College Bowl Betting Tips

For those of you who love college football betting there is a second Christmas season approaching and it’s known as Bowl season. The odds makers will be putting plenty of gifts out there with their college bowl odds and we want to make sure you capitalize on every opportunity so we have put together some NCAA college bowl betting tips to guide you through the games. Of course you can let us do all the work for you and then just sit back and watch your bets cash in by following our college bowl picks, but we know that some of you like to do the work yourself. So on that note, here are a few things we recommend you look for.

Motivation

What’s great about the bowl season is that most of the games are played on a neutral field. This year New Mexico is hosting Nevada, but other than that every game is played at a unique location. You also won’t find many teams that have played each other in recent memory. Of course some of the early games are between teams that have played each other already this season, UCLA/BYU and Central Michigan/Purdue come to mind. With all of this considered then you have to factor in who wants to win the game more than their opponent. Big schools from big conferences don’t really get excited to play smaller schools from non-BCS leagues. This year we have our eye on California taking on Air Force. Air Force is also motivated to play and never takes a down off, but the Golden Bears had aspirations of winning the Pac 10 and making a big bowl halfway through the year.

Conference Strength

You have to break down how each team fared in their conference and what their schedule was like. Teams coming out of the WAC who are undefeated are not as good as teams playing out of the SEC who have 3-4 losses under their belt. In 2006-07, the SEC went 6-2 against the spread (ATS) and it’s pretty much agreed upon that this was the toughest conference again in 2007. Look for good spots to play the SEC against teams with better records in large conferenes.

Underdogs

Another interesting trend from 2006-07 was that underdogs covered in 18 of 32 games. We think you are going to see more upsets again this year if the regular season was any indication. You had Stanford over USC, Appalachian State over Michigan, Syracuse upsetting Louisville, and of course Pitt over West Virginia in some of the biggest mind-bogglers we have ever seen. Parity is here to stay in NCAA football so take advantage by looking for the barking dogs this post-season!

For more college bowl handicapping information like how coaching changes affect the teams, check out the articles on our site of if you really want the easy way to cash in, get signed up for the football picks released by our handicappers.