One Week Wonders Usually Disappear by Week 2. The Betting Edge? Fading the Flukes Before the Books Adjust
The Great Overreaction Filter
Week 2 of NCAA Football exposes some pretenders. And some unexpected contenders.
Big wins and surprising underdogs. Ugly losses and flat favorites.
Betting-wise, it’s about false flags and overreactions.
What gets put into the narrative blender is the overreaction of the talking heads and social media warriors.
The result is that some teams head into Week 2 with a false halo around them, or on the other side, an overly harsh judgment.
What Week 2’s games often do is expose these false flags. Teams come back to earth, while others remember who they are and reassert themselves.
We’re here to play both sides and help Lucky Rebel’s players spot opportunities for Week 2 of college football.
Check out the latest odds at Lucky Rebel
Who to Fade – Teams that won big but are likely regression candidates.
If a favorite crushed in Week 1, they might actually be legit.
But look closer at their opponent that week. If it was a tiny school whose drum major is also their starting linebacker, they might not have proven much. For Week 2 bets, consider fading the big school that beat them up.
The markets will feed the hype that came with the bigs in the preseason, saying that after Week 1, they look real. Could be true. Some teams do go 12-0 every year.
But it could also be confirmation bias. And the sportsbooks might be capitalizing on the hype and padding the Week 2 spread. Look a little deeper at their roster and their Week 1 and upcoming Week 2 opponents.
The pretender might have had a big overhaul in the offseason, and their next opponents could be a conference rival who knows them well.
Those conference games – SEC, PAC-12, Big Ten, even the smaller ones – give underdog teams all kinds of motivation to bring the favorites down to earth.
Who to Back – Solid programs that lost but showed real upside.
The betting public loves a winner, and in the short college football season, they can also overreact to a Week 1 loser.
The short season basically requires TV and social media types to make snap judgments. Nuance? They have no time for it.
But if a ranked team, say one that is closer to the bottom half of the Top 25, lost a close game in Week 1, they could be the one to back in Week 2. Alarm bells don’t need to sound off after one week.
Look for returning starters. If there are a lot of them, it could mean they’re still coming together. A few more practice snaps can get them in sync. Plus, with returning vets, they probably have the character to rally after that Week 1 loss.
Or maybe it’s a home game for Week 2, and that first week’s stumble was on the road, in a hostile environment.
Finally, the coaching staff. A solid sideline will have spent the week adjusting and planning, fixing up holes that Week 1 exposed.
Check the lines to see if, after this analysis, the books are reacting to the public hype and judging them too harshly.
Market Overcorrection – How the public (and books) misadjust to Week 1.
We just threw some confirmation bias lingo your way.
Now how about recency bias?
It’s all about overreacting to a recent event, giving it more value than it really has. And recency bias happens in Week 2 NCAA Football betting as much as anywhere.
Books also feed into it, over-inflating points, sometimes by 3+, to a team that is coming off a dominant Week 1 performance.
Preseason polls also die hard. They don’t shift that much from Week 1, where the teams were unproven to being with, to Week 2.
So the casual betting fan who looks at the polls is still relying on data that is from a very small sample size of just one game. And while they do have more data analyzed, it can be the same with the sportsbooks.
That all makes for a perfect one week wonder scenario.
Week 2 will provide more data when the games are all done, and then we can maybe start discussing NCAAF trends, but that’s not helping you for the bets you need for Week 2.
Historical Trends – ATS records of teams coming off blowout wins/losses.
Teams coming off a blowout loss tend to come back ATS in Week 2.
Between 53% and 57% of them cover in Week 2. That could be because they don’t want to get embarrassed again and decide to dig deep. Or more likely, the public and the books have given their opponents too much of a spread.
The same contrarian thinking will benefit you after a blowout win.
The team that dominated in Week 1 often gets a bigger spread in Week 2 than they deserve, just based on all the buzz and the fact that the books shade the lines.
Don’t fade overconfidence either. That same team might have some undeserved swagger coming out of the tunnel in Week 2.
At Lucky Rebel, quiet confidence is what we’re into. Swagger and hype? Save it for Coach Prime maybe, but not us.
That means the lines are ripe for an underdog to beat the spread.
Week 2 Is When the Lines Are Ripe
Week 2 of college football can play right into the hands of the Lucky Rebel player.
Contrarian bets, by a disciplined bettor, on teams that you’ve studied well. That makes the money.
The market hasn’t corrected itself yet. It’s too early, so reactions and overreactions are all that the casual bettors have, and the books help feed into it.
When the rest of the market is looking the other way, that’s when you make your move.