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Breaking Down What Vegas Thinks the Dawgs Will Do This Year

The oddsmakers in Vegas have started releasing win totals for the 2021 season. We breakdown what the 10.5 game win total says about Vegas's perception of Georgia.

“The house always wins” is an adage, but it comes from a place of truth, especially in college football. The most accurate prediction of who will win a game is the point spread, and preseason win totals are the best way to tell how Vegas feels about a team heading into the season. That being said, it seems like the odds-makers are expecting Georgia to have an outstanding 2021 season.

The way betting for win totals works is that a sportsbook will set a number of wins for the team, and then bets are placed for the team to win more or fewer games than that number during the regular season. Multiple sportsbooks have set Georgia’s preseason win total at 10.5 for the 2021 season. A 10.5 win total means that Georgia’s two most likely predicted outcomes are winning 10 or 11 games this fall. There’s is a big difference between winning ten games and eleven games for teams. There have been plenty of teams with one loss in the regular season that have made the college football playoff and won a national championship. 

No teams have made the college football playoff with two losses during the regular season.

Georgia fans are certainly expecting the Dawgs to win more than ten games this season, and Vegas backs up their confidence. In addition, to win totals, Draft Kings has established the vigorish, or as it is more commonly known, “the juice,” for placing bets on either side of the Dawgs win total. 

The juice is the fee that bookmakers charge for placing a bet with them, but because that fee is different for outcomes that aren’t equally likely, they can also show which option the sportsbook thinks is more likely to occur. A negative number represents how much money you would have to put down to win $100, and a positive number is how much money you would make on a $100 bet. As such, a negative number indicates a more likely winning scenario than a positive number. 

The over for Georgia’s win total is juiced for -125, and the under is +100. In this case, the juice shows that Vegas believes it is more probable that Georgia wins 11 or more games than they win ten or fewer.

When you combine the odds on the win totals with the early point spreads released for the Georgia v. Clemson game, you gain the complete picture of what odds-makers believe the Dawgs season will look like. Georgia is a three-point underdog to Clemson in the opener. Still, by juicing the win total to favor 11 wins, sportsbooks indicate that they believe Georgia will win every other game this season.

A close loss in the season’s opening game would be a disappointment for Kirby Smart and the Dawgs. However, if they could win out in the regular season, they would be guaranteed a chance to play in the SEC championship and a chance to win a national championship berth. That is all Georgia fans could hope for, and they should be able to rest a little easier knowing that the best analysts in the country think that is the most likely outcome for the Dawgs’ regular season.

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