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From NIL to NFL players trying to come back to college, the transfer portal has been the root of mass confusion in regard to what’s allowed and what isn’t, heightening the uncertainty of the future of the sport. The transfer portal has also impacted how us sports bettors need to treat the first few weeks of the season, taking extra precautions in order to avoid falling into an early hole.
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How the Transfer Portal Impacts Early Season Betting?
🔑 Key Tip: Calculate how player transfers hurt the departing school along with the arrival school
Back in the day, keeping track of rosters was far easier with the only loss of production stemming from who graduated and who went to the NFL Draft. You also need to account for the school’s incoming recruiting class, digging into high school tape while tracking down beat reports to see who would start as a true freshman.
Since the arrival of the transfer portal, updating rosters has turned into a full time job with players seemingly swapping schools every single day. Not only do you need to try and calculate how their departure hurts a team, but how much of an impact they will have in their new home. The past few years have been especially tough with the total number of players entering the portal surpassing 3,000.
Speaking of turnover, the G6 has been ravaged with the P4 poaching any upcoming talent, forcing smaller schools to rely on mass overhauls just to stay competitive. When integrating an abundance of new pieces on both sides of the ball, identities change, wiping away any conviction you may have in your power ratings.
With the sport firmly in the wild west, we have had to tweak our process on how we go about betting the first few weeks of the season, practicing patience while digging deeper into the quality of their returning production.
Patience is a Virtue
🔑 Key Tip: Factor Success Rate, Havoc, Explosiveness and Finishing Drives for longer successful wagering
With question marks looming larger than ever over every single team, there is less conviction in power ratings, making it vital we dial it back early on in the year. Before the transfer portal, you used to be able to just make quick adjustments to an overall power rating knowing a majority of the team based on the previous year’s results.
With variance playing a larger role than ever early on in the year, the difference in value of ratings compared to the listed price have shrunk. You will still find discrepancies, yet now you need to account for what the difference really is worth and if you are properly pricing your team correctly.
While a slim margin may be worth a wager in the past, staying patient while using an early matchup to collect data instead of throwing a dart is far more valuable. With each passing week, factors like Success Rate, Havoc, Explosiveness, and Finishing Drives help us polish up our ratings, creating stronger buy points later in the year.
With that said, there are still opportunities in the first few weeks of the season we can attack the board. Especially when a discrepancy involves a team who is bringing back a majority of their roster. Returning production is key at this time of the year, using their continuity brush aside regression.
Offseason Research
🔑 Key Tip: Factor returning star players for certain schools
Unfortunately, looking at a team’s ranking in returning production is not nearly enough to base a wager on. You need to dig into who is returning and the quality of their starts. Just because a team brings back five players across the offensive line, if they were back ups the year before, their lack of starts is essentially the same as bringing in a transfer, creating uncertainty on how well they will gel together.
Continuity can also be a double edged sword when bringing back a majority of their starters, primarily for those who severely struggled the year before. If UMass brought back every single starter from last year’s abysmal roster, I would still hesitate to bump them up in my power ratings.
To help strengthen your belief in a team’s returning production, look for high quality impact players making their return at key positions. Monitoring spring/summer scrimmages while scanning social media for practice reports will also help you get a better idea on how last year’s back ups or new transfers are performing in a starting role.
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Opening Week College Football Betting
Even when I have a strong understanding of how a team may look, I still want to temper my bets early on in the year. This has resulted in me live betting far more than normal, using a few possessions to gauge if my preseason assessment was correct before locking in a wager.
The rise of prediction markets have also made trading far easier, building positions as the game progresses without fear of getting banned or limited for this style of play. Live trading can also lead to arb opportunities, locking in a profit no matter which side of your bet cashes.
In a changing landscape, tweaking how we go about betting while digging deeper into the impact of transfers and returning production will help keep us afloat and our bankrolls healthy.
Photo Credit: REUTERS
