So you’ve been dutifully digging through the internet for betting strategies and religiously betting on college football for the longest time you can remember yet the profits just don’t seem to come your way? Well, if so, then chances are that you have been making the following common college football betting mistakes.
A Closer Look At The Common Mistakes For College Football Betting
Little to No Emotional Balance
It’s okay to love a particular team. It is okay to bet on that team. And it is even okay to invest your emotions in your wagers (I mean, who wouldn’t be emotionally-invested in a money-making opportunity?). But here’s the thing; you should be careful when it comes to mixing your emotions to the point of insanity or simply letting your emotions cloud your judgment. Chattanooga is a good team FCS team in its own respect, but it will probably take a thousand tries before they ever get their first win against a team like Alabama, so don’t fool yourself into betting your house (or any of your money for that matter) on the Mocs to beat Bama straight up. That would just be plain stupid of you. Upsets happen, we agree, but they have to be well-founded. Similarly, don’t go banking your whole savings on the Bruins in a game between UCLA Bruins and USC just because your emotions—or so called gut-feelings—tell you that UCLA will be winning. This is a big Los Angeles rivalry football game that can go either way, and can hurt you badly if thing don’t go as per your predictions.
Chasing Losses and Pushing Your Luck
In close relations to the discussion on emotionality and football betting, you must be aware that wagering on college football is just like any business investment where winning and losing can happen at any given time. As a bettor or investor, you must therefore be ready to accept and deal with both results rationally. For example, avoid chasing losses after recording a big lose or avoid pushing your luck when you are on a winning roll.
Poor Research Acumen
The reason why college football is so popular is that there’s plenty of information available on teams, players, coaches, styles of play and so on. And if you want to be successful in NCAAF betting, you have no option but to invest into the culture of reading and properly researching on the team just in the same way you would do in any business investment. Failure to do so means you will be making ill-informed decisions, which will more often than not lead to losses than winnings.
Bad Bankroll Management
This is a universal flaw for most bettors and football punters are no exception. However deep-pocketed you are, it is paramount that you set limits for yourself in regards to issues such as how much money you can bet on an NCAAF game in a single hand, or how many college football bets to place in one day/week. Failure to manage your bankroll through such limits could easily plunge you in a hole that you will never recover from; a mistake that continues to affect millions of bettors across the world every single day.
Buying into Shaded Teams and Players
Having a good player is a great recipe for success just in the same way having a good team encourages efficiency and success on the field. And, as it happens so often in college football, the best players and teams in the league are often from the Power Five conferences, hence making your job easy if you are looking to identify these players and teams in an effortless way. The problem, however, is that the Oddsmakers and Bookmakers are well-aware of this tendency, so they often inflate the NCAAF lines involving these top players and teams. And, on a decent number of times, these team and players beat the numbers, but for the most part, the duped betting public is often on the suffering end after swallowing the baits hook-line-and-sinker. Unless there is really a good reason to bank on these shaded players and teams, learn to avoid them.
Misconceived Home Field Advantage
Home field advantage is real and statistics collected by sportsbooks over the past decade indicate that home teams have won over 60 percent of their games, which obviously translates into good money. But as a point of caution, this advantage is not always the case for all home-playing teams. Several factors, ranging from nature of opponent to historical trends, can easily derail a team’s chances to win or cover the spread at home, and you must study the NCAA Football lines accordingly rather than blindly putting a blanket bet on a team just because it is playing at home.
Failure to Consider Talent and Personnel Turnovers
Employing a great coach can have a huge impact on a team just in the same way losing a great coach can have a devastating impact on a school. The same line of thought holds true for losing or recruiting good players. Unfortunately for most NCAAF bettors, their assumption usually is that if a team played badly last year, it will play badly again this year; or that if a football program has been playing well over the years, it will be able to survive key departures in talent. While coaches like Nick Saban and Urban Meyer always seem to find a way of dealing even with the biggest of personnel and talent turnovers; the reality is that such changes tend to have huge impacts on teams, especially mid-level to low programs, and you must ensure that you consider such changes if you are to avoid overestimating or underestimating a team’s potential.
Blindly Following Experts
At the end of the day, the so-called college football experts are just human beings who are subject to errors, oversights and lapses in judgment that can easily mess your NCAAF bets in a big way. So while there is no denying the value of reading or listening to them handicapping games and giving crucial tidbits of information about teams and betting aspects such as key matchups and important trends; you should always remember to do your own research and fact-check information from them in order to make a well-advised decision.
