NCAA Football Week 10 Betting Preview

By Richard Gardner, Bodog Sportsbook Manager

Hard to believe we are in the final full month of the college football regular season. This weekend, there are two games that jump out to us here at Bodog right away in terms of potential big handles: Ohio State at Penn State and LSU at Alabama.

Both games have huge conference title game implications, while Alabama can’t afford a November loss and stay in the national title hunt. LSU has dominated the Alabama series of late, winning seven of the past nine and only losing three times on the road in this series since 1982 – that is a 10-3 record at Alabama in that stretch. The road team is a shocking 11-1-1 ATS in the past 13 meetings overall.

The Crimson Tide are 9-point favorites on Bodog’s college football odds, and I believe that high of a number will scare bettors off Bama because the Tide weren’t playing that well heading into last week’s bye. And Alabama is just 1-4 ATS in its past five games following a bye.

This will be one of those games that many players will wait until the last minute and will bet going by what they hear from the “talking heads” on television. It’s true – those TV analysts have a lot of pull in affecting a handle.

College bettors are much different than NFL ones in that many NCAA fans tend to bet off other people’s opinions – they might not even have seen a team play this season but will still lay down money. NFL fans usually aren’t influenced by “expert” opinions and just go with what they know.

As for the Buckeyes and Nittany Lions, we expect that one to have heavy two-way action because it has opened with such a small spread – PSU -3.5, which is basically what home-field is worth. The loser of this one almost certainly won’t get a BCS bowl berth.

We actually expect a decent amount of action on PSU from Iowa fans. An Ohio State loss all but gives the Big Ten title to the Hawkeyes because they would have the tiebreaker with Penn State due to a head-to-head victory. Thus Iowa fans might be betting more with their hearts than their heads this weekend. It happens.

The SEC and Big Ten might be the two most popular conferences in college football, but they don’t necessarily generate the biggest handle. A lot of times the Pac-10 will “win” the day, simply because of the late starts out West. Winning players are often rolling their money over, so they put it back in for one of those late Pac-10 games. And players who have lost try and catch up before the night is out.

It is a common misconception that Hawaii games get a large handle just because it’s the final game of the day most weeks (when Hawaii plays at home). We’ve found that the East Coast bettors, easily our biggest group of customers, are usually gambled out by the time the Warriors take the field for those 10-11 p.m. kickoffs.

I would like to give you one last look into the players’ minds, and that’s regarding last Sunday’s C-USA game between Marshall and Central Florida going opposite the World Series.

Because the college game was the only football game on last Sunday night, it fared pretty well considering the teams on the field: it generated about 25 percent of the handle of Game 4 between the Yankees and Phillies. That just proves to us, yet again, that football really is king when it comes to generating betting handle.