Now's the time to start your college football scouting and handicapping reports, using information gleaned from spring practices. It's also good to search for information impacting schools' BCS title ambitions.
The month of
May is already half over and the countdown to the start of another college
football season in underway. This is a great time of year to start scouting
your favorite teams for the upcoming season. While the start of summer camp is
still a few months away, there are always some interesting developments in the
world of college football that could end up having a major impact on a team’s
current odds to not only win their respective conference but make a run at a
BCS title.
The
following is a look at this week’s most interesting news and notes from the
world of college football, as we discuss how it could change the way betting odds makers look at these teams.
Potential playoff format continues to
take shape
As plans
continue to move forward to some kind of playoff format to decide each season’s
national champion starting in 2014, some of the actual details of how it will
be conducted continue to take shape. The general consensus is that the end
result will be a four-team playoff among the top-four ranked teams as a result
of the final regular-season BCS poll. The top-ranked team would play the
fourth-ranked team in one playoff and the second and third-ranked teams would
meet in the other. The winners would then play in the BCS Championship Game.
Where these
games would take place has been at the center of much of this discussion, but
this week’s decision by the Big Ten Conference to endorse the use of existing
bowl sites such as the Rose Bowl for the games could end-up going a long way
towards ironing-out the finer details of this monumental change.
Not so fast says DeLoss Dodds
In response
to the Big Ten’s position on the existing major bowls’ roll in the playoffs,
Texas’s athletic director DeLoss Dodds made it very clear that he is opposed to
the bowls being a part of the playoff system, stating recently that “this
entity needs to be separate” and that the playoff plan “needs to be their own
bowls, their own TV, their own sponsors”. Given the influential power that
Texas yields in the Big 12 it appears that there will already be a stalemate
between two of the most powerful conferences over this matter.
Florida State continues to ponder its
future
A little
over two weeks ago the rumors started flying around that Florida State was
seriously considering dropping out of the ACC to join the Big 12. Considering
that the Seminoles are the conference’s biggest entity when it comes to
football, you can only imagine the shock waves this story created in
Tallahassee and beyond.
The whole
idea has gained some support in light of all the recent movement among the
major conferences. The current 10-team Big 12 has created an opportunity for
the Seminoles to join a conference that is stronger in football as opposed to
staying basketball-centric ACC.
This week,
FSU president Eric Barron took up the cause against such a move, citing that
the losses still outweigh the benefits of joining the Big 12. It appears that
this matter will be subject to much debate, but in the short-term, there may be
some added value in the Seminoles’ current 14/1 odds to win a national title
this season. Their regular season schedule sets itself up for a possible
undefeated run all the way to the BCS title game. This could be a golden
opportunity considering next season in could playing in the Big 12 and facing a
four-team playoff to win it all.