It's that exciting time of the season once again in football – when college bowl games fill the TV screens of sports fans virtually every day. So, it's a great time to remind those who enjoy wagering a matchstick or two on the games that the percentages were once again on the side of the dogs a year ago.
Over the past four bowl seasons, underdogs have outdone the favorites 12-9 in 1998, 16-7 in '99, 17-7 in 2000, and 13-11 in '01 (when one contest was a pick 'em affair). That's a four-year total favoring the underdogs of 58-34 (63 percent). In the world of handicapping sports, that's a very nice winning percentage. But it can be refined by just a bit of research.
There are two main concepts to remember: First, most underdogs tend to have a bit of a psychological advantage in the bowls. With the layoff period between the end of the regular season and the bowls, it's often difficult for the favored team (almost always the team that had the better regular season) to get back in the groove and regain the same "edge" it had when regular-season play ended. Many of the favorites are coming off satisfying playoff wins, or victories over their rival, and so on. Meanwhile, many underdogs in bowls might have stumbled a bit down the stretch. Whatever.
When practice resumes for the bowls, teams installed as underdogs by the oddsmakers generally tend to be a little more focused. Many players are insulted that a good team like theirs isn't getting the respect they think it deserves. And there's a natural tendency among athletes these days to enjoy proving the so-called "experts" wrong, even though no insult was ever intended.
There are lots of distractions around bowl time. Many players have to take finals. Many travel home to visit family and friends. Bowl committees try to make sure players on both teams enjoy themselves in the host city with a series of outings and activities. And, since "boys will be boys," many players try to stretch the rules of their own coaches to party a bit on their own.
Generally speaking, the more focused team in a bowl matchup is going to have the edge, both straight up and against the spread. And, for the past four seasons, the more focused teams have been the underdogs in the majority of the games.
Second, underdogs tend to do a little better in the minor bowls than they do in the New Year's Day bowls. When the "big boys" play on New Year's Day and later, there is at least the national championship at stake, in addition to other high national rankings and prestige. The intensity of the preparation for both teams tends to be about equal.
For example, in the 2001 bowl season, underdogs in the pre-New Year's Day bowls were 10-6 vs. the spread. On Jan. 1 and later, dogs were only 3-5, with national champ Miami winning 37-14 as an 8.5-point favorite over Nebraska. With some understandable variation, the percentages overall for the pre-Jan. 1 games vs. the Jan. 1 and later games in recent years are reasonably similar.
But take a look at some of the classic pre-New Year's Day bowls.
In the Independence Bowl in Shreveport, Louisiana (a nice city, but not the garden spot of the earth), underdogs are 10-4 the last 14 years.
At the Sun Bowl in El Paso, dogs are 10-1-2 the last 13 years.
At the Peach Bowl in Atlanta, they're 8-2 the last 10 years.
You get the idea. In many of these minor-bowl matchups between losing conference contenders, many of the favored teams merely lack the knockout punch on offense or the stuff 'em defense to definitively finish off their opponents, even if they were well-focused and well-prepared. That's where the percentages have often been in the past few years in bowls.
When handicapping any game in any sporting event, a fundamental analysis of the matchup of the two teams always comes first, followed by a search for any line value provided by the oddsmaker, followed by the psychology, and, last, any interesting trends. Each game is an entity in and of itself, and is usually not connected in any way to bowl games of the past. But, the above bowl perspective might prove valuable again this season. Let's hope it is.
Chuck Sippl is the senior editor of The Gold Sheet, the first word in sports handicapping for 46 years. The amazingly compact Gold Sheet features analysis of every game, exclusive insider reports, handy pointspread logs, widely followed Power Ratings, and a Special Ticker of key injuries and team chemistry. If you have never seen The Gold Sheet and would like to peruse a complimentary sample copy, call The Gold Sheet at (800) 798-GOLD (4653) and mention you read about it in Card Player. You can look up The Gold Sheet on the web at www.goldsheet.com.