Early Analysis of the 2015 College Football Games of the Year
On Friday afternoon, the Golden Nugget race and sports book released their annual "College Football Games of the Year" for 2015 in an event which generates a pilgrimage to the Vegas book the weekend they get released each year. Earlier, Todd Fuhrman gave a good background on how the Nugget came up with these lines along with some other insight here.
Below are team summaries and lines organized by team. Unlike most of these lists that will pop up on the news cycles, organizing by team (instead of date) is a far easier way to view the results. The summary will show you which teams are favored the most and which the least. Obviously, being "Games of the Year," not all games are lined for each team. As such, this isn't the truest portrait of the 2014 games, but it certainly is the most accurate as of late June.
Your defending National Champions, the Ohio State Buckeyes, sit at the top of this list, being favored by an average of over 16 points in their 4 lined games. But not far behind is TCU as the only other program favored by an average of over 2 TDs in multiple lined games. Unsurprisingly, along with Alabama, these teams are favorites to win it all this year.
Alabama finds themselves favored in 8 of their 9 lined games, with their game in October vs Georgia being a pick-em. On average, they were favored by just over 1 TD in these 9 games. Fellow SEC rivals LSU and Georgia were also well regarded by the linemakers.
On the other end of the spectrum, the UNLV Rebels were lined in 6 games, but large underdogs in all of them. Their "best" line was +12 but they were as high as +33 vs Michigan in Ann Arbor, the largest underdog lined in this release. On average, UNLV was a +22 point underdog.
SEC teams who struggled in this release include South Carolina, who were dogs in 5 of their 6 lined games, by an average of almost 1 full TD, and Mississippi State, who were lined in 7 games and made underdogs in all of them.
In an interesting nugget on the team with the largest line swing, the Michigan Wolverines, now coached by Jim Harbaugh, are underdogs of 16 points at home to Ohio State, but are made favorites of 33 points at home vs UNLV. That 49 point swing is the largest of any of the 2015 teams.
Some other interesting trends, tidbits and nuggets from a review of the lines:
Up next, we will discuss the line swings between the 2015 meetings and the last time teams met, to see which teams are getting the most respect as compared to their prior meeting.
But for now, here's how your team looks from a Vegas linemaker's perspective in late June:
