College football officially got underway with California’s 51-31 victory over Hawaii last week. However, the season doesn’t really start until this upcoming weekend, which may be one of the most intriguing opening weeks that we can remember, with some high-profile matchups. However, like all Week 1 slates in recent memory, there are also a lot of one-sided matchups - none more so than the FBS vs. FCS clashes.
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Although some FBS vs. FCS games can be close, most end up being unmemorable blowouts. But are there any edges in these matchups that football betters can exploit? And are there any Power 5 conferences that seem especially vicious in taking down their FCS foes?
In order to answer those questions were dug into historical data going back to 1985. Although not all games in particular (older ones don’t have totals), with so many teams and a decent amount of years, the sample size is pretty large.
There are 1,837 games in the database between FBS and FCS teams, with 538 of them occurring in Week 1. We’ll differentiate between these two types of FBS-versus-FCS matchups, to see if there may be some edges early on that then disappears later in the season, or vice versa.
Right off the bat, there isn’t any obvious edge when betting these pointspreads spreads. In Week 1 matchups, FBS teams are 167-144 ATS, with seven pushes (the rest of the games were unlined, as many books don’t bother setting odds for games involving FCS teams). This is good for a 53.69 percent win rate, which is slightly better than the 52.4 percent win rate needed to break even, but not significantly so.
A one-sided prop test against a null hypothesis of 50 percent yields a p-value of 0.21, which, in plain terms, means that there’s 21 percent chance that the “edge” we observe is really just due to randomness. Generally, for most academic settings, a cutoff of 5 percent is set and anything below that is deemed “statistically significant”.
While we personally don’t believe that a 0.05 p-value is necessary in betting to deem something an edge, the 0.2122 is fairly high, which isn’t that encouraging. When looking at FBS-versus-FCS games not in Week 1, we see a similar story, with FBS teams going 324-291 ATS - good for a 52.68 percent win rate and a 0.19 p-value. Since both subsets of data tell a similar story, that does suggest there might be a slight edge taking the FBS teams, but a very small one.
Looking at totals, however, we see a much different story. FBS-versus-FCS matchups that do have a total have gone Over the number 127 out of 204 times. That’s a 62.25 percent Over rate, well above the break even rate, and has actually a fairly large sample size, yielding a p-value of 0.0006. This suggests that there’s a very slim chance that the rate of going Over has truly been 50 percent, as we would expect from a properly-set line.
Furthermore, this trend is continued (albeit slightly diluted) for FBS-versus-FCS tilts not in Week 1 – in those games, the Over hit 269 of 486 times, equal to 55.35 percent and a 0.02 p-value. This means that FBS-versus-FCS matchups tend to go Over the total at a statistically significant rate, especially during Week 1.
Not to go off on too large a tangent, but we were interested why this was happening. Looking more closely at the data, using the line and the total (when available) we can calculate expected points for both teams.
Looking at these, we can see that FBS teams outperform their expected points 119 times, and underperform 87. Similarly, FCS teams outperform their expected points 110 times, and underperform 91. This means that it isn’t just one side of the matchup that scores more – it is both.
So does this trend continue for standard FBS-versus-FBS games? The short answer – no. Games that involve two FBS teams in Week 1 go Over only 47.9 percent of the time – which is actually statistically significantly lower than 50 percent (p-value of 0.01, due to high sample size), although the margin is so small it probably isn’t profitable to bet of them.
This discrepancy between FBS-versus-FCS and FBS-versus-FBS matchups is really puzzling, and we don’t have a great explanation for why this occurs, besides perhaps the fact that FBS-versus-FCS matchups are generally blowouts, in which teams may give up a little bit on defense towards the end, as teams play second and third-string players.
Finally, returning to the topic at hand: which Power 5 conferences are the most merciless against FCS opponents in Week 1? Below is a table of their results.
As you can see above, the SEC and ACC are both fairly effective versus FCS foes, while the Big Ten, Big 12, and Pac-12 aren’t so much. The sample sizes are fairly low, so no statistically significant results, but this seems to suggest that if you want to bet on an FBS team when they are opening the season against an FCS team, the SEC and the ACC are the conferences in which to do so.
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Harrison Chase is the Co-President of the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective, a student-run organization at Harvard College dedicated to the quantitative analysis of sports strategy and management.
