When you are handicapping college football you don’t have the advantage of a preseason, and you often don’t get a lot of good information out of fall practices. That means that you have to go into the first game of the season relying more on what happened last season and what (more…)

As a general rule people aren’t nearly patient enough when it comes to the impact of recruiting in college football. Fans hear about the big names that their NCAA team has signed, and they expect the results to show up on the field right away. It’s rarely as quick or as (more…)

The third week of the college football season taught us a lot about the power of an early week off and what it can mean for teams. We’ll look at the specifics in a second, but let’s look at it generally first.

Most college football teams schedule a week off at some point (more…)

Betting on season win totals in college football is an increasingly popular and attractive option. It used to be that season win totals seemed like a gimmick bet, but increasingly they are looked at as a place to find real value by serious bettors. You have to tie your money up (more…)

Before the college football season starts each year there is lots of value to be found in betting conference winner futures. You can bet on which team is going to win each of the major NCAA conferences – and typically several of the minor conferences as well – and you can (more…)

I love college football fall practices because they are a clear sign that the brilliant college football season is just around the corner. From a sports betting perspective the best part of fall practices is that the general public isn’t paying a lot of attention. That means as a sports handicapper if (more…)

I’m a big believer in the importance of paying attention to fall practices to get ready for the college football season. The sports betting public generally isn’t paying a lot of attention to what goes on before the games start, so if you are on top of what is happening – (more…)

One of the challenging things that football bettors – and especially college football bettors because it is so common – have to deal with is very large point spreads in games. In college football it’s not uncommon to see spreads of four touchdowns or more in a game. When you see (more…)

The media loves to talk about the potential of a good college football team looking past a weak opponent towards a stronger opponent in their next game. They’ll often suggest that a team in this circumstance could lack focus and intensity and could be vulnerable to an upset or a less (more…)

Making money over the long term on college football betting – or any sport, really – isn’t really that difficult conceptually. All you need to do is find situations where there is value in lines and then bet to take advantage of that value. If you do that consistently over the (more…)

Rivalry games are one of the biggest factors that make college football the great sport that it is. The intensity and emotion that can be felt when two bitter college rivals meet in an annual, hate-filled event is almost unmatched in sports. For college football handicappers these games are particularly compelling. the (more…)

For hardcore college football fans national signing day is like Christmas in early February. A potentially cruel Christmas if your favorite school doesn’t land the high profile football prospects you crave. Or a truly fantastic Christmas if your NCAA teams reloads with blue chip talent. For sports bettors national signing day (more…)

National signing day in college football is becoming a bigger and bigger media spectacle every year. For those who aren’t obsessed with the sport, national signing day, which falls early in February each year, is the first day that recruits for the next season can sign a letter of intent and (more…)

I love the summer for the weather and all the fun things to do, but there is a big part of me that just wants it to end. The summer is what stands between me and the glorious return of the college football season, so at times it just seems endless. (more…)

College football doesn’t get a lot of attention from the general public until the first games are set to kick off. Before that, though, there are weeks of summer practice, and for college football bettors who are willing to pay attention and do a little bit of homework there is a (more…)

By the time we get about halfway through the college football season it’s about time to start taking unbeaten teams seriously. Expert college football bettors know when a NCAA football team wins six or seven games in a row they have started to show that they are serious, and that they have (more…)

By the time we get to the halfway point or so of the college football season the number of unbeaten teams has typically dwindled down to a handful or two. Most of those teams – unless they play in lesser NCAA conferences and have played very weak schedules – have realistic (more…)

When people set out to handicap college football games there are predictable factors that they look at – the quality of the offenses and defenses, the matchups, the head coaches, and so on. Those are obviously significant and relevant. They are also what most people will be doing. One of the (more…)

College football is typically a game played in the bright sun of the afternoon. That’s how it is supposed to be, and tradition is such a big part of the sport. Every week, though, there are a couple of night games. Just a small fraction of games are night games, and (more…)

There are few things more satisfying for college football bettors – and potentially profitable – than spotting a big upset and cashing a winning ticket on the underdog. If you aren’t careful, though, then chasing underdogs who don’t turn out is a quick way to go broke. You need to be (more…)

Rivalry games are the best part of college football – especially the season ending rivalries steeped in tradition and hatred. Sometimes, though, those rivalry NCAA games lose a lot of their luster because both football teams come into them struggling. If the teams aren’t playing well then the game doesn’t have (more…)

It seems like we are in the era of the scandal in college football. The list of teams that haven’t been under investigation at some point in the last decade is much shorter than those that have. Recruiting violations, players receiving benefits, contact with agents, improper training – the list of (more…)

Season win totals are a very interesting and increasingly popular way to bet on college football. The downside to the bets is that your money is tied up for the entire season. That complication can be very much worthwhile, though, if the value is there – and you can find some (more…)

There is no preseason in college football, so it can be hard for sports bettors to get a sense of how ready teams are before they play their first regular season game. Fall practice  It also doesn’t help that the media and fans are so excited for the season to start (more…)

One of the many things that makes college football both unique and so very interesting to handicap is the mass turnover each year caused by graduation and early departure for the NFL. The best football team in the country one year can be forced into a massive rebuilding project the next (more…)

Suspensions are a fact of life in college football, and it seems like they are more and more common these days. It seems like their is a new violation reported every day, media scrutiny is at an all-time high, and the pressure to clean up college football has never been more intense. (more…)

Most college football teams from major conferences don’t exactly challenge themselves in the first week of the season. There is no exhibition season, so teams will schedule an outmatched opponent to work out the kinks and get a reasonably safe taste of game action. That occasionally backfires, but most often it (more…)

An unfortunate reality of college football is that the time when teams are preparing for their bowl games is also the time when teams are making coaching changes and looking ahead to their next season and beyond. That means that there are several football teams that go into their bowl game (more…)

Nine weeks into the 2011 college football season Stanford was 9-0, quarterback Andrew Luck was running away with the Heisman race, and the team looked like they had a real shot at playing for the national championship. There was really only one thing standing in their way – a home game (more…)

College football fans are fickle. It only takes a couple of wins to start the season for people to start to get impressed by a team, and it only takes one loss for a football team to get forgotten about. Before you get too excited about a team after they have opened (more…)

There is a big gap between the last game of the regular college football season and the bowl game for a lot of teams. Football teams that don’t play in a conference championship game could be off for well over a month if they play in a post-New Year bowl game. (more…)

It’s not at all uncommon to see a college football coach fired before his team’s season has ended. As the pressure and intensity increases in the sport it’s only going to happen more often. When it does happen the betting public tends to react in a predictable and consistent way – (more…)

For years the major conferences in college football were relatively stable, but now it seems we can’t go a single year without significant changes to the alignment of at least one conference and often more. Every time the NCAA conferences are tweaked or shaken up college football handicappers have to come (more…)

Sometimes in college football it can seem like parity has a conference in a stranglehold. Strong teams win or lose from week to week as if games are determined by the flip of a coin, and everything handicappers think they know gets thrown out the window at the end of every (more…)

College football teams take a huge risk if they schedule a big game against another top level team to start the season – namely, they could lose. A loss early in the season puts them in a huge hole with the whole season still in front of them. For football handicappers dealing (more…)

Thanks to schools like USC and Ohio State we know a lot more about the impact of major violations on top level college football programs than we used to, and more than we probably ever wished we knew. Because NCAA sanctions at high level programs get so much media attention they (more…)

College football can be a very unforgiving sport for teams. The season is so short and the postseason opportunities so limited that one high profile loss can entirely derail a season and spell an end to the hopes and ambitions of a team. If that loss comes early in the season (more…)

When you are betting on college football one of the big challenges is that there are no preseason games. Training camps often aren’t particularly open to the public or media, either. It can be very challenging, then, to have an accurate sense of what a team is capable of before the (more…)

If you are a college football fan then you can surely think of cases where David has killed Goliath – where a heavy, heavy favorite has fallen in a very unlikely and unexpected way to an underdog that didn’t seem to have any chance of winning the game. The media understandably (more…)