How to Bet on College Football: The Fundamentals

How to bet on college football: the question of the century. College football provides one of the most exciting fan experiences for the American sports consumer. The NCAA has carved out an essential monopoly on fall Saturdays. This monopoly includes a day-long experience from the preeminent pre-game talk show in sports (College Gameday) during the morning hours to Pac-12 games kicking off at 10:30 PM on the East Coast. Beyond the daily schedule, the sport offers up exciting non-conference matchups (think about an early season Oregon Ducks-LSU Tigers matchup), some of the best rivalries in any sport (Ohio State-Michigan anybody?), and a system where suffering even one loss on a random September afternoon could spell doom for a team’s playoff hopes.

An additional and increasingly integral part of the college football experience for many fans is a way to get their own skin in the game beyond simple fandom: gambling on the games. Similar to any other sport, Vegas has provided its own specific system for placing bets on college football. Let’s take a look at how to get started placing wagers in the college football arena.

The Basics: What Bets Can I Place and Where?

As previously discussed in our college basketball section, the first and most important aspect of placing bets on college football is to identify an appropriate service. As a refresher, if you live in one of the dozen states that currently allow online sports betting, you have a range of options from traditional sportsbooks like Bovada, BetOnline and Bet365 to recent entrants like FanDuel, DraftKings, and Barstool. 

Any of these online betting sites will offer the popular football bets of moneyline, point spread, and over/under options, and you don’t have to pick just one service. Many experienced bettors will have accounts at multiple online sports books so they can “shop” for lines they think provide more value than another (more on this below). Plus, since these online sports books are competing against each other for the right to service your wagers, they run various promotions like guaranteed bets or deposit bonuses that you can choose from. 

Pick your favorite(s), make a deposit, and read on to learn exactly what you can bet on for each college football game. 

Similar to college basketball, college football has a series of basic bets you can place in order to make money off of any available games on a Saturday afternoon.  These include the moneyline bet, betting against the points spread, and betting the over/under (the total number of points scored in an NCAA game).  As another quick refresher, betting the moneyline simply means you pick who will win a football contest outright, a bet against the points spread includes betting on what you believe the final margin for the game will be, and the over/under includes a bet on the total number of points the two teams will combine to score.

Of course there are several other bets available on college football games, including live in-game bets of the above varieties, season long bets on total wins for an individual team, and even bets on who will win an individual conference or the national championship.  We will cover these areas in more depth moving forward, but for now let’s just focus on some of the basic strategies for placing college football bets. 

Strategies for Placing Bets on College Football

With the basics covered on what exact bets you can place on college football, let’s take a step forward and examine a few intricacies about betting on the NCAA games which can help improve your gambling decision making. 

Unlike basketball, tennis, or soccer where the sheer volume of available games to gamble on decreases the betting window for each individual contest (in other words the odds on these games will frequently appear 24 hours or so before it starts), football has a smaller slate of events which predominantly occur on the same day: Saturday. With a decreased comparative list of games, most online betting sites focus on putting out odds for all games at some point on Sunday afternoon. This is important for several reasons, however the most valuable aspect for an individual bettor is the provided opportunity to maximize your betting odds compared to the odds at kickoff: a concept called closing line value.

In short, closing line value is the difference between the Vegas opening odds and the closing line when a college football game kicks off. When the book sets their opening odds on Sunday afternoon, they are obviously setting a number (for instance Florida -6.5 v. South Carolina) they believe accurately represents the difference between the teams at that time.  However, the gambling market is dynamic throughout the week and based on myriad factors the public may view the potential outcome differently than Vegas. As such, each college football matchup’s odds can and will change throughout the week - even if just fluctuating back and forth between half a point or a full point - until the line finally locks at kickoff (the “closing line”).

These factors prompting changes may include: announced injuries, winning (or losing) streaks, a team’s name recognition relative to their positive (or negative) performance up to that point in the season, home field advantage, and/or any other potential intangibles the market may focus on that Vegas may have either incorporated or ignored as statistic noise. 

So how can a bettor use the closing line value concept to their advantage? In short, if you place a bet earlier in the week on Florida -6.5 and the line at kickoff is Florida -8.5, you have “earned” yourself an additional two points against the market at essentially the same base odds.  That is, if Florida wins the game 24-17 and you placed your bet earlier in the week, you win a bet that you would have lost had the bet been placed five minutes before the game starts. 

But be careful, because of course the opposite can also be true! Maybe you jumped on a line Sunday afternoon that you absolutely loved, but a large percentage of the market took the other side on.  You could just as easily find yourself on the other side of the coin by kickoff and have lost a little bit of value (if Florida goes off at -4.5 while you hold a -6.5 ticket). In order to help boost the percentage of times you gain value on your bets relative to the closing line, let’s take a quick look at some of the steps you can take. 

First and foremost, you should be doing research on the games you’re placing a college football on.  This seems obvious, but it can be easy to fall into a trap of wanting to get a bet on a game you know you will watch on Saturday and pull a quick trigger based on an eye test of the opening line. This is a surefire way to leak money over time compared to doing a thorough examination of the two teams.  Does Florida have any lingering injuries? Does South Carolina have an all-american linebacker suspended for the first half due to a previous targeting call? Is Florida’s perfect record inflated due to close wins against bad teams? These are all questions you should have at least some knowledge of prior to placing your bet. 

Next, you should not be placing bets on teams merely based on their names. Oh, look Michigan is playing Western Michigan and is “only” a 13.5 point favorite. Michigan is ALWAYS better than Western Michigan and they will EASILY beat a MAC team by two touchdowns.  This is how sportsbooks make money.  They will always take into account public perception when setting their lines.  If a line is too good to be true between a school everyone knows about and a perceived lesser opponent then you should do even more research than normal to try and ascertain exactly why the line opened where it did. 

Another critical aspect for gaining closing line value is the specific timing of your bet.  A lot of hardcore college football bettors may bet on several different games as soon as they see the odds come out on Sunday in order to maximize their bets relative to the market.  In other words, they may identify a situation where they believe the public will heavily bet on one side during the week thus driving the closing odds in an opposite direction. If you think 90% of the public will back South Carolina +6.5 coming off a massive upset over Georgia, but you believe this was a fluke and the line is lower due to recency bias you may want to get an early bet on Florida expecting to gain closing line value.

Finally, a good way to maximize your closing line value is to use a variety of sportsbooks when placing your college football gambles.  Vegas is not a monolith and sportsbooks will have different lines on the same game.  While these lines are frequently close to one another, you can potentially gain value on a game merely by looking through several sportsbooks and picking the “best” line at the time you place your bet. For example, if three sportsbooks have Florida -6.5 and a fourth has Florida -5.5 when you want to place your bet, then you should clearly bet on the site offering Florida -5.5 as you’ve already generated a point of value relative to the other three books. 

This post merely scratches the surface for college football gambling basics, ideas you should focus on throughout the week while placing bets, and more complex concepts like closing line value. In our next post we will dig into resources which are available for you to use to help make informed decisions as well as more specific statistical areas where you can gain an advantage when placing bets (yards per game, strength of schedule, turnover margin, etc.)

For now, good luck my friends and as always, be responsible with your gambling and never gamble with money that you cannot afford to lose!