It’s painful to see a +333 moneyline winner wasted as it was for our Football Parlay Friday last week. Georgia State came through for us at home against Vanderbilt but, unfortunately, no other squad could get the job done for us.
That’s going to happen with the parlays and that’s why they’re mostly for entertainment. We aren’t risking a lot of money, but instead taking a small position on some fun longshots to root home during a weekend of college football. I’m not entirely sure how East Carolina didn’t pull out a victory for us and Southern Miss had a 14-0 lead in the first quarter. But that’s how it goes.
Season record: 4-29, -$4.76, -7.2% ROI
I’m going to have switch things up a bit this week as I’m not seeing a ton of underdogs that are barking. I was trying to talk myself into Buffalo and Michigan and that just doesn’t seem like any fun. Again, this is supposed to be a fun bet for our Saturday sweat!
The last few weeks, I’ve actually had to narrow my selections down. This week I’m looking into some alternate spreads for a big favorite to cover. For alternate spreads, be sure to shop around as they tend to be more scarcely available.
My alternate spread choice this week is Penn State. The Nittany Lions are facing Kent State this week and the Golden Flashes might be an historically bad FBS team. Kent State would probably be a middle of the road FCS team. The Golden Flashes lost to Saint Francis (PA) two weeks ago, who is now 0-2 against FCS competition. I think there is a fat tail in the distribution here where Penn State wins by a considerable margin.
Kent State gave up 55 points to Pitt and 71 points to Tennessee (with 65 coming in the first half). These performances have made finding alt lines on Kent State is a bit trickier. We’re going to try to take advantage.
I think these five bets all have value — or close to it — according to my college football projection model and I am going to place them in a round-robin parlay. (You can find all of my CFB projections here.)
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The bets:
- Kansas moneyline (+110)
- Arizona State moneyline (+115)
- Baylor moneyline (+105)
- Oklahoma moneyline (+210)
- Penn State -55.5 (+210)
A simple parlay would have all five of these bets together for odds of +8794. That means if you bet $1, you’ll win $87.94. This will be one part of our parlay, but sportsbooks have a feature called round robins that will automatically parlay different combinations.
On BetMGM’s interface, you’ll scroll down your bet slip to see that section. I’ll be selecting “Round Robin 2/5.” This selection parlays each bet with another bet, creating 10 two-game parlays (11 parlays total if you include the five-game parlay above). I’m going to be staking $2 on every bet in this process for a grand total of $22.
The round-robin parlays:
- Kansas/Arizona State/Baylor/Oklahoma/Penn State -55.5 (+8794) — $2 to win $175.90
- Kansas/Arizona State (+351) — $2 to win $7.03
- Kansas/Baylor (+330) — $2 to win $6.61
- Kansas/Oklahoma (+551) — $2 to win $11.02
- Kansas/Penn State -55.5 (+551) — $2 to win $11.02
- Arizona State/Baylor (+340) — $2 to win $6.82
- Arizona State/Oklahoma (+566) — $2 to win $11.33
- Arizona State/Penn State -55.5 (+566) — $2 to win $11.33
- Baylor/Oklahoma (+535) — $2 to win $10.71
- Baylor/Penn State -55.5 (+535) — $2 to win $10.71
- Oklahoma/Penn State -55.5 (+861) — $2 to win $17.22
(Photo of Devin Kargman: Brandon Sumrall / Getty Images)
