Relatively Speaking, The Wiseguys Like Nebraska

Earlier this week, the Las Vegas Sports Consultants emerged from their smoke and grease-board filled offices, took off their green-tinted visors to wipe their collective brows with Rolex-clad wrists and unveiled their pre-season poll to the adoration of media and coaches poll haters the world round.

I tried to pack that first sentence with as many tired bookie stereotypes as possible, but I missed the most important one, the commonly held belief that bookmakers are 100 percent objective.

The reason this stereotype exists, of course, is because bookies care not who wins that Friday night San Jose State-Houston game. They only care that, when the game kicks off, they’ve got equal money (or close to it) on both the Spartans and Cougars. After that, the vig takes care of the rest.

You could say that, on a week-to-week basis, Vegas oddsmakers are beholden to perceived market value rather than true market value (so long objectivity!) but to determine the former you have to have a pretty good idea of the latter.

There is no Kelvin scale when it comes to college football power polling, but if there was you could imagine it existing deep in the catacombs of some Vegas casino, the places normally reserved for composite characters in a Ben Mezrich book, visible only to those privileged and powerful enough to not only create it but keep it a secret as well.

That’s a long way of saying that no poll is perfect but, for my money, the LVSC poll strives the hardest towards the ideal and what’s better, they like Nebraska more than any pundit not named Matt Hinton.

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