Notre Dame Football: What Chance Does Vegas Give the Irish To Win it All?
By J.P. Scott
The national championship odds are out for Notre Dame football and the rest of the country.
What are the chances that Notre Dame football wins the National Championship this season? Let’s just say “good, not great.”
Oddshark.com has opening lines for every FBS team in regard to getting to and winning the College Football Playoff this season.
The oddsmakers have Notre Dame as a +3300 bet. For you gambling novices, that means you’d win $3,300 for every $100 you bet.
In all, 21 college football programs have odds as good or better than what Notre Dame has. Alabama is the favorite at +250. Seven teams have the same odds as the Irish: Florida State, South Carolina, Southern Cal, Stanford, Texas A&M, Virginia Tech and West Virginia.
Interestingly enough, four of those teams — Florida State, Southern Cal, Stanford and Virginia Tech — are on the Notre Dame football schedule in 2018.
The only team on Notre Dame’s 2018 slate with outright better odds to win the national championship at this point is Michigan. The Wolverines opened at +900.
The rest of the odds for Notre Dame opponents are as follows:
Ball State: +150,000
Vanderbilt: +50,000
Wake Forest: +10,000
Pitt: +50,000
Navy: +125,000
Northwestern: +15,000
Syracuse: +25,000
You can make what you want of these numbers.
On one hand, they’re just odds designed to get people to put money down. But if you trust the wise guys in the desert, you look at these numbers and conclude that Notre Dame should have seven wins without question, four toss-up games and one loss.
That’s if you gauge each team’s overall talent level by their chances to win the national championship.
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Basically, the best-case, worst case scenarios according to these numbers put the Irish anywhere between 7-5 and 11-1 for the 2018 season. From as unbiased a stance as I can muster, that seems pretty accurate. I’d be shocked if they went 12-0 or finished .500 or worse. Anything else wouldn’t surprise me.
Looks like Las Vegas knows what it’s doing.