We’re more than a full month into the college football season and most teams have played four games. This means it’s a good time to start taking stock of the teams and how they might fare the rest of the way. Uncovering the teams that will be the big point spread winners yet in 2022 can really pay off. The fact is that in the last 10 seasons, 45 teams have won more than 75% or at least 11 games ATS in a season, and the chart below shows those.
There’s plenty of time to take advantage of these big-money teams, if we can uncover them. Think about it, even if a team is 4-0 ATS right now, if they were to finish 75% ATS for the entire season, that would mean at least a 5-3 ATS finish the rest of the way. If you’re thinking you’ve already missed the boat because these teams are off to great starts, think again. The 45 teams in the chart combined to go 282-98 SU and 295-80 ATS (78.7%) the rest of the way after their first four games. It is certainly worth our while to try to lock these teams down.
Readers of my college basketball analysis at tournament time know I like to use “shared characteristics” of past great teams to predict greatness for the coming action. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the shared characteristics of those past 45 top-performing college football ATS teams after four games to see if we can uncover the big-money teams of 2022 to ride them the rest of the way.
Here is a chart of the 45 teams over the last 10 years that have excelled against the spread in a given season.
Narrowing the list of potential ATS breakout teams for 2022
The chart above shows several variables and characteristics of the teams that have enjoyed stellar ATS seasons over the last 10 years. We will look at the 2022 teams and eliminate candidates that don’t fit the shared criteria of the past successful teams. Typically, I am looking for a benchmark of about 80% of teams meeting a certain threshold.
Trait 1: Winning record after three games
Of the 45 teams in the chart above, 30 had winning records after three games. This is a little less than the 80% I prefer, but there were no other possible break points. That would produce a list of 61 teams for 2022 still eligible for our list.
I will show a chart with these results and the eligible teams as we narrow them down a little more, after Trait 2 specifically.
Trait 2: Winning ATS record after three games
Of the 45 teams in the chart above, 40 had won at least three games ATS (>=75%) in their first four games. From our 61-team list, we would have 30 teams remaining that are still eligible qualifiers for our BIG MONEY criteria.