Unlocking the Secrets of College Football Moneyline Betting

The 2024 NCAA college football season is coming up soon at the end of August. That means more chances to place moneyline bets on your favorite schools, upset picks, rivalry games, and the biggest showdowns of the season at the best NCAAF betting sites.

However betting on college sports can be quite different from professional leagues, especially when it comes to moneyline betting. Pro teams, even the worst ones, are usually closer in talent to the top teams, so you don’t often see spreads that huge in the NFL. Even in the UFL this past season, no team was more than a 16-point favorite in any game.

But college football can have these massive spreads when top programs play the smaller schools. You can already find some big lines for Week 1 at the top offshore sportsbooks like Bovada (check our Bovada Review), including Oklahoma as a 41.5-point favorite against Temple, and Ohio State as a 50.5-point favorite against Akron. Games like that won’t even have a moneyline market available to bet most of the time.

Most of the time, those games are multi-touchdown blowouts too. That’s why we wanted to unlock the secrets to help you make your college football moneyline bets this season. We have identified 4 strategies to follow that we will break down below:

• Back some reasonable underdogs (low risk, high reward)
• Focus on the closer matchups (normal unit sizes, more consistent wins)
• Parlay some big favorites together (maximizing value)
• Go with your gut on rivalry games (futures betting angle)

Finding Underdog Value

As we said, there are a lot of blowouts in college football, which makes it harder to gain value from betting on favorites as you would in the NFL:

• In 910 games in the 2023 NCAA season, the average margin of victory was 18.0 points.
• Just over a third of those games (34.2%) were decided by 1-to-8 points.
• There were more games (355) decided by at least 20 points (39.0%) than there were one-possession games (312).

As expected, favorites cleaned up again on the moneyline bets:

• In the 2023 NCAA season, the favorites were 693-214 (.764).
• There were 35 schools who won at least 90% of their games as a favorite, including 26 teams who were undefeated when favored by the point spread.

This falls in line with previous seasons. If you look at the last 5 years (2019-23) of moneyline results for favorites for the 5 schools with the best odds to win the national championship in 2024, you’ll see these schools rarely ever blow such games:

• Georgia is a nation-best 61-4 (93.9%) as a favorite since 2019.
• Ohio State is 52-4 (92.9%) and its only loss as a favorite last year was in the Cotton Bowl against Missouri, a deflated 14-3 performance.
• Texas is just getting back on track with a 12-2 season last year, but since 2019, the Longhorns are 37-10 (78.7%) when favored, which is 2 losses per season.
• Oregon is an impressive 43-6 (87.8%) when favored since 2019.
• Alabama will no longer have head coach Nick Saban, but the team was 58-6 (90.6%) as a favorite since 2019.

Those kinds of teams are lucky to lose a game (or 2) each season, let alone to not deliver as a favorite. That’s why for many of the games with large spreads (20 or more points), you won’t even be able to get down a moneyline bet as the sportsbooks won’t offer them. They will only have spread and total markets.

Besides, even if you were getting -10000 odds on these huge favorites, is it really worth risking $10 to win a dime for something with a 99% chance to hit? Serious bettors are not looking for -10000 odds on anything. They might look for -800 odds on something that feels like it should be -10000.

In other words, you’re not going to be betting on Georgia to smash a non-conference foe or someone that’s really outmatched in the conference. Instead, you should think of underdogs in games that could match some of these roles.

• Avoid the miracle 30-point underdog upsets and focus on games where the underdog is of the 8-to-16 point variety, implying more of a 2-possession game instead of a total blowout.
• A decent team that’s unranked and playing at home against a top 25 team that may have played poorly the previous week could be a situation ripe for an upset.
• Back an underdog with a really unique stylistic advantage like a pass-happy offense or a dominant defense, especially if it’s going up against an opponent who may have a weakness with that particular matchup.
• Rivalry games can be fun to bet on, especially when a team gets a chance to ruin their rival’s season like we’ve seen many times over the years such as when Pittsburgh upset West Virginia in the 2007 Backyard Brawl.
• Check the injury report for starting quarterbacks, because may a freshman starting their first game for an injured starter could implode with nerves and bring down the better squad.

Venue is also very important as it is easier to win as an underdog at home than it is on the road in college football:

• Since 2019, home underdogs are 395-910 (30.3% win rate) and road underdogs are 484-1586 (23.4% win rate).
• Since 2019, only 3 schools have a winning record straight up as an underdog: Air Force (4-3, 57.1%), Appalachian State (7-6, 53.9%), and Coastal Carolina (13-12, 52.0%).

Finally, some of the best value on underdogs comes right at the beginning of the season when potential and expectations outpace the reality of what a team is going to be that year. Just look at some of the biggest upsets on the moneyline in the 2023 season.

In Week 1, Baylor lost as a 27.5-point favorite against Texas State in a 42-31 defeat that paved the way for a poor 3-9 finish by the Bears, and it set Texas State up well for an 8-5 bowl-eligible season after the school’s 1st win over a Power Five opponent.

Also in Week 1, Deion Sanders’ Colorado Buffaloes had a lot of media attention, and they backed it up right away with a 45-42 thriller against #17 TCU, a team that lost the national championship game the previous season. Colorado was a 21-point underdog in that game. But after the 3-0 start for Colorado, the team finished 1-8 the rest of the way.

Remember, Some Games Are Expected to Be Tight

We talked a lot about upsets since they are a fun part of the college football season. But let’s not forget about the bread-and-butter games that have a smaller spread and actually are expected to be close each week. Those are the games you’ll want to bet something closer to your normal unit size as they are closer to a coin flip outcome than the upset prayers above.

These can certainly be your rivalry games in conferences steeped in tradition like the SEC and Big Ten, or it can be a matchup like Ohio State vs. Notre Dame last September, a 3-point spread where the Buckeyes won by 3 points.

That’s not the coolest example since pushes aren’t fun, but it would have been a win on the moneyline and that’s what matters to us here. Ohio State was also a 4-point favorite against Penn State and won by 8 points, and the Buckeyes were a 3-point underdog in Michigan and lost by 6 points in a big one.

These are the games that should actually be closer, and you should just do your normal research on them. That means figuring out which team has the edge in matchups between the run and pass on both sides of the ball, recent results if it’s an annual rivalry, key injuries, and how the teams have played the last few weeks.

Anything you can find to end up on the right side of the moneyline with no concern over the spread.

Parlay of Favorites

We said you’re not going to be allowed to bet on the 40-point favorites anyway, but what about doing a parlay of favorites with solid odds that you wouldn’t necessarily like to play as singles?

Let’s use Week 1 lines for the 2024 season found at Bovada for a real-life example:

• Florida State (-550 at Bovada) has title expectations too and is a 13-point favorite against Georgia Tech in a game that will be played in Dublin on August 24.
• Georgia (-550) opens what it hopes is another championship-winning season as a 13.5-point favorite against Clemson.
• TCU (-320) will want to avoid another Week 1 upset like it had last year against Colorado, and the team is a 9-point favorite in Stanford.

If you did a parlay of moneyline winners for Florida State, Georgia and TCU, then that would have roughly -120 odds, making it almost like betting on the spread for any one of those games at -110 odds.

With the -550 odds, that’s about 84.6% implied probability for Florida State and Georgia to win. TCU at -320 is 76.2% implied, so when you multiply those three figures together, you do get about 54.5% implied odds, making -120 a fair price for that parlay.

Remember, parlays are harder to win as every leg has to hit, and every additional leg makes it that more likely for something to go wrong. But if you want to bet on some moneylines and feel confident in the teams you’re expecting to win, then a parlay with 2-to-5 teams might be the way to go for your college football betting.

It’s just not an advisable primary strategy. If you really want to have some fun, bet 3 heavy favorites along with your favorite underdog’s moneyline that week to really maximize value.

Rivalry Games Available Now

Finally, we wanted to point out that some rivalry games for the 2024 college football season are already available for betting markets at Bovada. You can place a bet today and think of it like a futures bet since the outcome won’t be determined until months down the road.

But while much can change between today and the day the game is played, you may have a great gut instinct on how this season is going to go for these teams, encouraging you to call your shot today as the value could get a lot worse come November.

For example, Ohio State is a 9.5-point home favorite against Michigan for their annual rivalry game to be played on November 30. Ohio State’s odds on the moneyline are currently -350 at Bovada.

But let’s say Michigan has a rough season after losing head coach Jim Harbaugh, quarterback J.J. McCarthy, and several other starters to the NFL this year. By the time that game comes around, the spread could be higher like -13.5 or worse for Michigan. Instead of getting -350 odds, you might get -550 odds by that time.

That’s why it could be worth it to place a bet now on a game down the road like that if you feel confident in how things are going to be this year.

There’s a similar situation in the SEC with Alabama losing Nick Saban, arguably the greatest coach to ever do it at the college level. The Crimson Tide is a 2.5-point underdog with +115 odds at Bovada in a November 9 matchup with favored LSU (-135) in Louisiana.

Those games could be a changing of the guard in those conferences this year. You can bet on them now as singles or even parlay their moneylines together if you want to.