Winning Your Bets With Tight NCAA Basketball Spreads
Sometimes, the best way to win money by beating the NCAA basketball spreads is to take a simple approach. This doesn’t mean the road to victory is an easy one, or one that doesn’t require research and homework, but it means that the approach you take can limit the variance and much of the sometimes maddening decisions you have to make in determining which teams to take in order to maximize your winnings while betting the NCAA basketball spreads.
With more than 300 teams participating at the Division I level, there are often more than 100 games with NCAA basketball spreads from which to choose on any given Saturday during the college basketball season.
It’s enough to make your head spin. The major television networks alone will broadcast enough games to fill your living room for the entire day, with ESPN and the other top-rated networks vying for your attention by featuring attractive match-ups usually between top-ranked teams from major conferences.
As an old saying goes, the value exists in gambling wherever you can find it. This applies to all forms of profitable gambling including blackjack and poker but especially applies to sports betting.
Thus, it pays to play to your strength, whatever that strength might be. For many casual bettors, the best chance they have is to bet teams on which they are familiar, which usually involves the high-profile teams from major conferences that often appear on television. If that is your preference, and what you feel most comfortable with, then by all means you should stick with it. But you should make sure you specialize in either a specific conference or two with which you have vast knowledge, or perhaps a certain half dozen or so top-rated teams whose tendencies you know well. Otherwise, you are fighting an uphill battle. This is because these overexposed teams also have caught the attention of the oddsmakers, whose NCAA basketball spreads benefit from the ability to gauge these teams on a regular basis for the same reasons you can follow them closely as an average sports fan.
Their college basketball lines are tweaked and massaged to reflect public perception, so you will often find it difficult to extract maximum value from major conferences because, to put it simply, the oddsmakers know what you are thinking and they are prepared for you. The same can’t be said of the so-called mid-major conferences, whose teams might be on television just once or twice a year, and most likely during their conference tournament. If you attended a school or live in a region near such a conference, this can give you a leg up on the oddsmakers. If you don’t, you can make up ground with some astute research on these conferences and teams.
Without question, the oddsmakers will still have an accurate power ranking for these clubs and a spread that is relatively solid. But the good news is, they are similarly working on somewhat incomplete information because of the obscurity of these conferences, and this is where you can find an advantage. The best place to look for value here is in underdogs, particularly of the home variety. You see, mid-major teams have to find ways to stay competitive without the luxury of several blue-chip recruits that their major-conference counterparts rely so heavily upon. TodaysPicks.net specializes in handicapping the mid-major teams.
So how do they do it? Most of these clubs have a game plan that is rooted firmly in fundamentals, which means an emphasis on set plays to get the best shot available, and a premium is placed on rebounding and defense. Their seasons are built around both regional rivalries and trying to knock off the conference’s leading teams. When you combine this with a mostly conservative style of play, it leads to low-scoring games that make the value of taking points even more important than the average game affords. In conferences such as the Horizon, Mid American and Missouri Valley, it’s not uncommon to see scores that are in the 50s and low 60s on a regular basis. This makes the value of taking even four or five points magnified to almost double its worth for the equivalent of, say, an Atlantic Coast Conference game.
Take, for example, the 2005-’06 Wichita State team of the Missouri Valley Conference. This team started off with an impressive 11-2 mark in the early going, with its only losses coming against highly ranked Michigan State and Illinois squads and included a win over Providence. This team was expected to roll through its conference, but instead lost five games during conference play and went just 8-12 against the spread during that time. The Shockers failed to cover in five of the last six conference games in which they were favored. The season still was a success. Wichita State sneaked into the NCAA Tournament and beat Seton Hall and Tennessee to advance to the Sweet 16 before losing to eventual Final Four participant George Mason. This impressive run proved that their strong start was no fluke, but their struggles within their own conference also proved how tightly bunched and competitive these teams really are.
So the lesson here is that while the ACC game on ESPN might be more entertaining, a willingness to dig past the glamour schools and look at the mid-majors can be a profitable strategy.
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