CFB win total betting: Relying on 2023 bowl goals

It's mid-August, and you've run out of football-themed TV to binge. You've done "Friday Night Lights" for the 13th time, all variations of "Last Chance U," and maybe even succumbed to "Titletown High." You need real football to start like air to breathe.

College football kicks off with Week 0 soon enough. But of the 133 teams at the FBS level, not everyone has championship aspirations - national or conference. For most college athletes - especially after a couple of early season losses - a successful campaign will be defined by whether they get to go on a fun trip at the end of the year.

If you slacked on college football prep, opting instead to drown in Netflix football-adjacent content, the good news is oddsmakers are telling us who - via their regular-season win totals - should be hoping just to make a bowl game.

Low-total teams probably won't be good enough to fight for their right to party, while those lined at 8-plus should get to six wins before mid-November. However, there exists a qualitative desire to get to six victories, followed by team-wide relief once a program becomes bowl eligible.

Let's look at the FBS programs with win totals lined around six and the price on a corresponding bet if they accomplish that goal.

The bowl-eligibility bubble

* From this list of 46 teams, we'll cut the programs whose final game comes against their biggest rival. The thinking is that if a team is already at six wins, a season finale against their rival will keep their attention and motivate them for that seventh W.

For the teams lined at 5.5 and dying for a sixth win, they'll have to play their season finales against a rival who'll want nothing more than to ruin their bowl chances. For example, there's more at stake in the Army-Navy game than just bowl eligibility. Elsewhere, you know a six-win Minnesota team is still going hard after Paul Bunyan's Axe against Wisconsin.

^ We'll cut teams on this list that face each other in the finale. If Appalachian State and Georgia Southern both accomplish their goal of six wins, even if they're both disinterested in a regular-season finale, by rule, one of them still has to win.

~ Some teams from our list meet in their last games, but it sets up for one school to care and the other to have potentially already secured its spot in the postseason. BYU may be going to Stillwater with five wins to take on Oklahoma State, who could already have six. That's a great situation to back the Cougars in the contest and makes it that much more likely we cash both tickets. Of note, FBS newcomers Jacksonville State and Sam Houston aren't eligible for postseason play, so they'll be fully engaged in their final game regardless of their record. That's enough to remove Louisiana Tech from our card but helps our chances for a Middle Tennessee under.

Win total bets

With these three factors applied, here are the win total bets we're left with:

Regular-season win totals are set based on the cumulative win probability of each team's games relative to the oddsmakers' rating. However, the value of the above bets is found in the incalculable elements of late-season focus, preparation, and desire by college athletes to win a game that may seem otherwise meaningless. All these teams would be thrilled with a bowl berth.

Without knowing anything more about them, we used market information and a glance at their late-season schedule to create win total bets on 15% of FBS teams that have value beyond how they're being rated.

This means you can go back to thinking about whether Tim Riggins and Tyra Collette will ever make it work. But now you can do it with a handful of tickets to sweat this coming season.

Matt Russell is the lead betting analyst for theScore. If there's a bad beat to be had, Matt will find it. Find him on social media @mrussauthentic.