At pretty much the halfway mark of the college football season, I wanted to see how the sportsbook betting odds matched up with current EPA leaders and PFF grades. Let’s see if we can find anything worth betting on. For the sake of this analysis we will use DraftKings Sportsbook’s current odds for Heisman.
As it currently stands, DraftKings has Miami’s Carson Beck as the slight betting favorite over Alabama’s Ty Simpson and Indiana’s Fernando Mendoza.
Prior to this past week, the betting favorite was Dante Moore who has since taken a bit of a stumble after a home loss to Indiana, led by Fernando Mendoza.
Below you can see how the top Heisman performers (and preseason favorite Arch Manning, yikes) are faring out in EPA per play vs their offensive performance grade by Pro Football Focus.
Carson Beck has a below average grade from PFF, lower than even Arch Manning’s egregious start to the year. Ty Simpson and Julian Sayin are rating out very well according to PFF but are in line with the bunch when it comes to EPA per play. In Simpson’s defense, they have run the gauntlet of competition already with Florida State, Georgia, Vanderbilt, Missouri. Yet they still have to face Tennessee, LSU, and Oklahoma among others.
Most interesting from this chart is USC’s Jayden Maiava. Performing extremely well from both an EPA per play and PFF offensive rating.
I wanted to take a look further into how these QBs are performing within the team’s opening script versus how the rest of the game plays out. This assumes that the first 15 offensive plays of the game are planned.
It’s interesting to see that guys like Fernando Mendoza and Dante Moore perform better as the game progresses versus the opening stages of the game when it’s presumably neutral.
Sayin, Beck, and less-so Simpson all perform very strongly in their team’s opening stages.
Arch Manning is having a rough year from his preseason hype. If you’re a Texas fan, I apologize for including him.
And again, Jayden Maiava is having an all-time great season.
We can take a few insights away from this. Perhaps Oregon and Indiana are slow starters or could improve some of their early play-calling decision-making, but it’s great to see that when the game gets flowing that they perform very well or that their coaches adapt well. Ohio State and Miami haven’t really been tested much this season so I think it’s a little early to say that they struggle with the flow of the game. Lastly, Lincoln Riley is cooking with Jayden Maiava’s season this year.
Takeaways:
Jayden Maiava is a great value bet at the time of my writing this at +2200. The current leader of the bunch in EPA per play and extremely efficient in both the early phases of the game and the later phases.
Dillon's Data 