Figure 1: Comparison of the final Vegas line to the average margin of victory for the favored team for all college football games played between 20 (data courtesy of the Prediction Tracker website) If you plot the final spread versus the average margin of victory, you get a very high correlation and a slope of 1.00, as shown below in Figure 1. “Vegas always knows” on average, with high varianceīased on my analysis of college football spread data back to 2001, Vegas is the best predictor of the outcome of a given game. I will share some of that insight with you here today. I have been studying the Vegas spread in both college basketball and football for several years, and over that time I have gained a lot of insight. However, there are a lot of very interesting mathematical/statistical facts about the spread that are also true and which can provide insight and even predictive power. The purpose of the Vegas spread is just to get equal amounts of money bet on both teams so that the folks that run the casinos are sure to make money either way. In the realm of the mathematics of sports, one of the most fascinating topics is that of the Las Vegas spread.
