College basketball handicapping can be a time consuming process. Almost every single team plays on Saturday, giving you over 150 different games to go over. Wednesdays and Thursdays are pretty popular too. If you are giving each game your full attention you will need to put aside several hours to do your analysis.
While we recommend going with an expert with a proven track record of winning, if you are not going to do that then at least use some of the tools below to save some time and make yourself more efficient. While this isn’t a complete list of power rankings, forums, software and systems that can help you win, we think it’s a pretty good start.
These sites all have matchup information that you can use. It will help you compare the stats for each team, some give you trends and betting systems on who should cover the spread or whether the game will go over or under the posted total.
Betting college basketball isn’t an easy thing to master, but there are several things you can look for when trying to spot winners. Here is a look at a few things I have found to really help my handicapping over the years.
There is no doubt that oddsmakers are very good at setting the lines, but many times they will adjust the lines towards one side when they feel the public perception of one team is much higher/lower than their actual value.
If you have a team that has lost five straight, the public is automatically going to start placing more and more bets on their opponents, but this is exactly what oddsmakers want, soon enough the team that is struggling is going to be getting more points than they should, and this is where handicapping sharks make their money.
Probably one of the biggest factors in college basketball is where the game is played at. Many times you will see teams that are highly ranked giving up way to many points on the road, simply because oddsmakers know that the public will more than likely go with the team that is ranked, even if they are playing a good team on the road.
One of my favorite plays is home underdogs that are very good on the defensive end of the floor. Teams have historically shot worse on the road than they have at home, and when you combine that with excellent defense, you have gained a lot of value on the home team. This tends to work out because people will spend more time looking at a teams overall record, and not factor in so many of the other things that determine the outcome of the game.
If you are going to be a successful college basketball handicapper, you have to keep up to date with injury reports for any team you are thinking about placing a bet on. There aren’t a ton of days between games, and many times you won’t know if a player is injured unless he is on your favorite team or is a star player that will show up on ESPN.
You also have to be able to understand how a certain injury will hurt a specific team. A team that has a number of players who score in double figures, the loss of the teams leading scorer will not be as big in this case, but if say he were the only player on the team averaging double digits, than its more than likely going to really hurt his team.
This is a very popular handicapping tool used by many of the experts, but without incorporating the other factors its not as effective as you might think. If you were to look at the trends for a college basketball game at covers.com, you will see that both teams have trends favoring them to win and trends favoring them to lose. The key here is being able to spot which trends actually factor into the matchup that you are trying to figure out.
For instance say one team has a trend that says they are 13-6 in their last 19 games played on Thursday, while the other team has a trend that says they are 9-5 ATS in their last 14 games as a home underdog of 5.0-10.5. The home underdog trend is a much bigger factor than how a team has done on a certain day. Spotting which trends actually matter takes some practice, but over time this can be an extremely useful tool in helping you profit in college basketball.