Best college football betting sites

How the bets themselves work, and why the book knows less about a small-conference game than about a pro one, is on how to bet on college football. This page is about choosing where to bet.

The week of a line

Most books put up next Saturday's numbers within a day of the last game ending, at low limits. Those first numbers are the softest the line will be all week, and the people who bet them are mostly people who know what they are doing. The book uses that money to find out where the line belongs. By Saturday morning the limits are much higher and the number has been leaned on from both sides.

So if you have done your work early, I'd want a book that opens early and takes a reasonable bet on the opener. If you bet on Saturday morning with the rest of the country, the opening time hardly matters to you and the price does: half a point is common between books in college football, and checking two of them before every bet is the cheapest edge you will ever get.

A deep menu on a lopsided game

On a game with a 30-point spread the side is a hard bet to like. The useful markets are the ones underneath it: the first-half line, while the starters are still in, and the team total, which lets you bet on one offense without caring what the other side does. Alternate spreads matter here too.

A book that deals those on every game, and not only on the television games, is worth more to a college bettor than one with a long list of novelty props. That's the first thing I'd look at on the board.

The futures board

Title and conference futures go up months ahead, with a long list of teams, and the book's cut on them is far bigger than on a game. You can see it by adding up the board.

Say a team is +400 to win the title. That price says 20 percent. Turn every price on the board into a percentage the same way, add them up, and say the total comes to 140 percent, when a fair board adds to 100. Scale the 20 percent down by that much and you get 14.3 percent, which is a fair price of +600. The book is paying +400 on a +600 chance.

Boards differ from book to book, and the difference on a longshot can be large. I'd add up two books' boards before betting a future at either, and I'd keep the stake small, because the money sits there all season. The sums are on the futures page.

How Saturday is bet

Recreational money arrives late, it goes to the big names and the night games, and it comes as parlays. The book's best day is a Saturday when the popular favorites cover the morning games and the players roll the winnings into the evening.

I never minded that business, and you shouldn't be ashamed of being part of it, as long as you know which side of the counter the edge is on. Set your figure for the Saturday before the first kickoff, and bet 1 or 2 percent of your bankroll a game. Twelve hours of football is plenty of time to talk yourself into the late game.