College Football Betting Tips: Narrowing Your Focus
By Loot, College Football Handicapper, Lootmeister.com
It is a challenge for college football bettors to focus their wagering. There are so many teams in the FBS and a bunch more that lie outside of it. The number of teams and the games seen on the betting board is enough to make anyone’s head spin. If you want to stay sufficiently informed, it takes a lot of time and work.
Unfortunately, we no longer live in a time where we can sit on the porch for 14 hours a day drinking lemonade. We have to earn a living. There are people to see, errands to run, dogs that need to be walked, and laundry that needs to be done. Who has time to scour the box scores of 60 different games?
In college football wagering, it’s critical to utilize the power of isolation. The bookie puts out a huge betting board. That is the field of play. Sticking to areas where you are the strongest is the goal--to engage the bookie in battle along the lines you deem suitable. Betting too many games all over a slew of different conferences is doing what the bookie wants. We want to draw the battle lines in college football betting.
A possible solution is to narrow your wagering focus. Concentrate on just a few conferences. This allows you to maintain an ongoing understanding of a team rather than just dropping in on a team in week eight and thinking you will be able to understand that team the way you need to make sound wagers. Doing that, you’ll miss a lot of stuff that you would have caught if paying more attention to a team and its games.
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What teams you decide to follow more closely can depend on a lot of factors. You could keep it more regional, as it’s easier to follow teams that are in your general area. Or you could focus on the conferences which you are already familiar. As you follow certain teams, you will be able to pick up on a lot of key information--things you won’t ascertain by merely looking at the box scores.
As we isolate our areas of expertise, we need to be mindful of the pitfalls. First of all, don’t make your favorite teams the center of your betting focus. Any familiarity you have with that team is usually counter-balanced by the prejudices you have as a fan. You won’t be able to judge them clearly. It’s unfortunate in a sense that you can’t use your knowledge, but being a huge lifelong fan of a team is usually not conducive to successful wagering.
If you follow certain conferences, you can begin to develop leans toward certain teams or an aversion toward others. This might be due to you developing a fondness or hatred for a team just based on their play on the field. More likely, it is due to whether or not they covered bets for you. A lot of people love Boise State. Some of them became Broncos fans during the late-2000’s when they were killing it at the betting window. In the last few seasons, however, that favoritism would have cost you being that they began struggling against the spread.
It’s important to keep an even slate. When following only certain teams, we can tend to go to the well to often with teams that are covering, while avoiding some great value wagers on teams because they let us down consistently in the past. When narrowing your focus on just a few conferences, make sure to shake the etch-A-sketch every now and then. We can’t carry baggage around from week-to-week.
This doesn’t work for everybody. A lot of guys take the whole board under consideration looking for good bets--it doesn’t matter who it is. Others, however, suffer in college football betting by venturing into the unknown. Let’s admit it, we’ve all made wagers on games where we couldn’t name one player on the field. That’s an extreme example, but we know deep-down when we are wagering on events where our knowledge is clearly not up to par. We find ourselves sort of throwing stuff against the wall to see if it will stick. If struggling, a betting man might consider wagering only on games where he has the chops to gauge the performances of both teams. And that requires refining your focus and recognizing your strong suits.
