SEC Dominance?

[IEEEWreck]

The college football betting market is very sharp and efficient, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. You're not gonna be beating it with strategies as simple as "pick against the bigger alumni base" or "bet against the SEC all the time because the media says they're way weaker than the betting market says". Public money only really moves the line on a few big games a year. The rest of the time, the bookmakers are just trying to pick as accurate a line as possible to keep the sharps from picking them off while they collect the vig from the recreational bettors. You just can't afford to intentionally shade lines like in the pre-internet era, it's too easy for people to sit at their laptops and line-shop every book around the world. They're just not gonna be off by huge margins. And given that America's opinion of the SEC is so much lower than their own, if anything they'll try to err on the opposite side rating the SEC lower than what they truly believe.

I believe it's efficient, at least in the weak efficient market sense (not unique to betting, I believe the wem theorem.) Just because expectations don't correspond to reality doesn't, however, indicate opportunities for arbitrage. Arbitrage (at least from historical information) is structurally precluded by sufficient liquidity in the market.

But the point I'm making is that efficient markets are not correct markets, and a whole lot of people think they are. All I'm saying is that efficient market equilibria demonstrate expectations, not reality. Expectations can be biased without creating arbitrage opportunities. So pointing to a market to validate expectations is circular, that's all.

 

[dressedcheeseside]

well congrats...

when is the last time you saw a sold out stadium for the science fair?

this is a football board, not chemistry.

Where the hell do you get that? That's a stupid thing to say.

 

[GTNavyNuke]

........
But the point I'm making is that efficient markets are not correct markets, and a whole lot of people think they are. All I'm saying is that efficient market equilibria demonstrate expectations, not reality. Expectations can be biased without creating arbitrage opportunities. So pointing to a market to validate expectations is circular, that's all.

This is so true. The futures and stock markets are efficient markets in that there is sufficient liquidity to generate a composite price which factors in all expectations at any one point in time.

However, the markets are far from "correct" or "accurate" at predicting anything other than money flow. Otherwise, how would our stock markets have seen over ten 50% "corrections" in the last 100 years (for stocks) when the underlying fundamentals didn't change as much over the period of the correction? Expectations create expectations that are not reality.

For sports betting, especially CFB betting, I think the upper limit of accuracy is about 76%. So many people have tried to do better, but there is no way to know how 40 kids are going to play together on a given day. Since the vigorish is about 10%, there is no way I could see to devise a system which improves on the line by 10%. If anyone knows one, keep quiet, do it and make $Ms.

 

[yellojello]

Fun enough, your own arguments above work against your claim. The Sagarin ratings for intraSEC play where there is data present far less variation than other conferences. So statistically speaking, 4-1 works out to a (poisson for chained a> b) 98.378 confidence that those acc teams are better than those sec teams. We could do a cdf calculation to see the chance that the acc teams are at least as better as the top SEC teams.

Why Poisson? I would have used a binomial model?

 

[IEEEWreck]

Why Poisson? I would have used a binomial model?

Yep, I meant binomial. Too little sleep because finals.