3/26/2022
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When it comes to betting on college football, you have plenty of options. Sportsbooks offer a variety of wager types involving things like totals, point spreads, and all sorts of prop bets. Perhaps the most straightforward of all the college football betting styles is the moneyline bet, which is strictly a pick for who will win the contest, nothing else.

  1. Betting The Money Line Football
  2. What Is The Moneyline Bet
  3. Nfl Betting Odds Money Lines
  4. Betting On Moneyline Football Scores
  5. How To Read Betting Odds

The NCAA football season is a particularly exciting time of year for moneyline betting. College athletes tend to see more variance between performances due to a variety of factors, powerhouse programs play significantly smaller schools in one-sided “contests,” and multi-touchdown point spreads are a common occurrence.

When most people think about betting sides in football their thought process starts and ends with the point spread. That’s unquestionably the most common and popular way to bet on the winner of a. The Bottom Line on Moneyline Betting. Moneyline bets are straight forward wagers in which you are simply deciding which side you think will win. For each game on the docket, oddsmakers will. Betting the moneyline for a football game is simply betting on which team you think is going to win. There is no point spread involved. Whichever team you select has to win outright for a wager to be.

Las Vegas Sports Betting provide live NCAA Football Moneyline Odds located below, those lines are constantly updated throughout the day. Need a Sportsbook to place your Moneyline NCAA College Football Bet. I have thought about laying a 500-1000$ 5-team parlay on the moneyline for college football teams that -1100 (ohio state game, wvu game, nebraska game, oklahoma game, florida game, or the.

These, plus many other variables, all come together to make moneyline wagers a challenging but rewarding style of gambling on the college game. In this article, we’ll be discussing several strategies and betting systems designed for picking winners straight up in the NCAA arena.

Some of these tips will merely be details worth examining when looking to place a moneyline bet, while others are tried and true college football betting systems.

We aren’t only looking to win a high percentage of games; that’s easy with so many lopsided matchups. We’re here to turn a profit and help our readers do so as well. And that requires picking the right games and hitting a mixture of underdog and favorites selections to maximize earnings and manage risks.

Slight Road Dogs

Something that’s often repeated with regards to betting underdogs is only to bet them if you really think they can win, even if you take the points. Well, a Bet Labs gambling system has found that wagering on the road underdog moneyline is profitable in games expected to be close contests. You’re looking for road teams who are getting between +2 and +6.5 points, ideally.

One of the reasons this college football moneyline betting strategy is useful is because public money frequently pours in on the favorite. Casual bettors seem to feel more comfortable taking the favored home team when the spread is a relatively narrow margin. The more money that comes in on the home team covering the spread and winning, the more value you’ll get for the underdog on the moneyline.

This system has proven to win about 50% of the time, on average. That’s a phenomenal winning percentage when betting underdogs moneylines. These games will frequently pay out between +130 and +155, meaning you could profit without even hitting half the wagers. At 50%, you’ll be building up the bankroll rather quickly.

70/30 Moneyline Strategy

The betting strategy detailed in the last section will be included in this one. Once again, you’ll be looking to spot probable upsets and bet them on the moneyline rather than taking the points. This time, we aren’t looking at the spreads so much as the betting action.

A Sports Insights system has found that underdog squads receiving less than 30% of the action have gone 11 – 5 against the spread. That’s a nearly 70% winning percentage! But we aren’t making point spread bets; we’re sticking with the moneyline.

Of those 16 games, 10 of them would still have won had they been bet straight-up. The spreads ranged from +2 to +11.5, showing that when the public is overly optimistic about one side, it pays to be a contrarian.

So, let’s say you put $100 on a moneyline bet for each of these 16 underdogs who received less than 30% of the total betting action. With those ten victories, you would be up a total of $1,474, making this one of the best college football moneyline betting strategies around.

The 70/30 strategy is a massively successful system and is one of the reasons why investing in a service that tracks line movements and action is worth the cost.

Look for Active Underdogs

You may have noticed that college football moneyline strategies tend to take one of a few different approaches to winning. They either focus on teams who are extreme favorites or try to spot underdogs with high potential to score an upset. This is the latter, an attempt to score more underdog moneyline wins.

No matter which college football experts or pundits you listen to, there’s always one consistent variable included in their handicapping: players’ emotions. At this level of the sport, athletes are more prone to significant variance when it comes to performance. Handicappers are always on the lookout for letdown games, emotional bounce-back contests, and teams looking past their next opponent.

Programs coming off an emotional win, possibly as an underdog triumphing over a bitter rival, frequently perform well below expectations in the following game. Meanwhile, teams that were recently upset themselves often dominate their next opponent with an inspired return to form.

Betting The Money Line Football

Then you have highly ranked teams focused on a matchup with playoff or championship implications in a couple weeks who forget about the game that must be played in the meantime. These overlooked squads come out and shock the cocky team somewhat often, ruining the hopes they had for the following week before the kickoff.

Since we’re looking for college football moneyline betting strategies, a solid place to start is by identifying schools facing one of these scenarios. Look at the matchups immediately before and after their most heated rivalry games, as well as any contests against top-ranked opponents. Mark those games off on your calendar to revisit when it’s closer to gameday.

Then, all you have to do is analyze the squads’ recent performances. Do they fit any of the conditions mentioned above? Are they playing an underdog divisional opponent immediately following a huge win over a rival? That might be a great place to lay some action!

Mike Wohl’s Heavy Favorites Moneyline System

At the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference, MIT graduate Mike Wohl presented a new ultra-conservative approach to college football moneyline betting strategy. He found that he could expect returns of 12.24% on the season, an excellent rate of return, by only gambling on heavy favorites on the moneyline.

He focused on point spreads ranging between 20 and 25 points and then bet them straight-up without the points. Throughout the NCAA football season, there are 4.5 games per week on average that fit these criteria.

By themselves, each of these wagers barely earns a profit, as should be expected when betting favored teams moneylines. However, with a big enough bankroll and staking amount, this slow, safe approach leads to returns that are competitive versus any investment portfolio. Considering the fact that teams with such broad point spread margins win their matchup roughly 95% of the time, there’s minimal risk involved.

If you have the patience and the bankroll to execute such a plan, it’s one of the safer ways to grow your bankroll over time. One thing to be wary of, however, is that some sportsbooks pull the moneyline odds as soon as the spread increases beyond 11.5 points or so. Online gambling sites will most likely be your only option for attempting such a strategy.

The Favorites’ Four-Team Parlay

Building on the same fundamental concept behind the Mike Wohl system, you may also want to try this college football moneyline betting strategy which utilizes parlay cards to improve payouts. While this method of betting on heavy favorites may carry a bit more risk, it also drastically increases the timeline for growing your bankroll.

To implement this betting system, you must find home teams that are favored by at least 14 points but are preferably closer to the 20-25 used in the previous section. You bet these four games on the moneyline parlay, which should average out to around -130 gambling odds.

To profit using this method, each individual game should have at least an 87% probability of winning their contest. At -130 odds, you only have to win 57% of your four-teamers to ultimately increase your bankroll. In most leagues, finding four teams per week that are so heavily favored would be nearly impossible, but in college football, there’s always some powerhouse squad using a lesser school as a warm-up game or active bye week.

Despite having to win at a high rate in order to profit, don’t let those percentages intimidate you. During the NCAA football season, two-to-three-touchdown favorites cover about 95% of the time. Once again, these moneyline odds won’t be available at most land-based sportsbooks. But online, you should be able to find bookies who will accept these conservative college football moneyline betting strategies.

Upsets Based on Travel

While many of the strategies in this article are fully-designed betting systems meant to be strictly followed to gain an edge, this tip is merely something worth identifying when looking for underdog moneyline candidates. A variable that many handicappers forget to consider is the effect travel has on the human body, and thus, athletic performance.

In particular, traveling from the west coast to the east has shown to decrease players’ abilities on the field of play dramatically. Northwest University did a study on circadian rhythms and their impact on athletic output and found that jet lag was a significant factor. Furthermore, for each time zone a team must travel through, it takes an additional twenty-four hours for the body to fully adjust back to its normal levels of speed, strength, and stamina.

If you identify schools that are heading east for their matchup, you can then see if they match any of our other criteria to find a high-probability upset pick. Imagine a road team that flew across the country and received over 70% of the public money that week. Talk about the ideal opportunity to employ some of our college football moneyline betting strategies.

Organize Your Staking by Favorite or Underdog

For the most part, when betting college football games on the moneyline, you’ll either be betting on a significant favorite or a slight underdog. When organizing your gambling this way, it’s crucial to have a system for your staking. Rather than bet the same amount for each contest, your staking amounts should change depending on the wager.

For the sake of this example, let’s say that your base unit of betting is $100. That’s your standard amount to stake and equals one unit. Whenever you’re using a college football moneyline betting strategy that focuses on taking the favorite, stake the amount required to produce one unit of earnings.

So, if you’re picking a -400 favorite, you’ll stake four units to win one. On the other hand, when you’re gambling on the upset, you merely have to put up one unit in an effort to win anywhere from one-and-a-half to three units. You’ll always be either betting $100 or trying to earn $100, depending on the result you’re working for.

Last Thoughts

College football lends itself well to moneyline betting strategies. With 128 participating Division I programs, there’s an enormous gap in talent between the top schools and the bottom feeders. Regardless, the disparity in ability does not stop these juggernaut teams from facing off against significantly weaker sides regularly.

Remember, when using the MIT graduates conservative moneyline system, there are roughly 4.5 matchups with point spreads of 20-25 points every week! Not only do we have tons of mismatched games where one squad is seriously better than the other, but there are also many upset opportunities if you know where to look.

A winning long-term college football moneyline betting strategy will diversify your bets into a mix of massively favored schools and slight underdogs. The 20-point favorites will win about 95% of their contests and create profit slowly, while the dogs only need to triumph around 50% of the time to increase the bankroll.

By focusing on a bevy of factors, from travel to weather to where public money is going, you can identify enough of both types of these matchups to benefit from each and every week. To quickly locate the best games on which to gamble, you may want to consider signing up for a sports betting analytics site like Bet Labs or Sports Insights.

There are also some powerful free tools out there, though they’ll require the ability to write SQL queries or will generally take more work to utilize. Whatever you choose, you’ll want a better way to locate the ideal scenarios to employ the systems and strategies than combing through all of the contests manually.

College football moneyline betting strategies are only one of many approaches to wagering during the season. In our other NCAA football gambling guides, we’ll look at systems built for betting against the spread, tips and tricks for picking over-under totals lines, futures bets, and propositions.

After reading them all, you’ll have numerous potent handicapping tools at your disposal to turn this fall and winter into some of the most successful gambling months of your life!

If you want to bet on football, then you have plenty of options.
There are not only lots of games you can bet on, there are also
lots of different types of wagers you can place. Point spreads
and totals are the most popular types, by quite a distance, and
many football bettors stick solely to those. This isn’t really the
ideal approach, as some of the other wagers can be very useful
in the right circumstances.

The moneyline is definitely one of those wagers. This is often viewed as an
alternative to the point spread, and in some respects it is, but
that doesn’t mean it should be ignored just because you like betting on the spread. We explain why in this
article, and we also offer some tips for betting football moneylines.

First, though, we’ll explain exactly how moneylines work when betting on football. You can watch this video we have put together or read on for even more information down the page.

How Football Moneylines Work

What Is The Moneyline Bet

Betting On Moneyline Football

Betting the moneyline for a football game is simply betting on which team you think is going to win. There is no point spread involved. Whichever team you select has to win outright for a wager to be successful. In the unlikely event of a tie, your stake will be returned.

In most football games there is a favorite and an underdog. Very occasionally there are games where the two team are completely evenly matched, but for the most part one team is favored over the other to win. With point spreads, the idea is to create an even money proposition when betting on the game. So the favorite has to win by at least a certain number of points for a wager on them to be successful, and the underdog has to lose by no more than a certain number of points for a wager on them to be successful. The bigger the gap in quality between the two teams, the bigger the point spread.

Because there’s no point spread involved with moneyline wagers, the odds are adjusted to reflect this. So whereas both sides of a point spread wager both have the same odds, or very close to the same (typically around -110), moneyline odds can be very different. Here’s an example.

Cardinals
-315

For this game, the Cardinals are the clear favorites. The bookmakers consider them very likely to win the game, so the odds are quite low. By contrast, the odds for the Packers are quite high because they’re not considered very likely to win. Here’s how the potential payouts look for the two wagers.

On Packers at
+250
On Cardinals at
-315

As you can see, you stand to make a much better return when backing the Packers. This is because the risks are higher, due to their chances of winning. The Cardinals are far more likely to win than lose, so a wager on them doesn’t offer a great return.

This highlights a notable advantage of the moneyline wager. You get to control, to some extent, the risk versus reward. For example, you might be quite certain that the Cardinals are going to win this game, but not convinced that they’re going to cover the spread. So a moneyline wager is the safe option. There’s less money to be made, but less chance of losing. On the other hand, you might think that the Packers are going to cause an upset. Rather than betting on them to cover the spread, you can bet on them to win outright. There’s less chance of winning such a wager, but the potential returns are much greater.

We mentioned earlier how point spreads change depending on the gap in quality between the two teams. The same principle applies to moneylines, but it’s the odds that change. So, for example, if two teams are fairly evenly matched then the following odds might be available.

Panthers
-150

The potential payout for a bet on the underdog here is lower than in the previous match, because they have a better chance of winning. The potential payout for a bet on the favorite is higher because they’re not AS likely to win.

When to Bet Moneylines

We’re often asked a question along the lines of “why would I place moneyline wagers rather than point spread wagers?” There’s no simple answer to this question really, as point spreads and moneylines shouldn’t be viewed as “either/or” options as such. You don’t have to decide that you’re always going to bet on the spread, or that you’re always going to bet moneylines. These are two different wager types that have their own merits, and any bettor should have them both in their arsenal.

We’ve already mentioned how moneyline wagers give you more control over the risk versus reward element of betting. There are also other reasons why you might choose this type of wager over a points spread. If you fully understand how both of these wagers work, you’ll find that there are games when a moneyline wager is the right option, and games when the point spread wager is the right option. There are no definitive rules about which one you should use and when, only a general principle that you should try to follow.

Place whichever type of wager you feel offers the most value in any given situation

This should hopefully make perfect sense to you. Successful betting, on any sport, is all about finding value, so you should always look to get the best value that you can. If a moneyline wager offers the best value on a football game, then that’s the wager you should be placing. If a point spread seems the best option, then go down that route. There may even be occasions where it’s viable to place both wagers on the same game.

With all that being said, there is one situation where we’d suggest the moneyline wager is usually a better option than a point spread wager. This is when you like three point underdogs in an NFL game. Only a small percentage of NFL games are decided by three points or less, so if you think a three point underdog is going to cover then you might as well bet on them to win outright. This will generally give you a much better return.

The Seattle versus Carolina game we showed you earlier is a good example of just that kind of situation. Here’s how the point spread looked for that game.

Panthers (-3)
-110

Seattle are three point underdogs, and a bet on them to cover is available at odds of -110. If you liked that bet, it would actually be much more logical to place a moneyline wager at odds of +130. Let’s look at the potential returns for the two bets.

On Packers at
-110
On Cardinals at
+110

This is a huge difference. The potential profit on the moneyline wager ($143) is over 40% greater than that of the point spread wager ($100). You’re a little less likely to win, as there is a chance that Seattle would lose by one or two points, but there’s a more than fair chance that if they did cover they would actually win the match. And, of course, if they lost by three or more then you’d have lost either way.

Tips for Betting Football Moneylines

Now that you know how moneylines work, and have some idea of when to use them, you can start to consider how to bet moneylines effectively. The following tips will help you with this.

Work on Your Handicapping Skills

As with any type of football wager, your best hope of making money lies in being able to handicap games effectively. This means analyzing each team’s relative chances of winning, and then comparing those chances to the odds available. That’s a slightly simplified explanation of how handicapping works, but it’s accurate nonetheless.

Actually handicapping games is far from simple though. Or, at least, handicapping them well is. There are all kinds of different factors that can affect the outcome of a game, and you need to take as many of them as possible into account. You also need to assess just how much of an impact those factors will have, and try to accurately evaluate just how likely a team is to win. For more advice on how to do this, please see the following article.

Picks Your Spots

One of the biggest mistakes that bettors make is trying to make a judgement on every single game that’s taking place. This is especially true of those who only focus on the NFL. There aren’t that many games each week, and bettors think they stand the best chance of making money if they can predict the outcomes in all of them. This is not an approach we recommend.

The key to successful betting lies in quality and not quantity. Your overall chances of winning are much greater if you pick your spots carefully, and only bet when you find real value. There isn’t a huge number of NFL games each week, but there’s enough that it’s simply not realistic to think you can handicap them all. And if you’re also betting on college games then this is even more of an issue.

Nfl Betting Odds Money Lines

Be patient, be selective, and only bet when you have justified reasons to do so.

Get the Best Odds

This tip applies to placing wager of any type, on any sport. It’s important enough for us to mention it here though. If you only bet with one bookmaker or betting site, then you’re almost certainly hindering your chances of making money. At the very least you will be missing out on getting the best possible value.

Betting On Moneyline Football Scores

This is because different bookmakers and betting sites price up games differently. So the odds they offer are not always the same. Remember the Packers versus Cardinals game we showed earlier as an example? We used the actual odds from a real betting site for that example. The following odds were also available for the same game, from various other sites.

  • Packers +252 / Cardinals -285
  • Packers +260 / Cardinals -290
  • Packers +240 / Cardinals -270
  • Packers +245 / Cardinals -280

As you can see, there’s not an insignificant difference in what was available. By shopping around for the best odds you can ensure that your potential payout is always as high as it can be. This is a great benefit over time, and can even be the difference between winning overall or losing overall. Such as the fine margins of betting on football.

How To Read Betting Odds

Summary

Moneylines are a viable alternative to point spreads when betting on football. If you’re one of those bettors who only ever bets on the spread, then you could very well be missing out on some good opportunities to find better value. We don’t recommend that you stop placing point spreads and only place moneyline wagers, but you should definitely consider both when betting on a game of football. Try to decide which one offers the better value, and then go with that option.

It’s also worth backing big favorites on the moneyline if you like a low risk approach. Always take the odds into consideration though. The profit from winning a lot of bets at very low odds can soon be wiped out with just a couple of losing bets.