LAS VEGAS — We’re nearly a month into the college football season and many teams have played three games. This is a good time to start taking stock of teams and how they might fare the rest of the way.
What can be a real find is to uncover the teams that will be the big point-spread winners yet in 2018. The fact is that in the last five seasons, 19 different teams have won either more than 75 percent or at least 11 games against the spread in a given campaign.
There’s still plenty of time to take advantage of these big-money teams. Let’s take a look at some of the shared characteristics of those past 19 top-performing teams after three games into those seasons to see if we can uncover the big-money teams of 2018 so we can ride them the rest of the way.
These 19 successful spread-beaters from the recent past — 2017: Fresno State, Georgia, Iowa State; 2016: Colorado State, Eastern Michigan, Temple; 2015: Toledo, Washington State; 2014: Arkansas, Louisiana Tech, TCU, Western Michigan; 2013: Auburn, Duke, Florida State, Houston, Missouri, Navy, North Texas — shared many common traits:
Winning record after three games
Of the 19 teams, 17 had winning records after three games. That would produce a list of 74 teams for 2018 still eligible for our list.
Same head coach as previous season
Again, 17 of the teams fit this criterion. Taking out this year’s teams with new head coaches and our list is trimmed to 68 teams.
Showing capable offense already
Another 17 of our 19 ATS excelling teams were scoring at least 27 ppg after their first three games. Taking out the 12 teams in 2018 that have not met that benchmark so far leaves us with 56 teams.
Meeting the defensive benchmark
The next eliminator has been defensive points per game. In order to keep our same criteria of 17 teams or more qualifying, the benchmark for points allowed is 30 ppg. Eliminating the teams in 2018 still on our list that don’t meet that threshold leaves us with 46 teams.
Winning ATS record so far
The list of 19 teams above shows 15 teams that had a winning point spread record after three games. This gives us another chance to eliminate a big group of teams. In fact, after doing this, our list is trimmed to 32 teams.
Had at least 13 starters back from prior year’s team
Fifteen of those teams brought back at least 13 starters. Checking our list for 2018, we are able to eliminate another 11 teams. We are now down to 21.
Brought back the same starting quarterback
One of the key traits of stability is a returning starting quarterback. Fifteen of the 19 teams that have enjoyed great ATS seasons over the last five years have had a returning starter at quarterback. After eliminating the teams for 2018 with new quarterbacks, we are down to 16 teams.
Running same offensive system as last year under same coordinator
Another key building block in successful ATS seasons for college teams in the consistency of running the same offensive system for the same offensive coordinator as the prior season, and 14 of the 19 in our list did. Eliminating the teams with new offensive coordinators still remaining among our 2018 potential qualifiers leaves us with 13 teams. Here they are:
Boise State, Boston College, Buffalo, Duke, Fresno State, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Miami (Fla.), North Texas, Syracuse, UNLV, Utah State.
Team had losing record in prior season
If you are satisfied with the list as it stands, you would do fairly well riding all 13 teams for the rest of the season. However, if you are looking to take it one step further, 13 of the 19 ATS standout teams from 2013-17 had a losing record the prior season. These are the real surprise teams that can build so much momentum early, that they are able to ride it to huge profits for the entire season. Looking at our remaining 2018 teams, these are the ones that had losing records last year:
Kansas: Off the 1-11 season of 2017, the Jayhawks have already won more games in 2018 than last year. Naturally the schedule is about to get much tougher, but that doesn’t mean the Jayhawks can’t keep winning, at least where the point spread is concerned.
Syracuse: The Orange are a very intriguing team. Sitting at 3-0 and off a huge rout of Florida State, this veteran team has the looks of a major surprise unit in the ACC.
UNLV: Coach Tony Sanchez’s offense has put up just shy of 40 ppg thus far and QB Armani Rogers has proven to be a capable dual-threat weapon. With an upset win Saturday at Arkansas State, things could start to get real interesting in Vegas.
Utah State: Coach Matt Wells’ team has hit the 40-point mark in half of its last 12 games.
