If you are an avid sports bettor that loves to wager on college basketball, then the best way to maximize your return on investment is to develop a set of time-tested betting strategies that can carry you through the start of the season in November with non-conference play right through the NCAA Tournament in March.
Right off the bat you need to start slow and build your betting volume as the season progresses. Player turnover creates quite a bit of uncertainty for even for top teams in the nation so it is a good idea to simply track betting trends and statistics for the first few weeks of a new season. The real meat on the bone is after the New Year when conference play starts up. Always remember that familiarity lends itself to predictability and the more you know about a particular team the better you will become at predicting the outcome of its games.
Coaching at the collegiate level plays a far bigger role than it does in the NBA. There is a reason why coaches like Mike Krzyzewski at Duke, Bill Self at Kansas and Michigan State’s Tom Izzo win as many games as they do. Every college basketball coach plays a big role in their team’s success and failure and sometimes you can uncover a huge mismatch that is not reflected in the betting line based simply on who is calling the shots from the bench.
An accurate and reliable source for injuries can be worth its weight in gold over the course of a college basketball season. When it comes to the NBA it becomes national news if a player like LeBron James or Stephen Curry is out of the lineup, but at this level up-to-date injury information for a team’s top player can be much harder to come by, especially when you move down the ranks to the Mid-Majors. If there is ever any doubt of a key player or players’ status for a game on either side of a matchup, then the best course of action would be to pass on betting that game.
The betting public is in love with betting favorites and every single sportsbook is well aware of this fact. One betting strategy that can pay off big is looking for home underdogs poised for a strong outing. Home court is huge at the college level and when a team is listed as an underdog at home there is an automatic motivation to prove the oddsmakers wrong. Most of the really big upsets that occur during the course of the season are pulled off by underdogs at home. If you go back to the recent results against the spread for the 2015/2016 college basketball season it was basically a 50/50 proposition between road favorites and home underdogs.
Another strategy that can pay some big dividends at the betting window is riding hot streaks by good teams. There are certain ebbs and flows that every good college team will go through over the course of a season. The one thing that all the top teams in nation all have in common is that they do go on to win the majority of their games straight-up. What you want to look for are the good teams that go on to cover the spread in a good portion of those games. When a team gets hot ATS with two or three covers in a row you should ride them until they cool. Looking back at Villanova’s recent run to a national title, it closed-out the regular season and the Big East Tournament with a 2-6 record ATS in its last eight games before going a perfect 6-0 both SU and ATS in the NCAA Tournament.
