How to Spot Inflated Spreads in College Football?

There you are waiting for lines to come out for the upcoming week. In particular, the big matchup between State Tech and Poly U, a game you’ve handicapped to favor Tech by 6½. When the lines come out, State Tech is laying 8½ at one of the top sportsbooks you use.

Is it an inflated line, or did you miss something in all the numbers your own power rankings show and the early previews you’ve read? Worse yet, could it be a trap?

One thing it is not is you being smarter than the oddsmaker who set the line according to their perception of how the combination of John Q. Publics and Billy Sharps will react.

Public Perception Drives All Spreads

Yes, inflated lines are out there ready for both the early bird and late risers to bet to their advantage. Or advantages, plural, as the case may be.

Final scores are frequently way off the spreads listed on NCAAF odds boards, more times than not, those finals are within a point or two of the spreads, and it’s the perception that Las Vegas is always close that plays into an oddsmaker’s decision-making process.

Vegas isn’t always close, obviously. It’s just that when bettors see that Team A was favored to beat Team B by 7 with a 49-point total, and the final score is 28-21, it’s a natural human tendency to inflate that one example in our memories.

The variance between the closing spread and the actual outcome can often be 10+ points per game for any given week on a college football betting card. But it would confuse and scare too many potential customers if the odds were released as “State Tech -8½, +/- 10 points.”

Early Season Mismatches

There are power rankings galore these days. Every website touting itself as an authority on the subject of college football has its own formulas being crunched by computers, as well as a bevy of experts sharing their informed opinions on the subject.

There were dozens of “way too early” rankings released within a few hours of Michigan winning the National Championship in January, and ESPN just updated its power rankings to reflect what we’ve all learned from spring practices.

Lo and behold! ESPN’s top 4 are the exact same top 4 currently on college football futures odds boards:

Any guesses on how the preseason Associated Press rankings might look in the same top 4 slots? The reason I ask is that despite all the statistical rankings that are available, John Q. Public still relies heavily on the conventional polls, such as the AP and coaches poll.

The oddsmakers are keenly aware of this, and that naturally leads to top 25 teams having their spreads inflated to help balance the action on both sides of their games. Since 2004, unranked teams have covered the spreads in more than 51% of their games against ranked opponents.

It is early in the season, the first 2-3 weeks, that bettors can find inflated lines in some of the non-conference tune-ups that many of the bigger schools schedule.

Home, Sweet Home?

John Q. Public loves the home team, and sharp sportsbooks are very much aware of the old home-field advantage factor on the minds of all bettors.

Ask the average college football bettor on the street how much playing at home is worth on the NCAAF odds, and most will probably tell you 3 points. That 3-point rule has been passed down from one generation to the next, and that’s just fine with the oddsmakers when evaluating how bettors are going to initially react to a line.

Some college football stadiums are indeed tougher than others for visiting teams to play. It’s just not a hard 3 points at every venue, and bettors who do their homework can find edges of 1-2 points in the lines based on the old myth.

Fans themselves can often play into the perception of a stadium being a tougher place for visitors than they actually are. Crowd noise can be a factor, but no matter how loud Freddy Freshman yells from Row 42, Seat 15 in the upper deck, he still can’t cover that wide receiver who is streaking downfield.

The Art of Middling

Knowing exactly when to place a bet can be a tricky proposition, and it’s important for bettors to not only look for spreads that might be inflated to start with, but also spreads that inflate as the week progresses toward Saturday’s kickoff.

Call it mob mentality for lack of a better term, but spreads sort of take on a life of their own for all sorts of reasons. The hype surrounding a game can dictate the early rush to take State Tech -6½, and before you know it, it’s been pushed up to -9 or -10.

Anyone who got in at -6½ should be thinking about also getting in at +9 in an attempt to middle the outcome and win both ways. Risky? It can be, but then, that’s why they call it gambling.