1. The most popular college football bet is betting against the spread (ATS). Against the spread betting isn’t about picking a winner of the game, it’s about picking the team who will cover the spread, a line set by sportsbooks.
2. A college football betting season ravaged by COVID-19 finally saw its completion, with Alabama crowned as the National Champion after thumping Ohio State.
3. With the Big Ten and Pac-12 postponing their seasons due to the coronavirus pandemic, sportsbooks across the U.S. Have halted betting on college football.

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.

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.

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.

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 .

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.

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.

Who Is The Public Betting On College Football Teams

“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?

Who Is The Public Betting On College Football Scores

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.

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.

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.

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.

Our team at The Sports Geek has spent countless hours combing through tons of online sportsbooks with college football odds, and we are proud to present our selections for the absolute best real money NCAA football betting sites.

Using an extensive list of criteria, we assessed nearly every aspect of each site to ensure the best possible player experience. You can trust that playing on any of these online NCAAF betting sites will be enjoyable.

It is worth mentioning that we don’t get paid for placing any of these sites on our list. Our recommendations are given based on our experience with these sites. We provide you with accurate, objective information. Later, we will discuss some of the criteria we used in making our selections, and we encourage you to use these as a resource when researching for any future NCAAF betting website.

Attributes of High-Quality NCAAF Betting Sites

Strong Website Security

The first important thing you should consider when looking for where to bet on NCAA football games online is website security. You must play on an NCAAF betting website that makes sure to keep all your data privates. The NCAA football betting sites we chose each use state-of-the-art technology to guard against cyber threats. Our security experts have vetted each of the college football betting sites, and all of them are verified secure. We picked the platforms that use cutting-edge software and advanced encryptions to keep your data away from prying eyes. You can be sure that if you choose to play on any site we recommend, you’ll have the safest online gambling experience possible.

Online College Football Betting Platforms

It is also vital that you choose real money NCAAF betting sites that provide multiple ways to play. In this day and age, players want to have access to their accounts from anywhere. You must be able to place bets on your PC but also your phone and tablet. By providing a variety of ways to bet, you’ll have much better access to your account. You will be able to take advantage of any opportunity, even if you can’t get to a computer.

User Interface

In addition to multiple platforms, you want to play on a site that is easy to use. The user experience on your website will be a crucial driver in determining the quality of your playing experience. Each NCAAF betting website we selected has invested in building clean, straightforward, and beautiful CFB betting platforms. Not only will betting on any site we recommend be easy, but you will enjoy spending time on the site as well.

New Player Bonuses

Next, when looking for where to bet on NCAAF, you want to look for valuable new player signup bonuses. These are bonuses that college football betting websites offer to new players as an incentive to choose their site over the competition. Most of the time, these will come in the form of a deposit match when the account is first funded. Let’s say you find a site offering a 50% match on the first $500 deposited. This means if you start with more than $500, they will give you an extra $250 in credit.

Real Money Betting Promotions

Similar to new player bonuses, promos are tools used by online sportsbooks to attract and retain players. These are much less exclusive than new player bonuses, and these generally apply to all players. NCAA football betting websites can offer a wide range of promotions, from boosting odds to bet matches. There is no limit to the creativity of promos, and they can add a fun new twist to your bets. Many times, you will need to opt into a promo, so make sure to check regularly to see which ones may apply to you.

Competitive NCAAF Odds

As you might expect, you also want to bet on an NCAA college football betting website that provides you with the best possible odds. When we talk about odds, we are referring to the data provided by the bookmaker that tells us what a bet pays along with the relative likelihood of that bet winning. We’ll discuss odds in more detail, but for now, just remember that you want to play on a site with better college football odds so you get larger payouts when you win. Each online NCAAF betting website creates their own wagers, so the variety of bets and odds can vary from site to site. We’ve got a list of college football betting sites that offer some of the best odds on the internet.

Who Is The Public Betting On College Football Bowl

Cryptocurrency

In 2017, Bitcoin exploded in value and became a household name across the world. Since then, cryptocurrencies have found a foothold as a viable currency worldwide. With millions of users and thousands of different coins, it was just a matter of time before this new form of money found its way into online gambling. Players prefer to gamble using cryptocurrencies because they usually offer more anonymity, more flexibility, and are less expensive to use than conventional currencies. You’ll find that the NCAAF betting sites on our list support crypto, and many of them even have exclusive promos just for crypto players.

Customer Service

Last but not least, any good real money NCAAF betting website needs to offer best-in-class customer service. We looked for sites that provide players with around-the-clock support via multiple channels, including phone, email, and live chat. These sites have millions of satisfied customers, and each has a long track record of putting players first. Should you ever have an issue, you want the sports betting site to have your back. If you ever run into a problem while playing on a website we recommend, you can be sure you will get a resolution quickly and professionally.

Resources for College Football Betting

Free NCAA Football Betting Picks

You’ll find tons of great resources on The Sports Geek to help you get into online NCAA football betting. The first of those is our collection of expert college football picks. Our experts provide both picks and in-depth analysis on tons of matchups that can help you make your decisions. Their analysis will include everything from stats to players to college football betting tips that will be game-changing for your strategy. You will get valuable peeks into what the pros are thinking, which can help you refine your own strategy. Over time, you will see patterns you can apply to your picks. Think of it as having your own personal mentor for each and every bet you place.

• Ohio State at Alabama NCAAF AI Prediction – CFP National Championship

• Ohio State Buckeyes vs. Alabama Crimson Tide Pick – National Championship January 11, 2021

• West Virginia at Army NCAAF AI Prediction – Liberty Bowl

• Ball State at San Jose State NCAAF AI Prediction – Arizona Bowl

• Tulsa at Mississippi State NCAAF AI Prediction – Armed Forces Bowl

• West Virginia Mountaineers vs. Army Black Knights Pick – Liberty Bowl December 31, 2020

• Ball State Cardinals vs. San Jose State Spartans Pick – Arizona Bowl December 31, 2020

• Tulsa Golden Hurricane vs. Mississippi State Bulldogs Pick – Armed Forces Bowl December 31, 2020

• Florida at Oklahoma NCAAF AI Prediction – Cotton Bowl Classic

NCAAF AI Computer Picks

In addition to expert picks, we also give you access to our AI picks. We use artificial intelligence models that use complex predictive algorithms to make the best possible picks. These models take thousands of factors into account in determining the most statistically probable outcome for each matchup. The great thing about using a computer model is that it learns over time, and the system is continually improving itself. Each incorrect pick adds another data point to make each subsequent pick better.

College Football Betting News

Who Is The Public Betting On College Football Rankings

If you want to be successful in NCAAF betting, you need to stay on top of the news. Things happen too quickly to make informed decisions if you aren’t up to speed. We can help by providing up-to-date NCAAF news on everything happening within the college football world. While it’s great to know your numbers, football is more than just statistics. We can help you understand what’s happening while also helping you identify proper NCAAF betting opportunities and risks. Check out our college football news page to see all the breaking stories, so you can always be prepared to make informed bets.

• Ohio State QB Justin Fields Declares for 2021 NFL Draft

• Devonta Smith’s Record-Breaking First Half Lifts Alabama Over Ohio State in CFP Title Game

• Trevor Lawrence Officially Declares for the 2021 NFL Draft

• Alabama’s DeVonta Smith is First WR Since 1991 to Win Heisman Trophy

• Clemson Tigers Dominate Latest AP College Football Poll

• No.1 Clemson is Favorite To Win Sixth Straight ACC Title

• Big Ten Votes to Postpone College Football Season Until Spring of 2021

• UConn Is First FBS Team To Call Off 2020 Season

• ACC’s 11-Game Football Schedule For 2020 Includes Notre Dame

NCAA Football Betting Blog

Who Is The Public Betting On College Football

On top of our comprehensive news coverage, we also address tons of other excellent topics in our NCAAF blog. Here, you will find a wealth of informative looks at different aspects of the sport beyond just current events. You’ll find NCAAF betting guides, tips, and analyses to help you further your knowledge about college football. Browsing through the archives is a great way to discover new perspectives and new insights that might not dominate headlines, but it might make the difference between winning and losing your next bet.

NCAA Football Betting Strategy

If you are looking to focus on a proper strategy, you’ll be glad to know we have an entire section dedicated to helping you build a winning NCAA college football betting strategy. To be successful, you need more than just a passing understanding of the matchup, and we help you dig deeper. These NCAAF betting tips and strategy resources are great for everyone from newbies to old vets. This college football betting guide will show you everything from where to start defining a strategy to teaching you how to squeeze max value out of any bet.

How to Understand NCAAF Betting Odds and Lines

The first step to getting started is learning how to read NCAAF odds and lines. While these might look intimidating when you see a massive wall of numbers at the sportsbook, they are much easier to understand than they look. We are going to talk you through understanding these critical pieces of information. They will drive every NCAAF bet you make. We are going to start with a high-level look, then hone in on some examples.

• Let’s start with understanding NCAAF odds. As we mentioned before, odds tell you what a bet pays if you win. These will generally be represented by a number higher than 100 or less than -100. A positive number means a team is an underdog, and a negative number denotes the favorite. These numbers will tell you what you win in relation to a $100 bet.
• Let’s say you take a bet that is paying +300, and you bet $1. In this case, you bet on the underdog, so you’ll win more if the underdog wins. +300 equates to winning $3. Add that to the $1 we bet, and you get a total payout of $4. Conversely, let’s say that the other team’s odds are at -300, and you bet on them. You’ve bet on the favorite, so your payout is expected to be much smaller. -300 correlates to winning $.33 in our example. Add that to your bet, and you get a total payout of $1.33. As you can see, that’s a massive difference.
  When it comes to real money NCAAF betting, with great risk, comes great reward.
• Next, let’s talk about reading the “line” or the “spread.” This is a single number that will be positive or negative based on which team is favored to win, just like the odds. But unlike the odds, this number represents the amount by which a team is expected to win. Perhaps you see a game showing +5.5 for one team and -5.5 for the other. This would mean the first team is expected to lose by 5.5 points while the second team is expected to win by 5.5 points. We’ll get deeper into how to apply this in the next section.

Most Popular NCAAF Bets

Long ago, sports betting was just a function of picking who would win a game. Nowadays, CFB betting has gotten much more complicated. The sheer range of bets you can place provides for opportunities that never existed in the olden days. We’re going to highlight a few of the main types of bets you can expect to see when you jump into real money college football betting. While we are going to present lots of choices, we recommend you pick one or two and stick with those. Most pros stay in the black by focusing on one or two rather than trying to be a jack of all trades. Follow their lead, and you’ll be on your way NCAAF betting for money.

NCAA Football Spread Bets

Up first is betting the spread. This is one of the easiest and most common bets you can make in NCAA college football betting. The idea behind setting a spread is to equalize two teams across a bet. Bookmakers “level the playing field” by handicapping the favorite and making them perform better than the underdog to win the bet. This is vital because no two teams are equal, so a straight 50/50 bet would never be fair.

The spread represents an expected variance between the two teams. This assigned number forces one side to not only win but outperform expectations. The spread shows how many points the favorite is supposed to win by, and conversely, the number the underdog should lose by. If there were no spread, everyone would always bet on the favorite, and the house would go out of business. Let’s take a look at an example of a typical NCAA football spread.

Here, we have the LSU Tigers playing the Florida Gators. In this matchup, we have the tigers offered at -8.5 points, paying -110, while the Gators are offered at +8.5 and also paying -110. You will notice that both bets pay the same because the probability of the Tigers winning by 8.5 is equal to the likelihood of the Gators losing by 8.5 in the bookmakers’ estimation. We would read this spread as, “LSU is expected to win the game by eight and a half points.” It is worth noting that the half points are used to prevent a tie since there are no half points in college football.

Another thing to remember is that the NCAA spread is not set in stone. Bookmakers move college football betting lines as needed to balance bets. The goal of any sportsbook is to have equal bets on each side of any bet. If one side gets too heavy, they need to adjust. They do this by moving the line. Say they had way too many bets on the Tigers. They could move the line from -8.5 to -9.5, meaning the Tigers need to do even better to win, and the Gators can do worse and still win. This incentivizes betting on the gators while discouraging betting on the Tigers.

NCAAF Moneyline Bets

The next type of bet we’ll discuss is moneyline bets. These are another straightforward type of bet that’s easy to pick if you are new to real money NCAAF betting. In this case, your goal is simply to pick a team to win the game. However, while that sounds simple, these aren’t just 50/50 bets. In spread betting, the teams are equalized using the spread. In moneyline betting, the teams are balanced using the odds. Rather than adjusting the expectations for each team, the bookmakers keep the expectations even (win the game) and adjusts the payouts.

In the middle row, you will see the odds on a moneyline bet from our earlier example. Like we’ve discussed, the numbers represent the payouts of each outcome. Here, we can see that the LSU Tigers are -305 favorites over the +220 Florida Gators. This gap signifies both a perceived disparity in the capabilities of the teams, as well as a massive difference in payout for a winning bet. Keep in mind that, unlike spread betting, your team needs to win the game for you to win your bet. Let’s see various bets would work out with our example.

Scenario A: You bet $10 on the Gators, and they win the game. They were offered at +220, meaning they were supposed to lose according to the bookmaker. Because they were supposed to get walloped, you would win $22 if they win the game. Add that to your bet, and they house owes you $32 on a $10 wager. Not too shabby!

Scenario B: You bet $10 on the Tigers, and they win the game. In this case, they were the favorite at -305, meaning they were expected to dominate. As expected, they won the game and as a result, you earn $3.33 on your $10 bet. Add that to your original wager, and you get paid a total of $13.33.

As you might expect in NCAAF betting, it pays to choose the underdog when you are confident. However, things aren’t that simple. Bookmakers scale the odds explicitly to account for the variances in the team, so if you see a +220 underdog, you are much more likely to lose than win. In fact, in our example, the bookmaker thinks you are nearly 7x more likely to lose your money if you bet on the Gators. The real key to moneyline betting is to find bets where your knowledge helps you spot value. In other words, you want to spot bets where you think the risk represented in the odds is greater than the real-life risk.

Over/Under Bets on College Football Games

Next, let’s look at over/under bets. These are great if you are betting on an NCAA football game where you aren’t a major fan of either team or if you’re looking for live college football betting options. Or maybe you want a unique way to take advantage of specific matchups. Over/under CFB bets allow you to bet on whether the points scored by both teams will total more or less than a given total. Let’s go back to our example.

Over to the right, you’ll see numbers designated with an “O” or a “U.” You’ll also notice that the numbers are the same. This represents the total point threshold to win the bet. Next to the point total, you will see the payout for that bet. Here, we see that the O/U is 38.5 points with the bet paying -115 regardless of where you bet. If the total points are 38 or under, an under bet will win. If both teams total 39 or more points, an over bet will win. These bets can be particularly useful if you think a game will be more offensive or defensive than usual.

College Football Prop Bets

Finally, there are prop bets. These are often some of the most fun bets to place as they make every single aspect of the game fun. Prop, or proposition betting, adds a whole new level of excitement by allowing you to bet on a ton of smaller outcomes in the game. Rather than just betting on the overall result, you can bet on NCAA football with wagers like who will win the coin toss or who will score the first touchdown. These bets can add massive upside when made as part of larger parlay bets.

You’ll find lots of prop bets available on NCAAF betting sites that aren’t available in live sportsbooks. In some states, NCAA football betting online is restricted and in others, the sportsbook simply doesn’t have the resources to offer such bets.

However, it’s helpful to remember that prop bets are all just about luck. While some will be, such as what color shoes a particular player might wear, others are much more calculated. If you are looking to try all the crazy bets and just have fun, go nuts. But if you are serious about making money, focus on the skilled prop bets. Look for college football bets that can be more predictable and use the right data to back up your wagers. These skill-based bets can be quite profitable with the right prep.

NCAA Football Betting Conclusion

Betting real money on NCAA college football can take the excitement of watching the game to a whole new level. With tons of different bets, plenty of weekly action, and edge-of-your-seat playoffs, real money NCAAF betting can be a great way to get your feet wet with sports betting. Even if you’re new to gambling on college football, putting a few bucks on your favorite team might be the start of a profitable sports betting career.

Hopefully, you’ve learned more about how to bet on college football. We’ve discussed the critical aspects of a good NCAAF betting site, shared valuable learning resources, learned how to read lines and odds, and we outlined the popular types of bets you’ll run into. Check out The Sports Geek for more info on how to build your strategy into something special. Always bet responsibly, and never bet more than you can afford to lose. Have fun and good luck!

2021 College Football Betting FAQ