Over the past few weeks, I have taken you on a tour of the college football preseason landscape.

I reviewed the lessons of 2025, examined Michigan State's schedule and analyzed the races in the Big Ten, the rest of the Power Four and the Group of Six. Most recently, I projected the 12-team College Football Playoff.

Across the first seven installments, I shared odds generated by a simulation of the full college football season. In today's finale, we will see whether those numbers might help us win a little money.

That's right: It is time to kick off the 2026 edition of Dr. Green and White's Bad Betting Advice.

The Big Picture

My full-season simulation produces odds that can be compared with futures available at various online sportsbooks. The types of possible wagers include winning a division, reaching a conference championship game, winning a conference, making the College Football Playoff and winning the national championship.

Table 1 summarizes those odds for the consensus preseason top 25.

Table 1: Conference championship, playoff and national title odds for the consensus top 25 in 2026. Simulation probabilities are compared with DraftKings odds to estimate potential return on investment.

Table 1 includes each team's preseason ranking, strength of schedule, and strength-of-schedule ranking. It then lists the probability of each outcome from my simulation, followed by DraftKings odds as of Aug. 24, 2026. I converted the moneylines to implied probabilities for an easier comparison.

The right side shows the projected return on a $100 wager, assuming my simulation reflects the true probability. Bets with a positive projected return are shaded green.

As expected, national title odds track closely with the preseason rankings. No. 1 Ohio State has the best chance to win the championship at 13.7%, followed by No. 2 Oregon (11.5%), No. 3 Notre Dame (8.7%), No. 4 Texas (8.6%) and No. 5 Georgia (7.0%).

Playoff probabilities for the top 10 cluster near 50%, suggesting that roughly half of those highly ranked teams will make the field.

Some will fall short of expectations; others will absorb one loss too many. In my disruptive scenario, No. 6 Indiana (10-2), No. 8 Texas A&M (7-5) and No. 9 Oklahoma (7-5) all miss the field despite being three of the best nine teams in the country.

About 75% of these bets carry a negative projected ROI. That is no surprise: Sportsbooks build an edge into their prices, so the house wins on average.

Still, a few teams show a positive ROI in at least one of the three categories. Texas A&M, Oklahoma, BYU, Iowa and Clemson each post positive returns in at least two.

Which futures and win totals offer the best value? Subscribe to Spartans Illustrated to unlock Dr. Green and White’s highest-rated conference, playoff and national championship wagers, plus the most promising Big Ten bets for 2026.