Week 5 of the college football season featured 22 outright upsets, including ranked teams like Oregon, Fresno State, Texas A&M, Florida and UCLA. At this point in the season, the answer to the question of whether or not anybody in college football is good is a short one. Alabama. Georgia.
This is a weird environment for both bettors and oddsmakers. A high-variance environment such as this one can have a lot of benefits for bettors that are able to isolate the teams that are for real, the teams that aren’t and the spots to capitalize. On the other hand, oddsmakers may be able to prey on the reactionary nature of the betting markets and bait bettors into taking teams that may not be able to sustain what they’ve recently done.
There is a lot to unpack every Sunday morning, but the box scores can help us determine what was real and what wasn’t from the past weekend of college football.
Let’s check out some examples and what they mean going forward.