Over the past few weeks, I have taken you on a journey across the college football preseason landscape. I have reflected back on the data from 2023 and conducted a detailed analysis of the schedule for the Michigan State Spartans. I have analyzed the races in the Big Ten, the rest of the Power Four Conferences, and in the Group of Five. Most recently, I have made some predictions regarding the new 12-team college football playoffs.

In the first six installments of this series, I have discussed a multitude of odds that I have generated using a simulation of the full college football season. In today's final installment of our college football preview, we will explore whether or not these odds might just help us win a bit of money.

That's right, it's time to officially kickoff the 2024 edition of Dr. Green and White's Bad Betting Advice

The results of my full season simulation provide a variety of odds that can be compared to common betting lines available from any common sports book. These include the odds to win a division and/or qualify for a conference championship game, the odds to win the conference, make the playoffs, and win the National Championship.

Table 1 below summarizes the odds for all of these events for each of the top 25 teams in the country, based on the consensus of preseason publications explained in Part One.

Table 1 includes the preseason rank and strength of schedule (and SoS rank) for each team. It then lists the odds for each event based on my simulation results. The middle of the table shows the Draft Kings money line odds for each of those bets. I have converted those money lines to the equivalent odds so that they can be easily compared to the simulation odds.

Finally, the right side of the table gives the return on investment (ROI) for each potential bet of $100, assuming the odds from my simulation are the true odds. I have shaded each potential bet with a positive ROI as green.

Despite the fact that my disruptive scenario and official prediction has Oregon beating Texas for the National Title while Georgia, Ohio State, and Alabama all miss out on the playoffs, the overall odds to win the national title correlate very closely with the preseason rankings.

Preseason No. 1 Georgia has the best odds to win the National Championship (10.5%), followed by No. 2 Ohio State (8.4%), No. 3 Oregon (8.3%), No. 4 Texas (7.5%), No. 5 Alabama (6.8%), and No. 6 Penn State (6.0%). However, the sum of the playoff odds for those six teams (3.15) suggest that only half of them will make the playoffs. In other words, my disruptive scenario is one very feasible way that the season could play out.

Note that around two-thirds of these bets have a negative ROI. This is not surprising, as the folks in Las Vegas are experts at setting the line just above the real odds such that the house always wins.

But, there are a few teams that have a positive ROI for at least one of three events captured in this table. Alabama, Penn State, Michigan, Missouri, and Oklahoma all stand out.

The information in Table 1 is a just a small sample of the potential bets that my simulation generates. It is also possible to estimate which specific bets look the most promising (have the highest ROI) in several different categories.

Table 2 below lists the top 25 highest ROI wagers for teams that either win the conference championship or make the championship game (which is noted throughout this series as "win division" even if the conference no longer has divisions).