Colorado Buffaloes, Deion Sanders are sportsbooks' worst nightmare
Everybody in America seems to be rooting for the University of Colorado this season.
That is, everybody except for the bookies.
After shocking TCU as a very popular three-touchdown underdog in Week 1, Deion Sanders’ Buffaloes took care of Nebraska, 36-14, on Saturday to move to 2-0 overall and 2-0 Against the Spread (ATS).
It was a disastrous result for the sportsbooks, who were quick to react to the win over the Horned Frogs by moving Colorado from a 7.5-point underdog to a three-point favorite against Nebraska.
There were plenty of sharp people who thought the unprecedented adjustment was an overreaction, but the public was happy to hop on the bandwagon, even if it was a square play.
Turns out, Joe Public was right in this case.
And when a darling like Colorado wins, it’s never a good thing for the bookies.
“The ticket count on Colorado is crazy,” Scott Shelton of BetMGM told Vegas Insider’s Patrick Everson before the game. “There’s not an NFL team with as many spread bets as Colorado. They have four times as many spread bets as any pro team.”
In most cases when the public is riding a team like this, we’ll see some smart money come in on the other side. Wise guys are usually happy to sell high in situations like this, and plenty of people will thumb their noses at the casual punters riding a team like the Buffaloes.
But there is a lesson in Colorado’s win over Nebraska: Just because the public is all over a team doesn’t mean it’s a bad bet.
In fact, there will be times when the pros can learn a thing or two from the folks who are not in the sports-betting weeds.
Every once in a while, an outlier team will come along, change things up in the offseason and take a massive leap forward.
The public usually catches onto things like that before the professionals do because most sharps will be careful to adjust a team too much from a small sample.
It’s a good practice in the long run, but in a unique situation like this it pays to be quick, which is not something that most wise guys are comfortable with.
It usually takes a couple of games for professional bettors to adjust teams and they are usually (and rightfully) pretty conservative when it comes to making adjustments in their power ratings, especially after just a couple of games.
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Most sharps will tell you they work extremely hard not to let narratives or outside noise seep into their projections, so when the Sanders soap opera began in Colorado these pundits were probably licking their chops, knowing the public would be fascinated with Colorado right from the jump and that would give them an opportunity to fade the Buffs at a good number.
They were right about one thing: The public has been all over Colorado.
But in this case, it’s the squares that have looked sharp.
