Teams that run a lot have more carries in traffic and tend to fumble more. That goes double for option teams that pitch the ball a lot. Teams that throw more often naturally toss more picks. That's why rate stats are typically so much more useful than counting stats. Interceptions per pass attempt or fumbles per game are more useful metrics than the raw totals. Knowing what percentage of a team's possessions end in a turnover is helpful, as is contextualizing turnovers given the takeaway ability of the opposing defenses faced.
Hundreds of coaches at all levels believe that turnover margin is the single statistic that correlates most closely with wins and losses. A team's ball-security performance is super tough to predict game to game, but being attuned to all the related factors and causes can give you a sense of ball-security habits and the consequent probabilities.
