NCAAF SEC Betting 2021 Season Recap

We've made it through the final weekend without college football until January, which means starting this week, the boys of the Bucket Squad will be giving out our picks for every SEC game of the season for the third year in a row.  I realized I never wrote a recap article where I summarized our collective results like I did after the 2020 season, so let's take a short trip back in time to recount the 2021 college football season and how the five of us fared in our SEC picks.

College football's 2021 season saw Georgia finally breaking through with Kirby Smart to win a national championship over Alabama, despite getting beaten soundly by Bama in the SEC championship game a couple weeks prior.  Georgia had one of the best defenses we've ever seen in college football, as evidenced by the fact that five of their defensive players were taken in the first round of the 2022 NFL draft.  A lot of people thought they still wouldn't be able to get over the hump of beating Alabama, but they did just that in the national championship game, securing a 33-18 victory which was sealed by a pick six from Kelee Ringo.

The five Bucket Squad experts followed along to the SEC schedule closely all season and provided our personal insight into how we expected each game to go.  For every game that an SEC team played in 2021, we picked the straight up victor, the winner against the spread, and the over/under.

​The winner of our competition actually came down to the final game we picked, the SEC championship game, as Jacob and Ryne were neck and neck as the season came to an end.  Here are the final results from our 2021 season:

Congratulations to Jacob for clutching it out at the end to win the second annual Bucket Squad SEC Betting Competition for his second year in a row.  Jacob also had the best record against the spread, while Ryne had the best money line record and Alex was the best at picking over/unders.  We'll try to prevent Jacob from getting his third title in 2022, or we might have to rename the competition to the Bucket Squad SEC Betting Competition presented by Jacob.

As I did after last season, I ran a basic analysis on our picks to try to determine any noticeable trends in our collective effort to provide the most accurate betting advice we could.  Just like last time, I judged our success by the win percentage of bets that we all or mostly agreed upon.

There are three types of bets:

• Money Line
• Against the Spread
• Over/Under

There are three classifications of bet predictions:

• Majority 3 (3 out of 5 of us made the same pick)
• Majority 4 (4 out of 5 of us made the same pick)
• Unanimous (5 out of 5 of us made the same pick)

For each type of bet, I figured out which classification it fell into based on how many of us picked it.  Then, after every bet placed fell into one of the three classifications, I sorted them by type of bet to determine how many times we correctly picked a game right that we agreed upon versus how many times we were incorrect in those scenarios.  Here are the results represented as win/loss records, and also compared to our 2020 results:

The cells shaded green mean we improved as a group from year to year, while the red cells mean we did worse this season than we did the season before.

Here are the results represented as win percentages, with the same shading rules as above:

 As you can see, we did slightly worse this season in picking the money line and winners against the spread.  It is good news that our unanimous picks against the spread improved and hit at a rate of 60 percent, which is quite a good rate for those bets.

We did much better as a whole in betting the over/unders, with the exception of when we had unanimous selections in that area.  However, we only had 16 of those unanimous picks on the point total, as opposed to the 83 bets where either 3 or 4 of us agreed, which is a much larger sample size.  In all, we experienced an improvement of over 10 percentage points on our over/under bets, which is a massive jump in the betting world.  So good job there, fellas.

I would attribute our slightly worse performance in the other two categories to the fact that this season was just harder to predict than usual.  There were more surprising upsets than we've had in recent years, so I think most people probably had a tougher time betting on SEC games throughout 2021.

Our betting data will only get more accurate as we collect more seasons of data, but through our first two years of betting on every SEC game, this is where we stand from a record standpoint:

And here are the win percentages:

For both charts, the green cells simply represent a positive record or win percentage exceeding 50 percent, while the red cells are records or win percentages below 50 percent.

I'm pretty happy with our results from this season, as we've greatly improved our over/under bets to nearly 50 percent and have maintained our bets against the spread above 50 percent as well.

As always, we will continue to do our best to provide the most accurate sports betting predictions on the internet.  Be sure to follow along with what advice we give during each week of the SEC season, and if you listen to what the majority of us predict, there's a good chance you'll end up ahead when the season is all said and done.

Our first bets will take place for this Saturday, when the lone SEC team, Vanderbilt, kicks off their season in week 0.  So stay tuned for our predictions for that game and every game of the SEC calendar in each week that follows up until the SEC championship game on December 3.

Written by Nick Swatson