[BostonCard]

That's what WIM is trying to say; that the casino's are systematically wrong.  The theory is that certain teams are consistently overrated because their irrational fanbases have ridiculous expectations about how good a team they are going to be and are willing to bet money on it (think Notre Dame or maybe USC, for example).  In something as rare as national championships, I think the numbers are too small to make any meaningful determination (for example, you could argue that over the last 50 years, Stanford has been overrated, since it hasn't won a national championship despite having non-zero odds of winning one each year).  You might be able to do an analysis of whether the spread inherently overrated certain teams over the past decade or so (that would give you over 100 games to use to determine the outcome).  My guess is you might see some deviations from teams going 50/50 against the spread, but that such deviations would be small compared to the house's take.

BC

[BostonCard]

That's what WIM is trying to say; that the casino's are systematically wrong.  The theory is that certain teams are consistently overrated because their irrational fanbases have ridiculous expectations about how good a team they are going to be and are willing to bet money on it (think Notre Dame or maybe USC, for example).  In something as rare as national championships, I think the numbers are too small to make any meaningful determination (for example, you could argue that over the last 50 years, Stanford has been overrated, since it hasn't won a national championship despite having non-zero odds of winning one each year).  You might be able to do an analysis of whether the spread inherently overrated certain teams over the past decade or so (that would give you over 100 games to use to determine the outcome).  My guess is you might see some deviations from teams going 50/50 against the spread, but that such deviations would be small compared to the house's take.

BC