Given the sheer amount of betting volume generated by college basketball, betting the OVER or UNDER on game total odds should be a big part of the overall betting strategy. What separates the betting sharps from the general betting public is the ability to identify actual value in betting lines for any sport, and in this case, college basketball.
College basketball ranks high on that list for one main reason – variety on a daily basis.
The sharps know that there are more than 30 different conferences in Division I men’s college basketball. This adds up to more than 350 teams averaging one to two games a week!
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While the online books will post sharp betting lines for all the major matchups on the daily schedule, a few of the lines that are released for smaller Mid-Major conferences are going to be a bit on the soft side.
Find the Soft Lines
This is especially true when it comes to setting totals.
These lines are normally released closer to tip-off to provide an immediate opportunity to jump on a perceived soft total line.Related: Pelican PPH Provides You the Opportunity to Succeed
Unless you are a professional gambler, you are not going to have the necessary time to capitalize of each daily total line that gets released a bit soft. A more realistic approach to betting college basketball total line odds is to become a “subject matter expert” for one or two conferences.
If you are a big East Coast sports betting fan, you might what to focus all of your college basketball handicapping efforts on the ACC and Big East. If you are located out on the West Coast, you might want to shift your efforts to the Pac-12 and Mountain West.
Whatever reason you have for gravitating towards a certain geographic region or conference, learn to use that interest as a betting strength. It is far easier to learn quite a bit about a smaller number of teams as opposed to knowing something about every nationally ranked team and beyond.
Get to know each team’s top scorers. In college basketball, certain teams tend to rely on just one or two hot hands a game. If those shooters have been cold lately, going UNDER for their next game might make sense.
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This also pertains to injury situations throughout the regular season.
If a team is five deep in double-digit scorers, they can compensate for one and maybe two of those players being out of the lineup. When a team is relying far more heavily on one or two players for the bulk of the points, their loss will have a much more prominent impact on the final score.
Familiarity tends to add more predictability to future outcomes.
Conference teams play one another once or twice a season every single year. If they had another meeting in the season-ending conference tournament, there is enough weight in the recent head-to-head betting trends to impact future results.
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For example, if the last five or six meetings between a pair of conference rivals have stayed UNDER the closing total line, that is important to know.
The Answers You Need
The lean automatically goes to the home team in quite a few close college basketball conference matchups. However, you may have to dig a bit deeper when it comes to a total line bet.
What is the overall playing form for each side?
How many points is each team giving up on defense each night?
What is the difference in that number for home and road games?
Are there any significant injuries?
These are all questions that need to be factored in the overall handicapping process for successfully betting college basketball totals.
