The USFL can count itself fortunate not to be folding midway through the season. That may sound like a cruel joke at the United States Football League’s expense, but the positive step is no laughing matter for league bosses who’ve watched other minor-league American football brands start up and then give-up within weeks. NFL Europe and other NFL-affiliated efforts have had The Shield to buoy them for quasi-successful runs in operation, but independently funded minor pigskin leagues have enjoyed a median life-span of something between 4 years and 1.5 weeks in recent eras. XFL 2.0 gets a pass d ..read more

The refashioned USFL’s pair of top preseason picks, the Michigan Panthers and Tampa Bay Bandits, have belly-flopped after losing 3 out of 4 games in embarrassing style. The Panthers may be the saddest tale of disappointment. Blessed with #1 overall USFL draft pick QB Shea Patterson, and coached by former St. Louis Rams skipper Jeff Fisher, the Panthers were touted as “futures” odds favorites in March and April. But as WagerBop argued prior to the spring season, Fisher’s team was overrated based on his name-brand NFL stripes. Patterson has been overwhelmed as the sloppy Panthers fumble and whi ..read more

In the words of Colin Montgomerie after Team England bogeyed the 18th hole to lose a match, “well, that changes all that, then.” Forget that tripe about Alabama getting a “mulligan” at #5 just so Cincinnati could be left dangling at #4, waiting to be nixed from the 2021-22 College Football Playoff as soon as the SEC Championship Game and Big Ten Championship scrums took place. Cincinnati has been ranked up to #2 after walloping another AAC stronghold by about 50 points in Week 7, showing that CFP committee members are at least capable of understanding 1 objective rule of team vs team analysis ..read more

We usually don’t use weekly intros to soapbox, but rather to introduce overall betting angles to think about when preparing a round of picks. This time, though, the 2 genres are kind of connected. Alabama should absolutely not be a 5th-ranked team after losing to an unranked school with a .500 record like Texas A&M. It’s not so much about “SEC bias” or even Power-5 bias, because you’d shudder to think what would happen to Kentucky or Ole Miss if they opened with a win streak, then lost to a program ranked as low as the Aggies. Nothing against Texas A&M, of course, or even Alabama, whi ..read more

Leagues designed to promote absolute parity can make the fog of shallow hype even harder to squint through. How many times has an NFL player gone on a talk show, and when asked if his team can potentially win the Super Bowl, he says, “Hey man, sky’s the limit. Lotta talent on this team.” That’s probably my favorite political-sports tripe of all, “Lotta talent on this team.” It’s impossible to lie when you say that unless you’re playing on the Bad News Bears (at the beginning of the movie) since even a winning Little League team has a “lot” of talent. It all depends on the definition of “a lot ..read more

Those who follow WagerBop’s W/L records know that our Daily Double prediction outcomes are far more curious than our results with any other sport or league. We do pretty well on big soccer matches and flop often on also-ran derbies – it’s much the same with UFC (especially yours-truly’s prizefighting picks, which only seem to pay off if the event’s PPV buy-rate matches a certain standard) and NBA basketball. Pigskin forecasting is an annual struggle to get to 60%. Our baseball picks would never, ever hit 60% for a season (or a summer) if only the ordinary stretches counted – in fact most of t ..read more

As we’ve noted repeatedly headed into the 2021 conference slate, heretofore-unheralded (geez, that sounds like a 2020s luxury car slogan, but it fits today’s topic with Undeniable Precision and Precise Undeniability) FBS programs are making hay against the nation’s Top 25, and the phenomenon of name-brand teams flopping as massive favorites against mid-ranked Division 1 opponents is doing more than just expose the folly of preseason and Week 1 AP Poll rankings this time. COVID-19 sports restrictions of 2020 were like a dyke blocking-up part of the Nile River. Anti-sports journalists at The Na ..read more

Having blogged about High School pigskin for nearly the last 10 years in a row, I’ve been witness to the “NCAA-ification” of the prep ranks. That’s not necessarily a reference to the scourge of hand-picked teams and so-called Friday night “football” broadcasts that turn into scouting orgies for SEC aficionados, or even the “Bishop Sycamore” syndrome of independent barnstorming teams masquerading as schools. Those problems are separate cans of worms. Rather, I’m talking about the wider and wider “variable” in any prep gridiron forecast. Once upon a time, Big Campus Prep would play Horse & ..read more

Note: WagerBop apologizes to those who clicked looking specifically for moneyline picks earlier today. We’ll have a bunch of ML picks to offer on college football in Week 3, but Week 2’s predictions focus on OOC point spreads. The mislabeled headline has been corrected to reflect this week’s choice of markets.  There’s a classic Metallica tune I’m thinking of today, “The Thing That Should Not Be.” The proto-stoner metal track gives off the impression that it’s about a bubbling sea monster, but really it’s a metaphor of human irrationality – James Hetfield’s lyrics “the fearless wretch in ..read more

The most interesting angle of 2021’s college football kickoff is the prospect of Group-of-5 teams finally taking revenge on the sport’s aristocrats. The NCAA’s general COVID-19 waiver for last year’s seniors has allowed G5 schools to return 95% of a roster in some scenarios, while the Top 25 has been ransacked as usual by NFL teams and transfer decisions. It hasn’t shown up in College Football Playoff odds, and there’s precious little time for sharks to wager on “preseason” CFP odds with Week Zero already in the books and Week 1 fast approaching, so it’s probably not because no one has yet co ..read more