NCAA Basketball Championship Odds
By Loot, College Basketball Handicapper, Lootmeister.com
The most popular futures bet in all of college basketball is to pick who win the whole thing--the NCAA Tournament. The betting in March Madness is one of the most frenzied betting periods of the year in any sport. Some well-placed futures bets can have you sitting pretty by tournament time.
At any point, from before the first regular season tip-off to the time when the tournament is actually under way, you can pick who will win the tourney. Both bets are good, but the rewards can be greater the sooner you bet. It’s a heck of a way to capitalize monetarily from a long-term vision you have of a team’s success. And you can pick more than one team, of course, so your eggs aren’t all in one basket.
The beauty of these bets are innumerable. There is something to be said about a wager where you can bet just a few dollars and then have a vested interest in that team for the entire season. That’s a lot of bang for your buck. Usually when betting college hoops, we throw down our money and in a few hours, the bet is over. When betting on a team to win the tournament, every individual part of the season is a piece of the bigger picture. Even if you don’t have bets riding on all the individual games, you still have a stake, being that every result counts.
When betting on singular games, there are some great spots--make no mistake. But there are a lot of bad things that can happen in a one-game window. A player can get hurt or something just isn’t right about the team we bet. Over the course of a whole season, those things can hurt, but they will blend in better and not necessarily ruin a team’s whole season. In other words, betting on a team in a bet that covers the whole season can insulate you from the unforeseeable elements that often spoil bets made on single games.
And let’s face it--sometimes our view of things is more wide-reaching. We may not know exactly how something will happen, just that it will. Futures bets are good for people who look at things like this. They don’t sweat every single detail, as their predictions are more about the “big picture.” So when you think a team has a good chance of winning the NCAA Championship, you’re not saying you know exactly how it will happen, just that it very well might. A team’s journey to the top is filled with a lot of peaks and valleys along the way, whether straight-up or against-the-spread. When betting on the big picture with NCAA futures, you can focus more on the end-game and not fuss on every detail along the way.
The odds for who will win the tournament are expressed in a fractional form. Here is a small group of examples:
Florida: 5/1
Louisville: 13/2
Providence 200/1
You see Florida with odds of 5/1. That means you get 5 for every 1 you bet. Louisville is 13/2. Books like to use whole numbers, hence the 13/2 expression, which is basically the same as 6.5-to-1, meaning you get 6.5 for every one you bet if Louisville were to win the tourney. You also see an example of a major underdog, with Providence at 200/1. A $10 bet on Providence would yield $2000 in winnings if they pulled off the improbable.
That’s the funny thing about the NCAA tournament--some weird teams can pull through from time to time. Sure, some great teams often win with not-so-great odds, but not always. History is littered with teams that would have fetched huge returns if you were fortunate to have bet on them. And that’s especially the case if you make the bets early in the season. By the time everyone knows a team is good, it’s too late to get enormous potential return.
It’s key to use a good sportsbook when making futures bets. Don’t trust some fly-by-night outfit with your futures wagers, being that there is no guarantee that book will even still be operating in the future. When making bets that takes months to unfold, we want to be positive that the book will still be around when it’s time to collect. Bovada Sportsbook is an online betting site that has endured throughout the years and a place where you can trust with your money.
Making a futures bet on the winner of the NCAA tournament is a great way to capitalize on your longterm vision. It gives you a bet that lasts months, giving you maximum action on your wagering dollar. When the tournament comes around, having a stake on a team or even a group of teams can provide both profit and endless entertainment value.
