CFB betting prep: How season win totals can be misleading in rating teams

Longtime college football fans are used to realignment. The Big 8 became the Big 12 only to have the SEC pillage a pair of its teams twice in just over a decade. The Big East outright dissolved. There's an almost annual switcheroo or two in the lower end of D-I football with leagues like the Mountain West, Sun Belt, American Athletic Conference, and Conference USA expanding or contracting.

This offseason has seen more than its fair share of movement, and it's just the beginning as we await USC and UCLA's uncomfortable moves to the Big Ten. Conference USA added new Football Bowl Subdivision teams after losing teams to the American. The Big-12 snapped up some teams from the American to skip past its advertised number of 12 teams, going from 10 to 14. With many teams having new schedules, evaluations will be trickier.

Earlier this offseason, we looked at the professional ranks, taking the win totals in both the NFC and AFC to determine where each team was rated in the betting market. These ratings act as a springboard for creating point spreads and finding value - from season win totals to game-to-game betting.

The college football schedule is far fairer than the NFL's calendar. The main reason for that is the drastic difference in the quality of the 10 total conferences that make up the "league" that is the FBS.

Even if you've never seen a college football game, tallying up the projected win totals for each conference provides a decent ranking of the conferences. With 12 games per team, if we take the total projected wins for a conference and divide them by its number of teams, we get a hint of how each individual league ranks before we've even kicked a game off.

To be even more specific, we'll convert a team total like LSU's under-9.5 wins at -140 to 9.05 projected wins - a fair number with balanced -110/-110 odds.

Conferences are rated based on how their teams are expected to fare in non-conference games. How many games a team plays against lower-level Football Championship Series teams can complicate this. We're looking at you, SEC.

Alabama has Chattanooga on its schedule as a virtual bye week and plays only eight conference games. Meanwhile, USC won't meet any FCS opponents but will play nine games within the Pac-12. The Trojans' weakest opponent might be San Jose State. While they're 31-point favorites in Week 1, that doesn't quite compare to the Crimson Tide's mark as 50-plus-point favorites against the Moccasins. Bama is also a 38-point favorite in Week 1 against Middle Tennessee.

Speaking of San Jose State, it's lined at 5.5 wins despite not coming remotely close to matching the quality of a squad like Florida - which also carries a 5.5-win team total. The quality of their opponents and, by association, their conference shape those numbers.

Unfortunately, you can't just equally boost every team by its conference rating. Just take a look at the defending champion Georgia's schedule for 2023. Despite playing out of the top conference in the country, its schedule isn't exactly filled with landmines. One of the best parts about being Georgia is that you don't have to play Georgia, and therefore your SEC schedule isn't as hard as others'. For example, Vanderbilt has a 3.5-win total, which is lower because it doesn't get to play itself but does have to face Georgia.

In the MAC, Western Michigan has a 3.5-win total, but it'll be massive underdogs to mid-tier SEC team Mississippi State and would be getting a couple of scores from Vandy if they played.

So how do we make up the stagger when it comes to teams in different conferences with the same win total? Like most other handicapping angles, we take educated guesses on how teams are boosted or dropped by who they play.

With a tough SEC slate, Vanderbilt's 3.5 wins could be around 25% higher with an average schedule strength, making it good enough to be a five-win team nationally. In comparison, Western Michigan's total would be even lower than 3.5 if playing in the MAC didn't afford it more winnable games than playing a random selection of the other 133 FBS teams.

Of the 67.4 projected wins for MAC teams, 48 are guaranteed to come in conference, meaning 19.4 wins will need to come in 48 non-conference matchups. That .404 projected win percentage means the Broncos might be lucky to win three games if they played an average schedule, as they've also padded their slate with a game against St. Francis of the FCS.

As we prepare for another college football season, don't equate projected win totals to team quality. Make sure you know how hard a team's slate is before assigning it a rating.

Matt Russell is the lead betting analyst for theScore. If there's a bad beat to be had, Matt will find it. Find him on Twitter @mrussauthentic.