Week 1 Is Where the Overconfident Programs Get Exposed. Historic Upsets, Bad Beats, and Value Buried Under Public Bias.
The Myth of Opening Week Dominance
By the time NCAA Football Week 1 rolls around, casual bettors and fans will have heard the name of the top 4-5 teams for the past several months.
Same for the most highly rated players coming in or returning. They’ve been discussed and dissected on dozens of shows and in social media.
This all leads to a lot of them being way overvalued in the first weeks of the season.
That means bad beats. We hate to see it, but you can set your watch to it. Every season.
For the average betting fan who’s been chomping at the bit to get some bets down for college football since mid-January, Week 1 can be a trap.
Check out the latest odds at Lucky Rebel
Why Big Brands Fail Early
We can pick a number of teams over the past several years that have stumbled early in college football, at least when it comes to the dominance they were supposed to have.
Florida State and Oregon are the most recent examples. And you can bank on more like it when every college football betting season kicks off.
FSU, even after some key additions after the ’23 season, couldn’t make all the new faces come together. Three straight losses, including a loss ATS in Week 10 despite being big favorites, and they never sniffed the AP Top 25 after Week 1.
Oregon, with a crazy 7-TD spread for their Week 1 game last season, beat Idaho by just 10 points.
What happens year over year?
The transfer portal is a new and major factor. Roster turnover has always been a big part of college football – even back in the day, a top QB might have been running the show for 3-4 years max. Coaches had to plan around a new incoming class every year.
But these days, the portal has put roster changes into overdrive. More than 25% of players enter the portal every offseason now.
Sure, that gives teams a chance to plug holes in the lineup and reverse fortunes with some star players.
Miami, by adding Cam Ward through the portal = instant upgrade to a 10-win season.
But just as often, top teams lose key players and struggle to replace them, especially with the new guys still learning the system in Week 1.
Same for coaching changes.
The average coaching tenure is now just barely 3 years. In the past two seasons, 44% of FBS schools have changed their head coach.
No wonder that by Week 1, even the big name schools have trouble with cohesion in the lineup and on the sidelines.
Finally, vanilla game plans. To offset a lot of turnover, coaches have to dumb down their playbook. This can lead to lower scoring games and smaller actual spreads.
Historical Chaos Moments
We’ll keep picking on Florida State for a minute, then cover Deion Sanders’ big arrival into college football.
They were 10.5-point favorites heading into the 2024 season opener against Georgia Tech. The Yellow Jackets were unranked, sitting around the mid-50’s in most rankings.
But the Seminoles couldn’t get it together the entire game and lost the opener 24-21, a 13-point swing in the spread.
Even more of a shocker happened a year earlier, in Week 1 of the 2023 season. Coach Prime took his unranked Colorado Buffaloes into Texas and took down #17-ranked TCU by 3 points. Heading into the game, Colorado was a 20.5-point ‘dog.
TCU was the national runner-up just 8 months earlier. Shows you what hype and offseason can do to a team.
Casual bettors would have lost out big going with all the buzz around TCU.
Sharps, on the other hand, would have seen all the recruits that Sanders brought in, factored in the big spread, and taken to Buffaloes to at least cover.
What Smart Bettors Look For
Stale lines happen. And sharps love it.
We’ve seen lines set way back in June for Week 1 games that don’t happen until late August or early September.
The books do this to capture early interest. But they might be missing key injuries or team drama, or relying too much on last season’s final results. (Ahem, TCU).
The smart bettors keep track of this info and can spot a stale line, often one that’s too inflated for the favorite.
The flip side of that overvalued favorite is the undervalued underdog.
Like last year’s ASU squad. Arizona State was predicted to be at the bottom of the Big 12 going into last season. They ended up winning the conference and making the College Football Playoff.
The Sun Devils were an underdog for 9 games before becoming the favorites regularly. Talk about stale lines and talk about opportunity.
With so many schools to keep track of in NCAA football, it makes sense that the books are sometimes slow to adjust to an emerging, hot team. Lucky Rebel players can move faster and capitalize.
Embrace the Uncertainty – and Profit from It
Lucky Rebel’s lines are as tight as we can get. But even we have to deal with all the unknowns and uncertainty heading into Week 1 of NCAA betting.
Our advice? Embrace the uncertainty.
As the guy from Game of Thrones said: “Chaos is a ladder”. Climb it.
Market inefficiency is big in Week 1. Track the lines several weeks out and see if they haven’t moved. They could be stale.
The underdogs themselves? They have stories that haven’t been told yet. Meanwhile, the favorites have gotten all the hype. Look for spreads that are too large and make you pause for a second.
And dig into the offseason story of the underdogs. Often the portal can help smaller market teams land a bigger fish or two that can make a difference, especially in Week 1 before the opposing teams have had a chance to adjust.