Early Tennessee line
- Thread starter CaptainFalcon
- Start date
This one might get out of hand. We might've been able to catch them unawares if they'd won against UGA. I'm afraid we'll have their full attention. Going to have to play better than we've played so far.
Might have a shootout. UGA put up some numbers and UAB scored 24 on them yesterday. I think they win by 14-17 - we are not great in the trenches.
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I think that’s pretty accurate. Shapen will have to be better than he was yesterday. He missed a lot of open receivers and missed on some for sure TD passes
Pretty sure I’ve never seen a line have a 6.5 point shift in a week, but OK.
Alcorn State went 20 points in 2 days. Of course someone probably got fired for that.
Vegas is guessing. They want a line that will generate equal betting on both sides. They don't care about reality, they care what gamblers are thinking.
Vegas ain’t guessing. Reason casinos and sports books that are ran right stay open
Yeah, but their guesses are a lot better than most. They are looking for a the “smart money median”, and have various algorithms and very calculated ways of finding it.
He holds the ball too long. It's a big concern headed into SEC play.
Yeah, but they arent trying to predict the outcome of the game. They're trying to predict the gambling public's perception of the likely outcome of the game. And as more information has become available to everyone, the gambling public's perception has gotten more accurate, thus the spreads appear more accurate.
Back in the pre internet days, there was basically one guy in Vegas who set the opening lines. He was very knowledgeable about football, but he was going with his gut. Whole number spreads were common back then, too.
Maybe. They were up 42-7 at half on UAB. Definitely took their starters out and took their foot off the gas.
Dawgs may lose by 20, but there is zero doubt that the Vols were on their mind Saturday. That is just the reality of playing what should be a lesser opponent the week before a huge game.
Only 4 teams that are 4-0 are also 4-0 against spread. We one of them.
That’s not how it works in sports betting
they don’t care what the final score is. They want equal money on both sides and they will move the line back and forth or as far as they need to to get that
The line has moved, as low as 7.5 on some sites, which illustrates what I was saying about sports books not trying to predict the score.
The early bettors are bullish on State and/or bearish on the Vols. The spread has moved 3 points to entice more betting on UT. This creates the awkward situation where, if the Vols win by 9, the sports book has to pay the early State bettors, and the later Vol bettors. They could lose money (doubtful, but that's why the line moved).
Now, if the Vols win by 11, one could argue the initial point spread was "right", in that it correctly predicted the score. But it was really the wrong spread, because it generated too much betting in one direction.
If I still gambled on sports, i would have taken the Vols at -10, and then bet more at -7. Good news though, because the reason I dont bet on sports anymore is I would probably lose both bets.
The early bettors are bullish on State and/or bearish on the Vols. The spread has moved 3 points to entice more betting on UT. This creates the awkward situation where, if the Vols win by 9, the sports book has to pay the early State bettors, and the later Vol bettors. They could lose money (doubtful, but that's why the line moved).
Now, if the Vols win by 11, one could argue the initial point spread was "right", in that it correctly predicted the score. But it was really the wrong spread, because it generated too much betting in one direction.
If I still gambled on sports, i would have taken the Vols at -10, and then bet more at -7. Good news though, because the reason I dont bet on sports anymore is I would probably lose both bets.
Vegas opening lines are guesses in a way, but they're educated. It's very obvious they use the more prominent computer models and whatever injury knowledge they have to set the opening lines. And they've done this for decades.
As of Sunday Massey Ratings was predicting a 10 point game. And the opening line was...10 points.
As of Sunday Massey Ratings was predicting a 10 point game. And the opening line was...10 points.
This is all correct. Each sportsbook utilizes multiple handicappers that they’ll pay out a nominal fee for their assessment. Each handicapper will have his own system of breaking down the data to determine the point spread of each game. One sports book might take the average of all their handicappers info. Another might throw out the highest and lowest, and take the average of whats left. Another may take the median. In any case, the books are going to have slight variation with each other, but not much.
A handicapper in Vegas is really no different than a financial analyst for stocks at Goldman Sachs, they are just looking at different data. Both are providing a valuation based on likelihood of future outcomes, given past data that is publicly available.
The money line is another story, they are set directly by the sports books based on the aggregate data provided by all the handicappers. Generally speaking, the wider the range of outcomes, the bigger the ML payout.
Example - Team A plays Team B. 5 handicappers yield an average of Team A being favored over Team B by 7.5 points. Highest is 9 points, lowest is 6 points. Then you have Team C vs. Team D. Average of 5 handicappers also have Team C favored by 7.5, but in this case the highest is 11.5 and the lowest is 3.5. Both spreads are the same, but Team C vs. Team D is going to have a bigger ML due to higher degree of uncertainty around the game from the experts.
Another point of order - while the general goal for sportsbooks is to even out the the bets on both sides of the spread on any given game, the ultimate goal is really just to even out the money on both sides when looking at the sum total of ALL games. If 80% of money is on Tennessee to cover over this weekend, but 80% of money is on another underdog somewhere else to cover, then its a wash, and they won’t necessarily move either line even though the bets are uneven. However, they still might move both lines if they see the betting traffic slow down, just to increase total number of bets. General point is that uneven betting doesn’t always yield a line movement.
This is actually not quite the case….very oversimplified. It’s absolutely never been “a single guy going off his gut”. Even way before the internet, there were multiple handicappers with spreadsheets, statistics, and advanced metrics that they had studied over years. The system for setting the lines was largely the same as it is now. The only difference now is that there is a lot more data available, and it travels faster and can be analyzed faster. Therefore, accuracy has certainly improved.
I read an article about Earl Weaver a few months ago, the HoF MLB manager who was known as perhaps the earliest adopter of analytics in baseball back in the 70’s. He credited his father, who was a bookie / handicapper, as a major credit to his success based on advanced metrics he used to set lines for games in the Great Depression and WWII era. Said he had hundreds of pages of data on every MLB season, mostly all handwritten. There were hundreds if not thousands of guys just like Earl Weaver’s dad, even in the 1930’s and 40’s. Its never been a situation where the handicappers / bookies are just flying by the seat of their pants. They’d all lose their asś pretty quickly if that’s all they did.
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