Late Season College Football Handicapping

Written by Evan Adams

One obvious trend this season has been the balance of power among Division I. There are only a handful of truly dominant teams this season. USC, Penn State, Oklahoma, Texas, Texas Tech, and Florida have been the only teams able to consistently win by margin, both straight up and against the spread. In addition, there are less than ten schools that have been non-competitive this year. Schools with less tradition have been able to build quality programs able to compete with any team in their conference. Consequently, conferences are littered with teams that have records of around .500. This spread of power has created some excellent opportunities for those doing football betting, especially as the season progresses.

Last Saturday several games came down to the wire and could have gone either way against the spread. There were at least nine games that were decided in the last few minutes. In addition, seventeen teams covered the spread by a touchdown or less. Let’s take a look at how we can put ourselves on the correct side of these close games.

One of the keys to winning these close games is putting yourself on the side that gives you the best chance to win. The best way to do that is to select underdogs as big as possible. What does that mean though? This theory does not mean to make your picks on all of the biggest underdogs in a given college football card, as there are several reasons why these teams are over 30 point underdogs. The key is to find underdogs that are capable winning a game outright. These teams should have relatively equal talent level of their opponent, and they might have some significant situational advantages. They may be facing a team either coming off of a huge win or have a big game looming the following week. In fact, taking these underdogs of over a touchdown is an extremely profitable proposition. These teams just have to keep a game close to cover, but they are routinely able to win outright. Some examples last week include Northwestern, Marshall, Arkansas, Utah State, Temple, Duke, and New Mexico. Another trait with all of these teams is that they were facing opponents that weren’t particularly dominating. As a result of relatively equal talent level, the teams listed above were able to win outright or at least cover the college football odds as significant underdogs.

Because of the improvement of lesser known teams, significant underdogs have been able to routinely win against teams of similar talent level. One of the most profitable betting strategies is finding underdogs as large as possible that have a chance to win outright. As the season progresses, these situations are going to continue to be extremely profitable.

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