It's Week 1... Here's who Elo likes
It's the start of a weird season. Let's see if we can pick some winners.
Hello everyone and welcome to the first edition of the Staturdays Newsletter. I’m really glad you’ve decided to join us and am excited to share some college football insight with you in a more personal way.
The goal of this newsletter will be to focus more on the weekly matchups and give insight into what our data, specifically our new Elo Ratings, have to say about the win probabilities for each team. We’ll be sending a weekly email (as long as there are games) with this info, as well as some of our favorite betting picks. We’ll be using DraftKings odds for the most part, but we’ll let you know if that’s ever not the case.
You’re getting yourself in on the ground floor, so congrats! This info will be in your hands before anybody else, and we may even expand this to go even deeper once we get the hang of it, delivering exclusive college football content to your inbox whenever we can.
So with all that being said, let’s get started!
Week 1 Matchups
Week 1 is a lot less exciting this year, with just a handful of matchups. None of them are Power-5 matchups, and most of them are fairly one-sided in terms of win probability. That being said, we’re still just as excited, if not more excited than usual, to have football on TV this weekend.
A quick primer on our lingo
We’re going to be talking a lot about win probability. When we say that Elo gives a team a 60% win probability, this means that based on the Elo Ratings of the two teams, we expect the higher rated team to win 6 out of 10 matchups head-to-head. Hardly a sure bet in that case.
When we talk about implied probability, we’re talking about the DraftKings odds. This is the win probability that is implied by the odds set by DraftKings or whoever else. To get these odds, we take the moneyline odds (odds that a team will win their game by any margin), and convert them into a percentage. For example, if DraftKings gives BYU +200 odds to win, they’re saying “we’re willing to pay you $300 if your $100 bet hits. To get the implied win probability, we take that $100 bet and divide it by the potential winnings of $300 to get 33% implied win probability. DraftKings thinks that BYU has a 1-in-3 shot at winning the game, so they’re willing to pay out 3 times your bet if you’re right.
Who Elo Likes
Below are the matchups for Week 1 and Elo win probabilities.
The most clear-cut matchup is Marshall vs. Eastern Kentucky. However, we wouldn’t advise you to blindly put your money on the highest win probabilities. What we’re looking for is value, namely, expected value. We want games where Elo has the win probability at 75%, and DraftKings is paying as if it is 65%. That means, if we make that same bet over and over in the long run, we’re going to be making money.
But DraftKings isn’t even offering bets on that game right now. The first game offered is Memphis-Arkansas State. Memphis is -1115 in that game, for an implied probability of 92%. Elo has them at a lower win probability, so we won’t want to take that bet. You might be interested in taking the other team then. However, DK has Arkansas St. at +650, or 13.3% implied probability, which is also too high compared to Elo. Why is that? That’s the cut the house takes, to make sure they profit no matter what team wins. They play it safe in their odds to cover any upsets like that.
However, DK did offer one good option. Navy at +102 has an implied probability of 49.5% ($100 bet / $202 winnings = 49.5%), compared to our ratings which have them at a 68.9% win probability. This is a big mismatch. Now, it’s still early in the season, and Elo has no idea what’s gone on during the offseason for either Navy or BYU. Also, in early-season games, Elo tends to vary in accuracy unless it’s clear-cut for one side or the other.
With all that being said, it’s such a big discrepancy between Elo and DK that I’m gonna take Elo this weekend to put my money where my mouth is. Check back next week to either see me:
a) Do the walk of shame
b) Brag my a** off
For you all, I’d say: Week 1 is tough. We don’t know a ton about the teams, or how all the external factors will affect them differently yet. So I’d say be cautious.
That’s all for this week. Enjoy the Week 1 games, and please share this with your friends in person and on social media if you enjoyed it, and feel free to forward this email along. Let me know what you liked and want more of, and what confused you or you want less of.
–Kyle