NCAA Football 2023 Season Megathread
Figured I would get this thing started since a mod still hasn’t changed the title of the 2022 thread. Let’s just start o
Anyone reputable up for a juice free bet, $1,000 to win a $1,000. I want Michigan -4.5. Any takers on Washington +4.5?
I didn't know Hawaii are nazis when it comes to sports betting.
Anyone reputable up for a juice free bet, $1,000 to win a $1,000. I want Michigan -4.5. Any takers on Washington +4.5?
I didn't know Hawaii are nazis when it comes to sports betting.
I'll do $100 if you want. I'm an old and only have PayPal. Had plenty of $$$ transactions on 2P2. But if you want to cover yourself, I'll ship you the $100 up front and if I win and you don't pay, I can start an ILP is a scammer and a thief thread that will get millions of posts and it'll be worth it. 😆
I'll do $100 if you want. I'm an old and only have PayPal. Had plenty of $$$ transactions on 2P2. But if you want to cover yourself, I'll ship you the $100 up front and if I win and you don't pay, I can start an ILP is a scammer and a thief thread that will get millions of posts and it'll be worth it. 😆
Sounds good. $100 booked. I have paypal too. You don't have to ship up front. Don't worry bout me. I'm more secure than Goldman Sachs.
So there's 900 left to play with if anyone is interested.
👍
Saves me the 10% vig I'd have to pay to my bookie. 
Thread gives me an idea for a betting app with like a 3% vig (like paypal) but a bid/ask market system. So like ILP’s bet above, he would offer UM -4.5, someone could take the action up to $1000, and the site takes a 3% escrow fee. Much cheaper than the standard 10%, but it is dependent on two people wanting the opposite sides of a wager.
Thread gives me an idea for a betting app with like a 3% vig (like paypal) but a bid/ask market system. So like ILP’s bet above, he would offer UM -4.5, someone could take the action up to $1000, and the site takes a 3% escrow fee. Much cheaper than the standard 10%, but it is dependent on two people wanting the opposite sides of a wager.
Dunno if it's still a thing, but sounds kinda like what Matchbook was years ago. Totally not UIGEA-friendly, but things were different then.
Thread gives me an idea for a betting app with like a 3% vig (like paypal) but a bid/ask market system. So like ILP’s bet above, he would offer UM -4.5, someone could take the action up to $1000, and the site takes a 3% escrow fee. Much cheaper than the standard 10%, but it is dependent on two people wanting the opposite sides of a wager.
I think this exists in various ways. The down side in practice is that people just wait to pick off stale lines.
28 is way too few teams for the top division of CFB.
Should be 64 probably. Even some of the programs that aren't nationally competitive just add so much to the sport. Having FBS football without Troy or Texas State is fine. Having FBS Football without the Egg Bowl would suck.
I'd be a fan of 64, but could probably live with 40-48. 28 is definitely too few. You're going to include Iowa, Wisconsin and Nebraska but not Minnesota? Pretty easy to come up with a number of others that should be in there.
From Stewart Mandel's 8/15/23 article on why we probably won't see the number get that high when cfb condenses into a super league
Four years ago, I wrote about potential future realignment scenarios. The most radical was a College Football Premier League, a football-only confederation of the top 28 national brands.
Three massive realignment waves later, that scenario no longer feels like a far-off fantasy. Frankly, it feels inevitable. Actual leaders of the sport are prophesying much the same thing.
“I think the future has to contemplate football being taken out of the mix,” Nebraska AD Trev Alberts told the Lincoln Journal Star last week. “We’re moving to a 35 to 40 top brands being part of something. If you just look at football in isolation, eventually conferences will matter less in a sense.”
Alberts is right, though he’s being generous with 35 to 40. If the past three years have taught us anything, it’s that TV networks’ thirst for more “big events” is leading to two super-conferences hoarding nearly all the biggest national brands. Everyone else is collateral damage.
paywalled link to article: https://theathletic.com/4776402/2023/08/...
Bro, not only is this game a lock, Michigan is a lock to win it all next year too assuming JJ comes back.
Remember when Greear set the over/under of national championships in Harbaugh's first 10 years at Michigan to 1.5 and he picked the over. We have to accept the fact that he right. He was smarter than all of us.
From Stewart Mandel's 8/15/23 article on why we probably won't see the number get that high when cfb condenses into a super league
Obviously the networks will want as many games as possible, but I wonder if the tradeoff is that we just go to like a 7 game regular season where every single game is a big matchup. Instead of a team playing 12 games, but 8 are mostly duds, almost every game will be a key matchup. This would make for a solid compromise where the players will not want to get too banged and risk injury, but also the networks will have plenty of big money events.
It could then lead into a 12-team playoff where the 4 division winners get byes.
Obviously the networks will want as many games as possible, but I wonder if the tradeoff is that we just go to like a 7 game regular season where every single game is a big matchup. Instead of a team playing 12 games, but 8 are mostly duds, almost every game will be a key matchup. This would make for a solid compromise where the players will not want to get too banged and risk injury, but also the networks will have plenty of big money events.
It could then lead into a 12-team playoff where the
i wouldn't think that you'd see cfb teams playing less regular season games. we are conditioned to have football for "x" amount of weeks now in late summer/fall/early winter
the issue is that society's interests and the media's landscapes continue to get more and more fragmented over time. the networks are going to need way more marquee match-ups to continue to make the profits necessary to bid and pay for cfb games
take Michigan's 13 game regular season ... they played two, ok three (i'll give you the Iowa game too), games that moved the media landscape interest needle. now look at what their regular season schedule could possibly look like (playing the six teams in their division and two teams each from the other three divisions):
Michigan's regular season marquee match-ups will at least double in a super league
the major networks need games that will reliably deliver ratings and ad revenue. there's no way major media players want to be contractually obligated to continue to show Vanderbilt, Purdue, etc. games. their brands and/or markets simply aren't big enough to deliver the desired ratings. again, as the media landscape / American entertainment landscape continues to fracture, the major media players aren't going to be in a position to carry inventory that doesn't produce ratings and revenue at a certain level. the cfb super league solves these issues for the major media players that want a cfb footprint
the question is how does the super league take shape? who are the players that are going to drive this change in cfb? i'm not sure and it isn't an easy question to answer. it won't be a PGA Tour / PIF scenario where secrecy was maintained and change appeared out of nowhere (bc there are more than two moving parts in this case)
that said, a major media player like Amazon or Google could be talking to the SEC's Slive and an assortment of influential / connected ADs as i type this
take Michigan's 13 game regular season ... they played two, ok three (i'll give you the Iowa game too), games that moved the media landscape interest needle. now look at what their regular season schedule could possibly look like (playing the six teams in their division and two teams each from the other three divisions):
Michigan's regular season marquee match-ups will at least double in a super league
the major networks need games that will reliably deliver ratings and ad revenue. there's no wa
B1G expansion is an intermediate step in that direction, with Michigan playing needle-moving games against MSU, OSU, Washington, USC, Oregon plus Texas in the non-conference in 2024.
Even playing scrubs, though, Michigan brings the eyeballs.
vs UNLV - 5th most viewed game in week 2
vs Bowling Green, 11th most viewed in week 3
vs Rutgers, 11th most viewed in week 4 (limited by being on BTN)
vs Nebraska, 4th most viewed in week 5
vs Minnesota, 6th most viewed in week 6
vs Indiana, 4th most viewed in week 7
vs LOLSparty, 4th most viewed in week 8
Bye, week 9
vs Purdue, 9th most viewed in week 10
vs Penn State, 1st in views by a lot in week 11
vs Maryland, 2nd most viewed in week 12
vs Ohio State, 1st in views, ldo, in week 13
vs Iowa, 2nd in views in championship week
No data for week 1 vs ECU since that was only on the Cock.
I'm not a data scientist and I'm far too lazy to try and quantify anything, but the things that jump out at me are that the biggest factors in ratings are:
(1) Is the game on network TV
(2) Is team X playing
(3) Is it a good game
(4) Time slot
It may even be that you can flip 3 and 4. 2 vs 3 might be arguable, but you'll consistently see a half dozen teams at the top no matter who they are playing so I think the order is right.
It's a reasonable question to ask whether a super league would bring in additional eyeballs or if it would simply redistribute them. If you were going to have 3 million people watch Michigan-Minnesota and 3 million watch Florida State - Virginia Tech, what would be the distribution of eyeballs if you had Michigan-Florida State (super) and Minnesota-Virginia Tech (non-super) instead? 5 million/1 million? Or would more people watch overall? Or fewer, since you may have less interest in a "meaningless" MN-VT game?
Also, will the concentration of viewers into watching super league games provide enough of a boost to ad rates to offset what's lost for non-super league games?
I'm sure there are people out there being paid handsomely to model all this.
As a fan, the feelingsball part of me thinks that a super league ultimately won't move the needle that much in terms of the number of meaningful games. 4-4 Michigan playing 4-4 USC in Week 10 for no stakes will not be anything special. Or even if, NFL style, playoff eligibility might be on the line (woo, get in with a just over .500 record!), meh.
Anyway, just rambling here.
good post Booker, but both of us failed to mention an important aspect of what's driving momentum towards a cfb super league in the first place
from the paywalled article linked yday:
And as conferences become more and more geographically silly, many folks are asking: Why not unbundle football from all the other sports? If Oregon football wants to take three weekend trips a year to the East Coast and Midwest, knock yourself out. But Oregon’s non-revenue sports, most of which play far more games, should not be traveling through multiple time zones throughout their conference season.
Super League wouldn't really work without significant talent redistribution that may not occur without intervention. Some of the teams in the Federation chart above would be lucky to win more than a game or two. Teams who have traditionally been "good" will be posting 6-6 type records every year instead of going 10-2 with six cupcake wins over JUCO teams followed by a bowl game that solidifies a nice season with hope that next year will be slightly better.
If a half dozen teams maintain their stranglehold and bash everyone else's brains in, I can't imagine too many people will be fans of that outside of the childlike cultists who support those teams. In other words, could easily go from a system with a bunch of teams with a steady draw that rely on fake wins against a bottom feeder system to one where they quickly realize they're now on the dinner menu and decide to peace out of the thing. So maybe it collapses or maybe they're forced to install a draft and/or salary cap of some sort. Unfortunately there are no other sports leagues where all of this was already figured out over the past hundred years.
Got numbers for a squares pool for the national championship game. Mine are:
Michigan 1, Washington 1
Michigan 1, Washington 7
Michigan 9, Washington 1
Michigan 9, Washington 7
Good luck me....
Am I crazy for thinking Nebraska could be a fun dark horse next year?
They went 5-7 despite outgaining opponents 5.1 ypp to 4.6
Five of their losses were by 1 score (as is the nebraska way), four by 3 and 1 by 7
Dylan Raiola is coming in at QB, and Haarburg is at worst a good change of pace QB and at best can be a functional starter if Raiola needs time
4* Oregon RB Dante Dowdell is coming in at RB
former Wyoming stud Isaiah Neyor (via Texas) is coming in at WR
Basically nobody on the whole team except the two QB transferred out, which seems like a good sign nowadays
Their sched is manageable:
v UTEP
v Colorado
v UNI
v Illinois
@ Purdue
v Rutgers
@ Indiana
@ Ohio State
v UCLA
@ USC
v Wisconsin
@ Iowa
