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What are your betting options when it comes to College Football? Although bookmakers will offer Prop bets and Game-Time Situations as the season unfolds, these are more difficult to master, especially if you don’t understand the basics.
The bread-and-butter foundation of betting on College Football consists of the Moneyline, Point Spread/Spread, and the Total.
This is the simplest bet to make. All you need to do is correctly pick the team that you think will win the game outright. But the maths isn’t totally straightforward.
Let’s say that the Notre Dame Fighting Irish are a 20-point favorite, for example. This means that the team is clearly expected to win more often. This is why it’s listed as -1350 on the Moneyline. The Navy Midshipmen are at +800. The payouts will differ according to which side you choose.
This is one of the most popular College Football bets. The spread is the number of points given to a team to handicap a game when each outcome is as likely as the other.
For instance, in Week 0, Notre Dame hosts Navy, and the Fighting Irish are favored by 20 points. The Spreads are listed as:
Think of this as Navy being given a 20-point lead.
Let’s suppose you bet on Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish will need to win by at least 21 points if you’re going to collect on your bet.
If you’re online betting on Navy, you’ll win if the team wins outright or loses by fewer than 20 points. In a case like this, where the spread is a whole number instead of one like 20.5, a final margin of 20 points will result in a Push, and you’ll get your money back.
This bet represents the total number of points scored in the game. Let’s say that the listed Total for the same Notre Dame/Navy game is 50.5 points. You can bet the final tally will be Over or Under this amount.
If you think that there’ll be more than 50.5 points scored in the game, you’ll bet Over 50.5. If you think there will be fewer than this amount, you bet on Under 50.5.
All bets have odds attached to them and this affects the size of your win. If we keep using the same game as our example, Notre Dame -20 is listed with -110 attached. Navy, with +20, also has -110, as do both sides of the Total. This is called the juice, vigorish, or vig.
Vig is how much the bookmaker charges you for the opportunity to make a bet. -120 is about standard, but odds can fluctuate for Spreads and Totals depending on various factors. Bookmakers may feel that one outcome is more likely and so put a heavier vig on that outcome, for example. Or the sportsbook could have more bets streaming in on one side and be looking to protect itself from heavy losses by adjusting the vig. In this case, with a -110 vig, you’ll have to bet $110 to win $100.