I promised many of the readers this past season that I would go into my strategy, and try to do my best to teach others how to handicap college football games. This will be a multi-part handicapping tutorial series that will go into all the little details that you need to consider to be on the right side consistently. Please feel free to utilize the comment section along the way if you have any questions.

Part 1: Tools

Much of the analysis I do starts with the statistics of certain teams. To put things into context, you need to be able to look at stats on a common level. To do that, unless you have a calculator

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Microsoft Excel

Without excel, 80% of my capping would be non-existent. On top of that, I would spend an unbearable amount of time on analysis. Excel is an amazing tool and I cannot reiterate that enough. Within excel, there are many different tools and formulas that you can use to make your analysis better, and easier. If you don’t understand the simple basics, the more advanced steps to follow will be much more complicated.

The Obvious Formula’s

SUM and AVERAGE

VLOOKUP

More Advance, But Still Important

TRIM :  Excel is a very frustrating program as well. In many cases, your vlookup will not work because the lookup value has a unnoticable difference, compared to the table you are referencing. The trim function will delete all unnecessary spaces from a cell, making the Vlookup more likely to work.

RANK:  This can take a list of values and give them a rank order. This is important when creating power rankings, or using the correlation matrix.

CORRELATION: As we get deeper in the weeds in the future post, we will begin to talk about correlations. There are certain stats that matter, and certain stats that don’t. We can assess the relativity of stats with the correlation formula.

STANDARD DEVIATION: When you have multiple methods to predict a score, the standard deviation becomes a very useful tool to assess variability. This will give you a window of variability to the mean, as well as measure confidence of a dataset.

The Most Important

WEB QUERIES: When I first started using excel at an advanced level to create my handicapping system, I would manually enter the stats I needed into a cell. This would populate other cells that contained formulas. It took me atleast 15 minutes to enter the stats of 2 teams, before I even started to analyze the game and and figure out if I wanted to cap it further or not.

What a web query essentially does is download data from an excel friendly website, and put it in a location in excel. What is great about this, is it will do it on command. Once I have the data downloaded once, it will download it on your command. College football is nice because there are many sites that you can utilize. As long as the website doesn’t change their format, you won’t have to change the format of your system either.

I cannot begin to explain how much utilizing web queries has helped save me time.

Can use, but NOT necessary

MACROS: Macro’s are not technically formulas. Macro’s are a way to automate, or program excel to do things with the click of a button, using Visual Basic Code. It sounds much more complicated than it actually is. A macro is simply a recording of a series of task.

You are able to record a macro, then play it back. Be careful though, the macro will record every single click or scroll that you make.

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Finally, as I am sure many of you found The Saturday Edge, there are plenty of websites out there that can help with excel. Most of the tools that I utilize, I taught myself, simply from our friend Google. You can look up practically anything, from how to open excel, to VBA code for your macros. 

Part of handicapping college football, is being able to take things from a macro level, and analyze the small details. Nothing makes this more efficient than Microsoft Excel. As boring as it is, these are very important things to know. The tutorial will be much easier and more informative from here on out.

When you first opened up this post, I don’t think you assumed I wouldn’t mention anything remotely related to football. Sorry. The next post will list all the sources that I use to handicap a single college football game, then we will get into the numbers.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the Handicapping Tutorial Series.