How to Win at Football Betting: Offensive Lines Play a HUGE Role!
By Loot, NCAA Football, Lootmeister.com
It’s important as college football bettors for us to move away from analyzing the more-flashy aspects of the game too much. It seems most people want to focus on quarterbacks, running backs, yardage gained, yardage allowed, and parts of the game you might see highlighted on Sportscenter. To get a leg up in college football wagering, we need to read between the lines, taking into account the game-changing elements of the sport that go under the radar a lot of the time.
This is not meant to imply that we want to pay no mind to the skill positions. Quarterbacks and the ball-handlers they have at their disposal are certainly key in deciding whether or not we cover the spread. It’s just that in any form of sports betting, it’s hard to take it to the next level by fretting over the same details that everyone else is sweating. To make it to the top, we need to master the art of reading between the lines.
We should resign ourselves to the fact that between the bookies, oddsmakers, and betting public--that the main issues on offense will be meted out. Let them wrangle over the minutia that lies in the different interpretations of the flashy parts of the game. Meanwhile, we can find edges by delving deeper into the details that no one really wants to sift through. They want to spend time pontificating on how a running back will perform against a defense or how a QB will fare against the opposing secondary. Or how much or how little teams have been scoring. Things like that.
Let’s focus on things like the offensive line. A lot of bettors want to sweep this dynamic of the game under the bed and pretend it doesn’t exist. Nevertheless, a lot of results in college football are decided by what happens or doesn’t happen with the offensive line. The players everyone obsesses on are all at the mercy of the offensive line. Running backs, tight ends, wide receivers, and quarterbacks can thrive behind an O-line doing its job. Meanwhile, those players can be rendered impotent in the face of an offensive line that doesn’t have its bearings and is getting dominated at the line of scrimmage.
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Look for matchup issues. If a defensive end who is going to be named an All-American is lining up against a tackle who is a replacement and is seeing his first real playing time, a bolt should go through your brain. If a normally-smooth running offense is now playing without their center, that’s another red alert. There are many different ways this can manifest, but one thing is for sure and that is a lot of bettors handicap a game rather incompletely due to the passing thought they pay to this aspect of the game.
When we’re betting against the spread, we are not so much picking winners in college football, but are playing a numbers game that can be quite erratic. In pro football, for example, the spreads are within a certain range. but in NCAA football betting, we are dealing with a mind-numbing range of point-spreads that can grow into the 5-6 touchdown region. It makes it important for us to analyze late-game coaching strategy. Do teams that are way ahead start letting their foot off the gas? Does a coach on teams that are way down try to make a go of it or does he start tinkering and fine-tuning with with his team in an effort to work on things for the future?
Look for individual matchups. Look at who is blocking who specifically and if any clues are offered in light of any seemingly lopsided matchups. We can fall into the trap in college football betting of looking at things in overly-general terms. We might notice a a good running back facing a team that ranks low in rushing “D.” Or we see a defensive line is not compiling sacks. These overly-general watermarks might lead us in the right direction. If we conduct a more-pointed analysis, however, we can develop even better insight.
We have to be an astute observer when betting on college football. Like if there were a huge brawl in a casino, everyone would be looking at the fight. A good pit boss, however, would be making sure no one was using the ruckus as a chance to steal. That’s what we should do when wagering. While everyone is looking at the more-flashy aspects of the game, our eyes are peeled on the less-visible parts of college football. The untapped resources in all walks of life are the areas that usually yield the best rewards and are ultimately how you win at football betting long term.
