With the Vegas win totals recently being released for the 2015 season, we decided to take a look back at how well Vegas predicted the win totals prior to the 2014 season.

Roll Bama Roll just compiled a nice report on the topic, and we’ll be using the same data that they used which are Bovada’s win totals for each SEC team right before the season kicked off in 2014.

The two key numbers provided by Vegas are the actual number of wins predicted (which can be a whole number or a fraction such as Alabama’s 10.5 wins) and the odds that Vegas attaches to either side of the bet.

Why are the odds important? If Vegas sets the line at 10.5 wins for Alabama, then gives you -150 odds if you bet the over on that line, that means Vegas is essentially discouraging the bet on the over side. -150 means you’d have to bet $150 to win $100. The +120 on the under side says that Vegas is trying to entice betters to take the under on the Alabama win total.

While there are many reasons why Vegas moves the odds around, we’ll just assume for simplicity that a negative number such as -150 means Vegas thinks that side is more than likely to hit. So, we’ll assume that Vegas believes Alabama is more likely to go over 10.5 wins than under. Again, this isn’t entirely true if you know how Vegas works, but for the sake of assigning grades to these predictions, that’s how we’ll approach the topic.

Here’s how we’d grade last year’s Vegas predictions across each SEC team (remember the win totals are just the 12 games in the regular season):

Team Wins (odds) Team Results Vegas Grade
Alabama 10.5 (-150/+120) 11 wins A+
South Carolina 9.5 (-125/-105) 6 wins F
Georgia 9.5 (-125/-105) 9 wins B+
Auburn 9 (-135/+105) 8 wins B-
LSU 9 (-125/-105) 8 wins B-
Ole Miss 8 (-115/-115) 9 wins B
Missouri 7.5 (-135/+105) 10 wins C-
Florida 7.5 (-140/+110) 6 wins B
Mississippi State 7.5 (-130/EVEN) 10 wins C-
Texas A&M 7 (-135/+105) 7 wins A+
Vanderbilt 6 (+155/-190) 3 wins D
Tennessee 5.5 (-135/+105) 6 wins A+
Arkansas 4.5 (-130/EVEN) 6 wins B
Kentucky 3.5 (-180/+150) 5 wins B-

Overall, Vegas was pretty good at predicting the wins. The biggest bust was the South Carolina line considering they missed the number of wins by 3.5 wins and encouraged betting the under on that line. Other misses include Missouri and Mississippi state.

Vegas nailed Alabama, Tennessee and Texas A&M prior to 2014.

Also note that Florida’s win total bet would have been nullified since the Gators’ first game of the season was cancelled. If we assume they would have won that game, the Vegas win total prediction looks better than you might think.

You can view the Vegas win totals for 2015 here.