R & L Carrier New Orleans Bowl
Tags: Sports, Sports Betting

R & L Carrier New Orleans Bowl

It’s Bowl Season!

This is hopefully every college football fan’s favorite time of year, our very own advent calendar; a present almost every day. The first bowl for the 2017 season is the R & L Carrier New Orleans Bowl featuring two former Sun Belt rivals, North Texas Mean Green and the Troy Trojans.

Handicapping bowls is one of the most intriguing parts of sports betting. As mentioned previously in the Army — Navy preview, link, you should be capping the underlying stats for each team plus the “spot” and now, add motivation. It’s always tricky as this means digging into coach movement, players coming back from injury, what kind of bowl the team has been awarded and as of last year, star players who are declaring for the draft deciding to just skip irrelevant bowls.

The lines for this bowl opened Troy -5.5 with a total of 61 (most widely available openers). These lines have since moved to Troy -7, total 62. Most people looking at this game might, at face value, think it’s going to be a shoot-out considering North Texas running attack and Troy’s fun offense. However, this total offers very little value based on each team’s expected points scored and expected points allowed. So, look to the spread for a bet on this game. One method of trying to normalize the statistics in college football while accounting for the different schedules is by averaging out each team’s opponents scoring results. This will hopefully help to determine how much each team scores, more or less than they should be expected to and how much each team gives up, more or less than they are expected to. This can be used to produce a theoretical spread and total. It looks like this:

It looks like Troy should be closer to a double-digit favourite and this is probably supported by the line movement from -5.5 to -7. It also looks like, as just mentioned above, the total is spot on. Something to avoid.

Another popular way to try and normalize the stats and produce a theoretical spread is through yards per play on offence and defence. This is how the game breaks down using that measurement:

As this metric usually leans heavily to the underdog, it’s generally best to look for a high variance to the available line (Army showed 3.5 of value in this metric on Saturday). Here it’s only 1.5 and also shows Troy with a decent sized advantage in yards allowed.

Another common way to compare teams is to look at how they perform in key situations during a game, such as on third down and in the red zone. While it is difficult to use these to create a theoretical spread, it can still be instructive. For these two teams the stats are as follows:

Here, it looks like North Texas might have a slightly better ability to move the chains down the field and stop Troy’s drives a little better. Also, it looks like once in the red zone North Texas has done a much better job converting than Troy. But, look at red zone defence. Troy has the best red zone defence in college football (in a vacuum that doesn’t adjust for opponent), whereas North Texas looks like they just concede in hopes of getting the ball back and scoring again (and if you watched North Texas-Army a few weeks ago you know this is true).

A little more in-depth way to compare teams is to delve into their defensive metrics, such as sack rate, tackle for loss success and drive stop rate. While these are all defensive stats, they do paint a picture as to what kind of field position teams may be able to generate and how successful they’ll be at keeping their opponent from sustaining scoring drives. The stats for this game are as follows:

All four of these stats, much like red zone defence, paint a picture of Troy as a defensive machine. They out rank North Texas by a significant margin in each category. This holds true in explosiveness as well. There’s probably enough numbers and charts in here already so, sufficed to say North Texas is pretty explosive on offence and Troy is pretty great at limiting explosive plays on defence.

A lot of these stats, except the first breakdown, are not considering strength of schedule. It is usually a great equalizer. It may be surprising to know to that Troy had the #100th ranked schedule in terms of difficulty and North Texas had the #99th. Basically identical.

It is bowl season so, what about the “intangible”? There is a bunch here to consider. First and foremost is the health of North Texas running back Jeffrey Wilson. North Texas’ running attack will be good without him but, great with him. He had 16 TD’s in 11 games and averages over 6 yards a carry. It has not been announced if he will play yet. Before the game against Rice, North Texas’ offence was rolling and they didn’t seem to miss Wilson in the first half against Rice, putting up 30. But, they scored 6 (two FG’s) in the second half and then were held scoreless till late in the 3rd quarter against FAU in the C-USA title game. Maybe they do miss Wilson more than expected?

What about a letdown for the Mean Green? (Fun, lengthy, aside — North Texas used to be the Eagles until 1966 when they adopted the name Mean Green. This apparently is purely coincidental to the fact that Hall of Fame NFLer “Mean” Joe Greene was playing for them at that time. The story goes, some North Texas basketball players started a chant about the team on the field being Mean Green and it stuck. Link. Believe what you will...) North Texas lost their first C-USA Championship game, two weeks ago, in very unconvincing fashion (they never got off the bus as the saying goes) and it’s hard to tell how excited they’ll be about this bowl. This will be their 3rd bowl in 4 seasons and I’m sure they were looking for a better berth.

From the Troy side, much like North Texas, it’s a program on the up-swing as young head coach Neal Brown has spiced things up. Troy went 6 years without a bowl bid or a Sun Belt title. Last year, in his first season, Troy took care of the bowl drought with an appearance in Dollar General Bowl and a win over Ohio. This year they took care of the title drought, splitting the Sun Belt crown with App. St. Brown has also reached 10 wins in each of his two seasons at the helm. I expect him to get this team motivated to continue the momentum into next season where they have once again scheduled Boise to lead things off and have also scheduled Power 5 mainstay Nebraska. After beating LSU this year its conceivable Brown will want to repeat a Power 5 victory. Brown’s been mentioned for some coaching openings but, he’s probably another good season or two away from leaving. Side note for prop bettors — Troy QB Brandon Silvers is two shy of the school record for career touchdowns. There’s no way Silvers and Brown don’t want that. If a prop bet of o2.5 TD’s thrown exists, hammer it.

There are 6.5 and 7’s widely available as of Monday December 11th. Troy should be able to score at their normal pace and their defence should be able to shut down North Texas’ attack. Watch for Wilson’s health and roll with the Trojans at 7 if he’s out and a lower number (6 or 6.5) if he plays.

Troy -7, -105

Good Luck