• Who Is The Public Betting On College Football Rankings
• Who Is The Public Betting On College Football Game
• Who Is The Public Betting On College Football Bowl
• Who Is The Public Betting On College Football Teams
• Who Is The Public Betting On College Football Games
• Who Is The Public Betting On College Football

College Football Betting Trends. See who the public is betting on and get deeper insight into the college football betting marketplace. These percentages represent real bets made at our contributing sportsbooks. Unlike other sites that only show consensus data, our NBA basketball odds data is taken from real bets placed at actual sportsbooks. College football betting in New Jersey. College football betting is undoubtedly a big part of the pie in New Jersey, because of the massive interest in college football generally. But that is not because of interest in the in-state teams. Rutgers sometimes makes a bowl game but is usually not a player on the national scale.

1. A college football consensus pick is the bet that’s favored by the majority of bettors. It’s usually expressed as a percentage of bets provided from the sportsbook to give you a look at what the general public is betting on a given game.
2. College football betting odds making is mainly an average of numbers and statistics but it is also partly a feel. A good college football betting odds maker will be able to see which way the public is likely to bet and make the odds accordingly. That does not always mean the college football betting line will be perfectly balanced as it should be.

Let’s say that, early in the week leading up to Nov. 21, you got a tip that the Pittsburgh Panthers would have multiple players out due to COVID-19 protocols in their upcoming game against Virginia Tech (something that’s been all too common during the 2020 season). The Hokies had just gone 1-3 in four straight one-score games, but by the adjusted scoring margin, they played better than average in all four of them. The Panthers had been blown out in two of their previous three.

Let’s say you took Virginia Tech as a 3-point road favorite based on that tip and waited for the news to break — and break it did. Shortly before the game, Pitt announced that it would play down seven starters and 16 players total. The line shot up to Virginia Tech -6.5 or -7, depending on the book. You would have probably felt secure in this bet cashing since you beat the line by a field goal or more of closing line value. Virginia Tech also had its own COVID-19 absences (four starters), but even before the line moved, the Hokies were projected by power ratings to cover the initial 3-point spread.SP+ projected Virginia Tech to win by nearly 6 points, for instance.

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Who’s the most chaotic fictional football coach? FiveThirtyEight

And so you settled in with ticket in hand, only to watch the Panthers absolutely blow the doors off of the Hokies in a 47-14 outright win. Wait, what?

It was a quintessential 2020 college football betting story. During a season that we weren’t sure should have been played, things have been rendered even more complicated for people outside the game, whether they’re just betting for fun or rely on it to make a living. Results like this go beyond tough beats and into a realization that, in yet another way, this year is not normal. The sport has been uniquely difficult to predict for those trying to find a reliable edge.

Even people who know what they’re doing are having weird seasons

Simply put: We were behind the eight ball way before the season even started, according to Parker Fleming, a college football analyst and economist.

The difficulty in handicapping this season goes back months if you consider the type of offseason many teams had — or, more accurately, didn’t have — thanks to the pandemic. Out of 130 Football Bowl Subdivision teams, 111 didn’t even make it halfway through their 14 allotted spring practices, and 40 percent, including bluebloods Alabama and Texas, didn’t get in even one spring practice. The strange offseason was just the first shock to the prognosticating system.

“Every good prediction is going to involve some kind of priors — a prior being some sort of belief or assumption or distribution of the way things should be,” Fleming said. “We know continuity in offseason work really matters. So without spring and with guys opting out and transfers and all this sort of stuff going on that’s unique to this situation and the vast uncertainty, there’s a huge shock to priors. And so that makes things really really hard because you can’t really think about the season the same way you’d think about a normal year.”

If you want to get even semi-serious about betting college football, a great place to start is to build a power ranking. There are some fancy ways to do it, but you can also just average a team’s ratings in a few of the predictive models already out there to make spreads of your own. One you could include is the SP+ rankings system created by ESPN’s Bill Connelly.SP+ went 53 to 54 percent against the spread in 2019 with a 12.4 absolute error, per Connelly. The ranking system is routinely north of 50 percent and near the percentage to turn a profit (roughly 52.5 percent) if you tailed him on all the games .

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Models like Connelly’s factor in opponent adjustments and tempo and are weighted in the early season by preseason projections that phase out as teams play games, which keeps wonky early-results from skewing a team’s rating. But models are perhaps uniquely suited to miss this season.

Using The Prediction Tracker, we tracked the most accurate systems that put out predictions from 2015-2019 to compare how they’re doing in 2020. We judged accuracy using the lowest mean absolute error, which tells us how far off a prediction is from the final scoring margin of the game, with anything below 12.5 considered exceptional, according to Connelly. Combining absolute error and performance against the spread gives us a full picture of a model’s accuracy — doing well against the spread with a high absolute error signals that a model is lucky as opposed to actually good.

2015-2019 Seasons			2020 Season
System	Straight up %	% vs. spread	Mean Error/G	Straight up %	% vs. spread	Mean Error/G
Dokter Entropy	74.5%	50.3%	12.68	73.3%	52.3%	13.09
ESPN FPI	74.5	50.3	12.75	74.1	52.1	13.03
Pi-Ratings Mean	74.4	50.9	12.80	71.2	54.5	13.09
Sagarin Ratings	74.0	50.8	12.85	72.0	48.1	13.92
Donchess Inference	73.9	50.8	12.93	75.3	53.7	13.09
Massey Ratings	73.0	50.0	13.13	70.8	49.5	13.79
Moore Power Ratings	73.0	51.0	13.13	70.8	49.0	13.96
ThePowerRank.com	74.0	50.6	13.14	70.6	51.5	13.46
Stat Fox	73.4	49.6	13.16	71.0	52.4	13.89
Catherwood Ratings	74.0	50.6	13.23	71.6	50.5	13.96
Average of top 10	73.9	50.5	12.98	72.1	51.4	13.53

On average, the systems are picking games straight up less correctly, and their absolute error is 0.55 points worse per game. So some of the best tracked models in college football predictions are just fine against the spread, but when they miss against the actual scoring margin, they really miss.SP+ is 51.2 percent against the spread this season, with a 13.6 absolute error.

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“If you’re a good stats-based handicapper, you’re gonna start with a model and you’re gonna make manual adjustments afterwards because you know this quarterback’s out or this team’s checked out or whatever the situation is,” Connelly said. “You’re going to be able to manually adjust for those things, and that’s not what a model technically does.”

One such handicapper is Bud Elliott, a college football writer for 247Sports.com. He uses a composite power rating and marries it with his own knowledge of teams and players. A team-based model would know that Team A beat Team B by 40 points last week, but it wouldn’t know that Team B had barely practiced in the preceding 10 days because contact-tracing protocols are forcing quarantines and on and on. You have to do that as the bettor, but how exactly do you calibrate it?

“If you have a good model, and you know for sure who is out and who they’re being replaced by and you have a feel for that, then you should be able to adjust your numbers appropriately,” Elliott said. “I think availability of information this year has been important. One thing I’m not sure how to grasp this year is how much missing practice either for a given week or for a team that is going virtual training for the week or whatever or whatnot is impacted. It’s hard to quantify that. You need to be able to quantify those things.”

Football and other sports like hockey are consistently opaque in the injury information they issue, a problem rooted in the perceived competitive advantage that secrecy can preserve. The NFL at least forces teams to produce injury reports several times a week, and the league’s COVID-19 protocol reporting is generally good. But in college football, there’s nothing close to standard injury reporting even outside of a pandemic. That’s one of the reasons official inactive reporting runs the gamut of styles from …

This (and it wasn’t made clear which of these absences were connected to COVID-19):

The following Georgia Southern players (in alphabetical order) are inactive for today’s football game against Campbell and will not dress for the contest:#HailSouthernpic.twitter.com/D9DfCIEsuZ

— Georgia Southern Football (@GSAthletics_FB) September 12, 2020

To this:

Tonight’s Unavailability Report pic.twitter.com/AvFUsAdGJJ

— Virginia Tech Football (@HokiesFB) September 26, 2020

“I put that disclaimer” about the season’s high level of uncertainty “on my column [in Week 2] like, guys, I really don’t know how this is gonna go,” Elliott said. “It’s been a little disappointing in some regard.”

Connelly also has a best bets column, in which he selects from games where SP+’s projections disagree with the lines by more than 3 points and also have lines around key numbers (13.5, 2.5, etc.). He did much better than 50 percent in 2019. Not so much in 2020.

“There is no system this year,” Connelly said. “I’m under .500 for best bets this year, and I’ll look at trends and do I have a good read on these teams and all of a sudden: no. It just really is a lot harder to come up with any sort of patterns or any sort of comfort level as far as the types of picks you’re looking for.”

So, what about the books?

The lines themselves are also performing quite poorly when compared with the actual results of the games. In fact, the mean absolute prediction error of the line itself hasn’t been this high (12.96) since 2002.

When you’re trying to beat the books, one way to do it is to beat the line to where it’s going to end up. You can do that by generating a power rating yourself for each team and seeing how it measures up against the opening spread for each game. If you do this on Sunday and your power rating says Team A is -7 against Team B and the opening line has Team A at -2, then you’d think you have an inside track at an advantage, all things being equal (no injuries or other issues). If you take Team A at -2, you have a better number than where you believe the line will end up. This is the concept of chasing closing-line value: When you try to beat the line, you’re also trying to beat the book to where the line might move by kickoff six days later.

Ed Salmons, the vice president of risk management at the Westgate SuperBook, laid out his bookmaking philosophy pretty simply: The best bookmaking is about getting to the closing line first. That’s all well and good in a normal year, but this is not a normal year — and playing closing-line value this year is a dangerous game.

“It’s so hard to be betting early in the week when you’re fighting for a number that you think is good, and then your team’s got some guys at the important positions that have [COVID-19] and you’re kind of screwed,” Salmons said.

The data backs that up to a staggering extent. From 2015 to 2019, we found that the line got just 0.04 points per game more accurate between the opening line and midweek, then improved another 0.04 points by the time it closed. But in 2020? The line’s accuracy has increased by 0.52 points per game between the opener and midweek.We assume this is because the opening line doesn’t know a lot about coming COVID-19 absences; as the week goes on, bettors gather information and move the line. It’s not necessarily surprising that knowledge about player absences in general would make a forecast better. In FiveThirtyEight NFL forecasts from 2015 through 2019, adjusting for starting QBs increases the correct pick rate by 1.5 percentage points and decreases the mean absolute error in the spread by 0.21 points per game. This year, the QB adjustment boosts the accuracy of NFL picks by 3.7 percentage points.

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This all tracks with something Salmons has noticed: The big plays at his book are now coming later in the week, and high rollers are waiting just like the rest of us to learn what COVID-19 will do to a team’s roster. But as the season has gone on and games have been canceled more frequently (instead of just postponed), some big plays will roll in on games that are at risk of not being played because of COVID-19. If the game gets canceled, the bet just gets refunded.

While the line itself is missing at a higher rate than normal, favorites are covering at a rate consistent with a normal year. Through Dec. 15, college football favorites were 256-258-9 against the spread, while NFL favorites were 92-116. The former is normal, but the latter is not.College favorites are still covering at a 49.8 percent clip in 2020, compared with 49.7 percent for the previous five years, but NFL favorites are covering only 44.2 percent of the time, well below the 2015-19 average of 48.5 percent.

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Lines can adjust in ways that algorithms can’t, and the books are keeping tabs on things a little bit more closely than regular folks — even if bookmakers like Salmons are using the same tools as ordinary bettors.Salmons says he largely uses Twitter and TweetDeck.

'>⁶ Salmons says the handle (a fancy betting term for cash) for NFL games is roughly where it should be because the league has brute-forced its way through the pandemic without any game cancellations. The college handle is lower, but that’s largely because of the volume of games lost to cancellation every week.

After five weeks in a row of college football's week-over-week games played percentage declining, it increased in Week 14, but the overall percentage still dropped.

For the season, 81.1 percent of the games scheduled have been played. pic.twitter.com/ov1cM2CbIR

— Andy Wittry (@AndyWittry) December 6, 2020

But when it comes down to the big plays in general, those are part of a broader story about how the pandemic has hurt Las Vegas’s bottom line. Salmons says he’s seeing fewer big players — and fewer huge plays.

“You just don’t have the tourism out here that you’d have in previous years,” Salmons said. “It’s such an ordeal now to get on a plane and come out here, and you got to wear the mask everywhere. It’s just harder to get those kinds of people into town”

It might be best to just write these oddities off as a 2020 thing

Even if you’re just betting for fun, it’s still frustrating to get to the end of a Saturday, having used a process you believe to be sound, only to be dealt another week of brutal results. Turning a profit — whether you’re trying to win real money or you just want to puff your chest about your record because you’re competitive — is hard, and this year made it much harder. But chin up: Maybe the tips will be worth something in 2021.

Neil Paine contributed research.

NCAA Football Betting Strategies: Guide to the Top Systems

College Football Betting Intro

When we talk about football, we usually think first of the NFL. It is after all America’s most popular sports organization.

As we discussed in our Intro to NFL Betting, the American Gaming Association estimated bettors to have wagered upwards of $4.7 billion dollars on the nation’s most-watched sporting event this past year—the Super Bowl.

And that’s just one estimate. When you look at the global numbers, this figure nearly doubles. Mint, a prominent financial planning website, estimates that bettors stake more than $8 billion every year on the Super Bowl alone.

But the NFL is not the only league to garner such attention from bettors.

NCAA football is right up there with it.

In 2014, Super Bowl XLIX only generated about 10,000 more bets than the most heavily bet college football game

In 2014, Super Bowl XLIX only generated about 10,000 more bets than the most heavily bet college football game: 122,370 compared to 112,644. And, according to CNBC, bettors stake between $60-70 billion in illegal wages on college football each year.

Since the NCAA decided to establish and expand their playoff format, bowl games and championships have proven to be hot opportunities for bettors.

Unlike the NFL, which plays almost all its games on Sunday, college football offers bettors the chance to wage on matchups happening throughout the week, including thirty plus matchups on Saturdays.

A greater slate of games means more money lines, more spreads, more chances to get some bang for your buck.

According to SportsInsights there was a point spread listed for 894 college football games in 2015. Meanwhile, in merely a handful of offshore sportsbooks, a grand total of 12,774,988 bets were placed during the college football season.

With so many options it’s easy to see why college football ranks as one of the most bet-on sports in America.

Who Is The Public Betting On College Football Rankings

As part of this article, we will discuss the different types of bets you can make on college games as well as some helpful tips and strategies for maximizing your returns.

But before we get into all that, let’s first take a look at the basics of our very own predictive wager system.

The Sports Analytics Simulator

The Simulator is built based on a predictive model created by a doctor with an extensive background in mathematics, psychology, and operations research.

The best networks were able to correctly predict the winning team 74.33 percent of the time (on average) as compared to the experts who were correct 68.67 percent of the time.

This individual has worked with multiple professional and collegiate sports organizations, player agents, sports data agencies and a top-ranked fantasy website. His work with professional sports organizations includes optimizing scout travel, in-depth player analysis and lineup configurations.

Among his greatest innovations was the discovery of neural networks as a powerful tool for sports betting.

A neural network is defined as a computer system modeled on the human brain and nervous system. Using this technology, the good doctor found that “the best networks were able to correctly predict the winning team 74.33 percent of the time (on average) as compared to the experts who were correct 68.67 percent of the time.”

While the model was initially developed around NBA betting, it has since been applied to other sports — chief among them, college football.

What makes the Sports Analytics Simulator unique is that it relies not on data inputs (statistics) from previous seasons, but on continuous game-to-game updates.

The Simulator’s specific algorithms run through up to forty different stat categories to create the most efficient model possible. From this model, we derive our picks for each game. And the best part is, our system is a living, breathing predictive model — it possesses machine learning capacities that allow to detect trends and potentials that we mere humans could only dream of finding.

For more information, check out this handy dandy video on how it works:

College Football Betting

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about the fundamentals of college football betting. Much like the NFL, college football offers the standard bets: spread, moneyline, totals, parlays, and teasers. Unique to college football are the 1st quarter and halftime bets. Let’s take a look at each type.

Spread Bet

Just like the NFL, college football’s most popular wager is the spread bet.

With spreads, bookmakers set a spread with a favorite and an underdog. This type of bet equalizes the chance of winning a wager.

In order for you to win on a bet of this nature, one team must cover the spread — so if the spread is -7 in favor of the Florida State over Oregon, the Sentinels must win by seven points or more. Whereas in order for the Ducks to cover the spread, they must either lose by less than seven points, or win.

For any spread, the underdog is indicated by a “+” while the favorite is indicated by a “-”. To make it simpler, the spread gives the underdog a ‘head start’. In this case, the Ducks have a +7 head start in points to kick off the game.

Also, when looking at spreads, you’ll see a larger number next to the actual spread. It might look like this:

• Florida State -7 -115
• Oregon +7 -105

The larger number is what’s called the Juice. It’s basically the fee that bookmakers charge for you to place a bet. In our example, if Florida State covers the spread a winning bet of $115 will yield $100 profit. Now, if you simply want to bet on the winner of the game you’ll want to place a…

Moneyline Bet

Moneyline betting is an equally common form of sports betting as spread bets. The difference is that with moneylines, bookmakers will set lines representing the favorite and the underdog. Let’s go back to this Florida State-Oregon matchup.

Let’s say the Sentinels have a favored line of -150 and the Ducks have an underdog line of +125. What this means is that in order to win a hundred dollars on the Sentinels, you must wage $150.

As for the underdogs, if you wage $100 you will win $125. Generally, the moneyline reflects the spread.

With the sheer number of available bets on a given Saturday, a bettor may choose to parlay (see below) several big favorites, which will increase the risk AND the payout of the wager. So that’s that.

Totals Bet

Totals betting is rather self-explanatory.

Also known as over/under, this form of betting involves placing a wager on the total number of points scored by both teams combined in a game.

Let’s say bookmakers set an over/under of 32 points for the Sentinels and Ducks. Your job as a bettor is to decide whether the score will be… over or under 32 points.

Prop Bet

A prop bet is a special kind of bet that has nothing to do with the outcome or final score of a game.

Prop bets come in many different forms. Some of them are player-based — how many yards or touchdowns a specific player scores. Some of them are based in live betting, i.e. if a team scores on a specific drive.

During bowl games you’ll see all sorts of fun prop bets like coin toss wagers.

Parlay Bet

Who Is The Public Betting On College Football Game

You might have seen a parlay bet featured in the film, Silver Linings Playbook, (or read it in the book), wherein Pat Solitano’s father, Patrizio Sr., places a bet on the Eagles-Cowboys game and the judging outcome of Pat and Tiffany’s dance number in a local dance-off.

In order for Patrizio to win the bet, the Eagles must win their game against Dallas and Tiffany and Pat must score 5 out of 10 in their dance competition.

This is what’s known as a parlay bet, wherein various games and outcomes are rubber-banded together into one single bet.

In order for the bettor to win the wager, all outcomes must unfold accordingly. This might involve a handful of other bets such as a totals bet and a moneyline bet. In college football, this is a common form of betting to increase risk and reward for your wagers.

Teaser Bet

A teaser bet is a form of parlay that involves a combination of two to ten wagers in which you adjust the point spreads and/or totals in your favor in exchange for a lower payout.

When your teaser includes a point spread, you have the option to decrease the spread for the favorite or increase the spread for the underdog.

When you’re teasing a total, you can increase the under or decrease the over.

Like a parlay, winning the bet is dependent on all of the wagers winning.

Standard teasers are 6, 6.5 and 7-point. There’s also a sweetheart teaser, which offers you have the choice to tease a line by 10 or 13 points. It’s basically a parlay with a little bit of zazz.

A teaser involves the same stipulations as a parlay; only you select a number of points to put down to decrease the risk (and reward) of a parlay.

For example, if a spread for a game is -7 and you place a 3-point teaser bet, your new line is -4. This 3-point advantage applies to each aspect of the teaser play.

College Football Betting Stats

Now that you know the basics of college football betting, let’s touch on some important factors to consider when handicapping games.

First and foremost, you’ve got to understand the nature of college football. In the NFL, all 32 teams are relatively equal in stature. Size, speed, skill—the NFL is filled with ever-tight competition.

But in college football, the stakes are different. Emotions run high. Motivations change week-to-week, game-to-game.

Up to 70 players can impact the outcome of a given matchup.

Experts have a lot of ideas about what statistics most impact a college football game. The following five, derived from numbers from the 2016 season, have consistently proven their influence on a team’s odds.

Explosiveness – as measured by PPP (points per play)

This one is simple. If a team makes more big plays than their opponent, they’re likely to win the game.

According to statistics, if a team leads in PPP they will win 86 percent of their matchups.

So look for a team with a penchant for big plays, and keep an eye on their opponents’ defensive stats.

If they’re giving up high PPP numbers each week, there’s a good chance they’ll lose.

Efficiency – as measured by success rate.

Success rate is measured by a number of baselines: 50% of needed yards on first down, 70% on second down, and 100% on third or fourth down.

This stat is similar to on-base percentage in baseball.

If a team has a high efficiency rating, they’re likely to avoid drive-crippling passing downs and, beyond that, stay on schedule, control the clock, and wear down their opponent’s defenses by keeping on the field.

If a team can best their opponent in efficiency, they’ll also win the game 83 percent of the time.

Field Position – as measured by average starting field position

They say special teams wins games. That’s what makes them so special.

Sure, it’s always a boost when a return man can return a kick or a punt for a touchdown. But it’s his ability to consistently provide his team with outstanding starting field position that determines his worth. Hence why good return men are so highly coveted in football.

They are often their team’s x-factor—the difference between having to drive 75 yards or 65 yards to the end zone.

As such, the team who wins the battle for field position wins the game 72 percent of the time.

Finishing Drives – as measured by points per trip inside the 40

Finish what you’ve started.

At this point you might find these tips a bit formulaic. It stands to reason that if a team creates big scoring plays, controls the clock, manages the ball, establishes solid field position, minimizes turnovers, and maximizes scoring drives, they’ll likely win the game.

When it comes to finishing drives, it’s less about how many opportunities you get inside the red zone, and more about how many points you can score once inside the 40.

There are numerous examples of teams creating more red zone opportunities but fewer scores than their opponent.

In 2012, Hawaii created 12 scoring opportunities against Colorado State’s four on October 27. They outgained the Rams by 102 yards, but still lost, 42-27. Talk about demoralizing.

The Warriors lost three turnovers (at the CSU 30, 31, and 33), punted twice (at the CSU 39 and 40), attempted three field goals (missing one), and turned the ball over on downs at the 2. Not to mention one of those three turnovers was an interception returned for a touchdown.

The point is straightforward: teams must score touchdowns on the majority of their drives that reach beyond their opponent’s 40.

Field goals will not cut it.

Basically, if a team can still put points on the board despite fewer scoring opportunities, they’ll win the game 72 percent of the time.

Turnovers – as measured by turnover margin

If we’re not beating a dead horse by now I don’t know what we’re doing.

Surprisingly enough turnovers are not the biggest factor to consider when handicapping games. But they still matter.

If you can minimize the amount of times you give up the ball, you’re obviously going to increase your chances of capitalizing on offense.

Who Is The Public Betting On College Football Bowl

Keep the ball in your possession, and the game is likely yours—assuming you can put the ball in the end zone. The team that wins the turnover battle wins the game 73 percent of the time.

Who Is The Public Betting On College Football Teams

While mastering these five aspects will go a long way towards helping a team win, bettors must not solely rely on them for handicapping games. College football outcomes swing like a loose pendulum.

Who Is The Public Betting On College Football Games

Cellar dwellers beat good teams when they’re not looking, or at the very least beat the spread. Slumping squads can come out strong against rivals or must-wins.

Oh, and there are other conferences besides the big ones (SEC, Big 12, Big 10, ACC, Pac 12).

Oddsmakers tend to look at the big TV games and the big conference matchups—the ones they know the betting public will be going heavy on.

This means, smaller conference games will likely slip through the cracks. If you’re betting ‘over/unders,’ look at the smaller conferences as value could be there because of the lack of two-way action.

Who Is The Public Betting On College Football

There is big money to be made in smaller-market games. One thing I’ve learned in life is never to follow the crowd. If you want to outsmart oddsmakers and increase your returns, be your own advocate, look for the games people are sleeping on.

Thankfully, they’re not hard to find in the NCAA.