College Football: Home Dogs and Betting Against the Public (2003-2007)
It’s almost “back-to-school” time! The students will be “hitting the books” — and for us — that means the college football powerhouses will be pounding each other! SportsInsights.comis pleased to present this year’s update on the College Football marketplace. Like last year, we’ll look at how college football dogs — and home dogs, in particular — fared over the recent past. We also updated our charts to show how Betting Against the Public can be used to improve “Home Dog” performance. Our research has been updated to include the 2007 season. SportsInsights’ exclusive betting percentages for college football include five seasons’ worth of data — and over 6,200 college football games.
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College Football Dogs and Home Dogs
Bettors often talk about underdogs. How have dogs done over the past few years in college football? And what about “home dogs?” Table 1 shows the results contained in our database since 1998. We purposely show results over individual years to highlight how performance can jump around — even over entire seasons.
Table 1 – College Football Dogs and Home Dogs
| Period | Dogs | Home Dogs |
| 1998-2007 | 50.4% | 51.6% |
| 2001 | 52.4% | 49.3% |
| 2002 | 50.2% | 50.0% |
| 2003 | 48.3% | 51.4% |
| 2004 | 52.1% | 60.2% |
| 2005 | 51.4% | 50.7% |
| 2006 | 51.0% | 48.7% |
| 2007 | 50.6% | 51.3% |
| Last 5 Years (2003-2007) | 50.3% | 52.2% |
Here are some key “takeaways” from the chart:
- The results continue to validate previous academic research — that there is a bias towards underdogs, and in particular, home dogs.
- The results show that although there is a bias, the sports marketplace is relatively efficient, so that the vig is difficult to overcome.
- Performance can fluctuate dramatically. Similar to the investment world, past performance is not necessarily an indication of future results.
- In this article, we highlighted all 2003-2007 periods in yellow to make comparison amongst the various approaches and tables easier to read. SportsInsights’ betting percentages are available starting in 2003.
Home Dogs Getting Points
Table 2 shows the performance of Home Dogs receiving a given amount of points.
Table 2: College Football Home Dogs Receiving X Points
| Period | 0.5 or More Pts | 3 or More | 7 or More | 14 or More |
| 2003-2007 | 52.2% | 52.1% | 52.7% | 52.9% |
| 2003 | 51.4% | 52.7% | 52.8% | 51.0% |
| 2004 | 60.2% | 58.0% | 61.2% | 57.4% |
| 2005 | 50.7% | 49.1% | 45.9% | 46.2% |
| 2006 | 48.7% | 50.0% | 49.6% | 56.8% |
| 2007 | 51.3% | 51.6% | 54.3% | 53.8% |
Betting Against the Public — on Home Dogs
Last year, we saw that combining “Betting Against the Public” with betting on “Home Dogs” — was a profitable betting strategy. We updated this information to include the 2007 season and present the results in Table 2’s format for comparison purposes.
Table 3: College Football Home Dogs and Betting Against the Public (30% Level)
| Period | 0.5 or More Pts | 3 or More | 7 or More | 14 or More |
| 2003-2007 | 54.6% | 53.6% | 53.7% | 53.8% |
| 2003 | 60.0% | 58.7% | 58.5% | 53.1% |
| 2004 | 60.6% | 58.8% | 59.3% | 56.8% |
| 2005 | 51.0% | 48.3% | 47.6% | 53.1% |
| 2006 | 50.0% | 50.0% | 50.6% | 56.8% |
| 2007 | 54.3% | 54.5% | 54.9% | 50.0% |
For the purposes of this chart, we selected games where the Public was 30% or lower on the Home Dog. Note how Betting Against the Public consistently adds value over Table 2 (Home Dogs, as a standalone system). Indeed, our series of articles has show that Betting Against the Public can add value to just about any handicapping approach. We hope that you will use SportsInsights.com’s numerous sports investing tools and data to improve your handicapping!
Disclaimer
We do not guarantee that the trends and biases we’ve found will continue to exist. It is impossible to predict the future. Any serious academic research in the field of “market efficiencies” recognizes that inefficiencies may disappear over time. Once inefficiencies are discovered, it is only a matter of time before the market corrects itself. We do not guarantee our data is error-free. However, we’ve tried our best to make sure every score and percentage is correct.