Big 12 Games Preview – 11/19/11

KSU +9.5 is just a gift from the gambling gods.

I’m staying far away from Texas -9.5. An extra week to gameplan doesn’t add weapons to our roster. Smoke and mirrors is only effective if you something that is actually a threat. Snyder is going to scheme our lack of weapons to death if we don’t have our backs healthy. That’s a pretty solid back 7 they have. They may not score much but, like Missouri, they may not have to.
They’re also far more likely to get turnovers than was the Missouri D.

I love your matchup analyzer.
My last trip to Vegas turned out to only cost me about 10 total bucks, all included, after I went around Sunday collecting on the college bets I had put down on Saturday.

Even if we win, I can’t imagine it will be by 10.

Are you kidding me? We are favored by 9.5? I am seriously going to lay into that…

Kansas State is going to roll us. It is going to be ugly.

Even if we win, I can’t imagine it will be by 10.

Aw, hell, I can imagine it, but the image is a little on the fuzzy side, sorta like them old-timey teevee sets with the rabbit ears festooned with tinfoil.

I don’t understand it, either, but if this site and others with similar info are correct, then Vegas seems to be betting a lot of money that Texas wins by double digits. They don’t always win but they didn’t build all that shit in the desert by being idiots and losing a lot, either.

I can only assume that our home game numbers, KSU wearing down from their schedule, and the nature of our guys’ injuries has Vegas confident that we’ll be healthy enough, fired up, and KSU will not have the energy for another fight. I’m sure they expect our defense to rock them, also.
Since this is the only game this season I’m attending live, I would be delighted by that outcome. I don’t really see it though. I think a repeat of the BYU game is our best bet. I’m terrified of us having to throw 40 times and throwing a few picks that set them up for all the offense they’ll need. They’re really hard to stop in the red zone.

Honestly, after the games last week, I would have guessed 9.5 the other way if you would have asked me which way I thought Vegas was going.

I would love to beat KSU with tricks and gimmicks. Turnabout is fair play, right?

Broyles-Jones connection got OU out of many jams. We may now see whether it was Jones or Broyles who was critical.

The only way Texas scores that much is if either A) the Horns bring in a bunch of ringers on O; or B) everyone who is injured outside of Fozzy is somehow miraculously 100% healthy, the OL doesn’t get owned by the K-State DL, the receiving corps is actually serviceable, & Ash grows up…a lot.

I don’t see either scenario happening.

I think the D will have a lot of trouble w/ the K-State O, even if Klein is exhausted from the past couple of weeks – the guy’s got incredible moxie. Plus, it seems that in just about every game the D gives up a handful of backbreaking plays.

Texas won’t be able to keep score w/ K-State, let alone outscore the cats.

Time for a new Hex Rally to rid ourselves of the bad juju of KSU.

Vegas is obviously considering that our injured guys will play this weekend. After the criticism Mack got for dressing but not playing B&B last week, I believe he’ll keep their status on the hush hush going into this game. I hope Vegas knows something we don’t.

Bill Snyder looks like the kind of guy that could literally scheme someone to death. It won’t be a pretty matchup. I thought the Ags made K-State look pretty pedestrian – and I don’t think they would beat MIzzou a second time around.

Child rape notwithstanding, the Big 10 continues to confuse. A quick look at the models from the last few weeks makes me think that the matchup analyser struggles too. Not sure that parity equals quality though.

Sports books’ profit models are based primarily on volume, not so much on nailing the point spread – unless they’ve changed. I don’t follow the Vegas betting, so I’m assuming it’s the same as it ever was, i.e. 6-5 take your pick. They try to set the lines so that both sides want a piece of the action and they wind up with equal dollars bet each way, so that regardless of the outcome they take the loser’s $6, give $5 to the winner and put a dollar in their own pocket. Given equal action, Vegas can’t lose. Unequal betting makes them very, very nervous, and sometimes leads to visits from Louie and Fingers.

I’ve always thought the lines moved based on “smart money” instead of trying to set the dollars equals on both sides. The juice allows Vegas to win in the long term if they lose half the time and win half the time. That’s why I thought the line was usually set so that there was a 50% chance of each team covering, regardless of the amount of money on each side. Also, lines tend to move earlier rather than later so it can’t be a pure balancing game. We sometimes hear the saying “the book won big on that game” or “the book got killed on that game” which I’ve always understood to mean the money was largely unbalanced.

I think the big thing missing from this is the consideration given that is Bergeron, Brown, Shipley, Grant and Fozzy are out then texas loses 23 of its 31 TDs… or 74% of its offense. There are other ways to slice it, but it will be tough sledding if they are all out again.

What Tex Long said. Vegas isn’t predicting who’ll win or by how much; they’re predicting how the bets will fall, with a goal of maintaining equipoise.

It’s the classic John Maynard Keynes “beauty contest” – the aim is not to choose the most beautiful contestant, but to pick the contestant that most other people will select as most beautiful.

Also, I have no doubt Vegas knows everything (including real time injury updates). I was there last year and bet on the Oregon vs Tennessee game. A thunderstorm delayed the game a couple of times. I remember talking to the sports book about what would happen if the game was cancelled. I might as well been talking to Dr. Neil Frank because the guy had an unbelievable amount of information on that particular storm cell.

I could never bet against my Horns, but I’ll happily take the under (O/U at 55.5) in this game. Texas has to sit Brown, Bergeron, Shipley and likely even Grant to give us a shot at beating aggy after a short practice week; and I believe strongly in the Diaz defense to keep the K-State score down.

“Vegas” can be interpreted two different ways:

1.) The Casinos themselves
2.) The guys that have taken Huckleberry’s hobby and are doing it professionally

The casino’s are not trying to to outsmart anyone. They just set the lines such that the money is split evenly on both sides. However, the second group of “Vegas” wields a large portion of that money, and if their models predict something counter-intuitive (such as Texas beating KSU by double digits) they can pull the lines strongly in that direction.

My guess is that this is what we are seeing.

Missing the Asset, and I need me some Big Cigar!
Basketball has this depressing quality of signaling the end of football.

Okay, best I can tell is that since 2003, when less than 20% of bets placed are on a home favorite, the home favorite is 6-3-1 against the spread. It’s a pretty rare event.

Of course, according to the information I have, there have been 425 occasions where the public has been >80% on a home team in that time span and not once has that been on a home dog.

Some weird stuff in this data. I sure hope it’s correct.