Good morning folks and happy Thursday. Sorry I’m a little late—I was still watching the overtimes in that Penn State-Illinois game (🥁). The games are flying by and we’re getting into the best matchups of the season. Last weekend, I wasn’t able to watch as much college football as I normally like to, but I did, unfortunately, see all nine overtimes in Penn State’s brutal loss to Illinois, Virginia Tech go down to Syracuse, and Notre Dame handle USC with some ease. And Navy, of all teams, almost pulled off the upset against #2 Cincinnati, but didn’t quite get there.
Coming from a completely biased perspective, I have to say that the new overtime rule that forces teams to just do back-and-forth two-point conversions after just two overtimes is bad. It feels gimmicky, and ironically, a rule that seemingly was put into place to speed along the overtimes actually took quite a long time. And, it completely took the kicking element out of it from the 3rd OT on.
Long ago, I was at the 2006 Orange Bowl between Florida State and Penn State which went to triple-overtime, and the thrill in having the kickers go back and forth missing field goals in the 1st OT, and for Freshmen Kevin Kelly to have redemption in the 3rd OT and win the game with a walk-off field goal, cannot be replicated with the new format that really becomes more of a coin-flip.
An Unlikely Back-and-Forth
I did see an interesting stat about the 9OT Illinois win, though. This season, the two-point conversion success rate has been around 43% (surprisingly low in my opinion). However, even in 2020, it was 42.5%, so I guess it checks out. Penn State and Illinois missed 10 consecutive two-point conversion attempts in those overtimes. It was truly remarkable. Assuming each attempt was independent and that Penn State and Illinois are both average two-point conversion teams (which, after that, probably isn’t the case), the odds of them going 0-for-10 were 0.57^10, which is 0.0036, or about 4 in 1,000. And the chance that they both make one after missing ten straight was about 7 in 10,000! So we really did witness something rare and unique on Saturday, even though at times it felt more like watching grass grow than witnessing history.
Anyway, let’s get into this week’s games.
Week 9
Elo has been positive for several weeks now, with a 9.5% rate of return. I’ll admit, even I was surprised when I found that out. Here are the positive EV bets for this week.
And here are the win probabilities for each conference this week. As always, you can check out the rest on Staturdays.com. This week, we have three mismatches between the Vegas and Elo favorites in the Big Ten alone, which is unheard of… and honestly, I like them all.
ACC
Big Ten
Big-12
Pac-12
SEC
That’s all for this week. Good luck this weekend and talk soon.
— Kyle