Before You Place Your Bets – You Better Know Your Coaches
Coaches are as important to college football as even the best blue chip recruits, so before you place your bets, you better know your coaches. This is especially true in today’s game given how much it changes and evolves from season to season. 
The funny thing is many head coaches aren’t necessarily hired because of their statistics as a coach like say a baseball player or a QB.
- Previous The Saturday Edge’s Top 10 College Football Betting Resources
- Next Preseason College Football: How Important are Returning Starters?
15 thoughts on “Before You Place Your Bets – You Better Know Your Coaches”
Leave a Reply
MAXIMIZE YOUR EDGE
Good stuff GS. I know how important it is to cap these coaches, or at least have a good idea of who is coaching and what their tendencies are. But I must admit I do not put very much time or effort into doing so.
I would say it is a factor that I am conscious of, but doesn’t play enough into my decision making process as it probably should.
Pez…I think betting reguarly on bad coaches is one of the biggest money burners in college football. There are reasons why the Zooks, Wannstadt’s, Sherman’s, Shannon’s aren’t head coaches anymore. They were bad. And in most cases, bad bets. Yet week after week posters would come into my threads and tell me I’ll be sorry if I bet against their teams. Especially when their teams come into the season with any kind of hype.
A good example of this was Texas A&M. They came into the 2011 season with quite a bit of hype. And were expected to challenge OU for the Big 12 title. This was all based on one good season (for A&M) in which there was absolutely no hype for the team and low expectations. But it was also a season that found many of the Big 12 teams being down or rebuilding in 2010, or had first year coaches. Combined with A&M playing 10 out of their 12 games in the state of Texas. There was no way the cards were going to fall the same way for them two years in a row. If they were going to live up to the hype, they were going to have to earn it with a head coach who could get them to play with a target on their backs. My feeling from the beginning of the season was Sherman wasn’t going to be up to the task.
Sherman was a case in which I wasn’t going to give his team the benefit of the doubt on a bet unless I knew it was a great spot for them on their schedule. They had many of those spots in 2010. But no so many in 2011. The only really great spot that I bet on A&M all season was coming home against Baylor after a tough two game road stretch against Arky and TT.. That was an incredibly good spot for the Aggies after playing those two games down to the wire.. And it was one of only 3 times they covered the spread all year! So you would have definitely been burning your money otherwise by betting on Sherman.
The reason I’m using Texas A&M so much in my comments is because they are a perfect example of a poorly coached team who is going to win a game every now and then when they are in terrific spots on their schedule. But are going to break your heart time and time again when they are expected to win or cover. Badly coached teams seldom win when we need them the most. Well coached can win “despite” the odds. And play their best ball when their backs are against the wall. Just look at Texas A&M’s last game of the year against their hated rivals Texas. A game that the fans wanted the team to win more than any game they’ve ever played at A&M. A game played at night in College Station with a packed house in front of a national television audience. The Aggies were favored by 8 , and end up losing the game straight up. THAT’S what bad coaches can do to you.
I know I’ve already written too much on this subject. But bad coaching has burned me time and time again in college football. To the point to where I now mark each team with red flags if I think their coaching could hamper their team’s success. Here’s example #2 of how important I think coaching is: Do you remember when Brian Kelly was absolutely tearing it up in the Big East. I remember in his last year after he had won the Big East the year before, his Cincy team lost virtually every defensive starter off of that team. He had only 1 returning starter on defense. And his team was picked to finish no better than 4th in conference. Trouble is, that conference was loaded with some very average to very bad coaches. With Kelly being the only shining light. That team not only won the conference again with basically no defense, they beat Wannstadt’s Pitt team on the road as favorites with everything on the line. That was Wanny’s best team. THAT’S the difference between good and bad coaching. If you were going to take a team to win a game with no defense playing on the road, that was the spot. And it was ONLY because of great coaching.
I can concur. I don’t even want to contemplate the number of times I lost betting on Wannstedt and Zookie.
You could have written a follow up post with all that A & M information.
Speaking of needing to know your coaches before placing your wager. I read this article yesterday by Berry Tramel (from your neck of the woods) about how Stoops doesn’t like to divulge injury info because it only helps OU’s opponents and gamblers.
https://blog.newsok.com/berrytramel/2012/04/11/oklahoma-football-bob-stoops-careful-on-injury-reporting/
Pez…I could really write much more on coaching. There is just so many variables involved in today’s college game. And most of them revolve around the head coach. From successful recruiting, to assistant coaching hires, to gameday coaching, to simple things like lockeroom pep talks. A HC in today’s game truley does have to be like a CO. And there are many coaches that are just not cut out for the job. Especially in divison one BCS football. As for Bob Stoops, it’s never been a secret around here that he doesn’t reveal all of the injures to his players. But in many ways I don’t blame him. What happens if say you have one deep threat WR on your offense, and he gets hurt. How much do you want to reveal to your opponent before the game in preparation for OU’s offense? A team could and probably would play a much different defense on you if they knew you didn’t have a real deep threat on offense that can hurt you. You can be more agressive if you know the game will be played within a 20 yard window. This is what Stoops means by not revealing his injuries to the bigtime bettors out there. He wants to keep his injuries as much of a mystery as possible. And many times he’s gone as far as to close his practices to the public to keep from revealing too much about players who are practicing and the ones who aren’t. Of course Stoops isn’t the only one who does this. He’s just one of the most well known.
Handicapping coaches is very important. Good coaches and good programs are always better bets than bad coaches and bad teams. That is just a fact.
I’ll definitely be writing some more on this subject in the future. One more thing I wanted to say about the Big East and their coaches. Have you noticed that since the best and most dominant coach Brian Kelly left the conference, that it has pretty much become a free-for-all with no dominant teams? It wasn’t just a coincidence that this happened. The conference was filled with basically a bunch of average or inexperienced coaches with average teams. “Or” a higher than average number of new coaches. There was only three coaches in BE conference who had coached a BCS team beyond one year! And that was Schiano (11 years, no Big East titles) and Marrone (2 yrs. experience), along with Pasqualoni (experienced but 1st year with new team). In turn did you notice that there were very few point spreads over a FG that were covered by the favorites this past season? No dominant coaching equals no dominant teams. And that’s why the conference title basically came down to a tiebrekaer, with WV winning the tiebreaker with Cincy because of their measly 3 point head to head win. Does anybody think that if Kelly was still coaching in the Big East this would have happened? I know i don’t. Coaching is HUGE in college football.
I frequently use http://www.coachesbtn.com to cap my coaches. Great guys that have every stat imaginable for college coaches. You should check them out.
Sorry, the URL is: https://coachesbythenumbers.com/
sabertstxvii, I used this site for the first time last season. And I agree, it’s a great site. I also used many of the links that were connected to the site such as Beyond The Bets and Crystal Ball Run. The hottest and coldest win/loss streaks of the coaches was also very helpful to me last season. I haven’t seen a site quite like this. And it’s right up my alley.
saber, thanks for coming by and leaving your comment.
check out wagerminds.com too. All good stuff and helping spread the wealth of knowledge.
Also, on your RX forum in the CFB section, I posted about twitter, and included all of their twitter “handles” and they are great to follow as well.
99 days!
It looks like this Coaches By The Numbers site has shifted their business model. They no longer sell subscriptions, and it looks like they’ve scrubbed the product clean of ATS info so as to make it palatable to athletic department types they’re trying to pitch it too.
I know that TeamRanking has sortable ATS records, but I would love to see this site put together some “trip notes” to augment when an ATSM was as indicative as its magnitude. Also would love to see the site start keeping track of coordinator successes in adjusting to 1H and in-game situations.
These coordinator ratings would definitely have to be more of a trip notes than a power rankings thing. Anybody got any idea for how to start organizing this information?
Hi Jack, thanks for the comment. CBN has definitely shifted their business model. They had a great free database that was available up through about May 2013, then they took it down.
A iist of coordinator rankings is a great idea, but as you point out, organizing and keeping track of them could be an issue.
https://coachingroots.com/ has a pretty good coaching database that lists coordinators, but they do not have the specific information you are seeking.