College football is one of the most popular sports in America. It’s probably the most popular betting option in the south, where legal betting states outnumber NFL teams.
Every year, I strike up dozens of casual conversations with friends, in-laws, and barflies about the upcoming college football season. And if I’m talking to someone who knows what I do for a living, the No. 1 question I get is: “What are some trends I can follow to be a successful college football bettor?”
This was the year I got tired of not having a comprehensive, ready-made answer. I spent several months of the 2025 offseason studying historical data and rereading my journal of historical betting notes.
I used that information to create this guide to college football betting strategies. These 13 historical trends have consistently produced successful college football predictions.
Some readers might be experienced NCAA bettors looking for new tools in their handicapping tool belt. Others might be novices with an interest in college football, looking to build the foundation for a successful betting hobby.
I hope that this walkthrough is great for both groups. Good luck this season!
Unranked Favorites vs. Ranked Underdogs
My favorite trend to start with is the unranked favorite playing the ranked underdog.
Think about how much time and energy is spent talking about the AP Top 25 every season. The AP Poll has some merit in how it shapes public perception of who is good and who isn’t. But as any fan of a middle-class team can tell you, there is way too much emotion invested in cracking the all-important poll and having your favorite team’s name listed.
Because of all this attention on the poll, betting markets tend to skew quite strongly toward a poll team. They’ll be a seven-point favorite when the spread should be -4, or maybe a 17-point favorite when -13 would be appropriate.
But in rare matchups – usually only a few games per season – an unranked team may play as a betting favorite versus a Top 25 resident. In these cases, it can often be advantageous to side with the unranked favorite.
After all, if the market typically skews toward ranked teams, and a ranked team isn’t favored to beat an unranked opponent, what is the market saying about that particular game?
Exploiting the Entertainment Bias of Ranked Matchups
College football data reveals another major betting bias of the AP Poll: spectacle. When two ranked teams play each other, there’s often a market bias toward a close, competitive game.
The last 20 years of college football odds say there’s a market inefficiency here. In games between two teams ranked between No. 4 and the bottom of the poll, a modest favorite of 8.5 points or less covers more than 60% of the time.
The takeaway: More often than not, the sexy ranked showdown isn’t nearly as good as the audience hopes it’ll be.
Road Dogs with Low Totals
This is a common football betting strategy among bettors, and it’s not only reserved for college football. It comes down to simple math – in games with low expected totals, points come at a premium.
Point spreads aren’t created equal. In a college game with a total of 47, a point spread in the neighborhood of seven to 10 points is quite a lot of advantage to hand out.
Compare that to a West Coast game with a total of 65, where more offense is expected. When a game could feature eight or nine touchdowns, it’s much more difficult to cover a +7 number.
Road underdogs in games with a total of 50 or less cover about 53% of the time. In college games with totals of 45 or less, that cover rate ticks closer to 55%. In conference play, the correlation is an additional 1% stronger. Sharp bettors will almost always take a conference dog in an expected low-scoring game.
Low Total Unders & High Total Overs
Let’s stick with the totals for another few minutes. I like to play contrarian angles on games, where the market is laying down a clear marker on how it sees a game.
In the totals market, that means looking for spots to predict unders on very low totals and overs on very high totals.
This is contrarian because of how the average bettor responds to these kinds of markets. On a total of 41, it’s common for a bettor to think something like, “That’s so low! I only need 20 points from each team!”
For a high total of something like 74, you can almost hear the square mind saying, “I don’t know, man. That’s a lot of points.”
But the market is setting these outlier numbers for a reason. A totals market that implies an unusual outcome in spite of likely majority action is a market that I want to lean into.
Service Academy Unders
Here’s a special subset of the low-total under rule: If two US Service Academies are playing against each other, take the under.
Over the last 21 seasons, in games between service academies, the under is 46-12-2.
That stat may change slightly, depending on which closing line was taken in a few close calls. But overall, the trend is overwhelming. If you’re predicting high-scoring games between the troops, you’re gonna have a bad time.
Sweaty Overs
How about a moment for the weather? College football is mostly played outdoors, and a full third of the season still takes place during the summer. That means most seasons feature dozens of games where it is crazy hot.
That’s a recipe for winded defenses and explosive plays – especially in the early part of the season, where young defenses may still be learning their coverages and rule sets.
Over the last 20 years, in games where the recorded temperature is over 90 degrees, the over has hit around 59% of the time. And since the over is often the square side of the totals market to begin with, a cover rate this high is quite impressive.
Windy Unders
The other side of the weather coin is hunting for windy games to predict an under. I know professional handicappers whose entire college football betting strategy is to bet the under in windy outdoor games.
Since 2005, blind-betting the under in games where the wind is at least 15 miles per hour resulted in a 58% cover rate.
The market often accounts for this in some way, but a point or two just isn’t enough to fully reflect the chaos that heavy wind can wreak on quarterbacks and place kickers.
Big 12 Country: Land of the Free, Home of the Dog
Even novice bettors are often familiar with the concept of the home dog. If you’re flirting with online sports betting, there are probably worse predictions to make than a home dog cover.
But not all home dogs are created equal, and not all conferences unravel in similar ways. In the case of the Big 12, the maximum chaos that lives in this conference is a huge boon to college football bettors.
Home dogs have been a consistent winner in the Big 12 since 2018, when PASPA was overturned by the US Supreme Court. The cover rate is even sharper when ranked Big 12 teams go on the road – conference underdogs are 39-28-4 (58%) against top 20 teams over the last seven seasons.
Short Moneyline Underdogs
If you’re hunting for plus-money predictions in the moneyline market, don’t sleep on the short dogs. Since 2005, underdogs +4 or shorter have won about 47% of their games outright.
Betting favorites at prices like -135 or -150, and winning 47% of the time, would be disastrous to a bankroll.
By contrast, underdogs priced at +135 or +150, who win 47% of the time, are a consistent bankroll booster.
Correlated Parlays
Parlays have become an increasingly popular bet in recent years because many bettors like to supplement their straight action with the potential for a larger payout.
In my opinion, the best way to incorporate the parlay into your wheelhouse of action is to look for spots where the point spread and total might both play toward a unified theory of a game.
Let me give you a hypothetical example. Imagine that Arizona is playing Colorado State in a nonconference September game. The point spread is Arizona -22.5, and the total is 65.5.
If I think Arizona is going to score a ton of points and handily beat Colorado State, a favorite/over SGP would make some sense. To get over a total in the mid-60s, there’s going to need to be a lot of offense. And to cover a point spread north of three touchdowns, Arizona is going to need to score a lot of offense.
From a raw math perspective, the structure and payout of a parlay multiplies the edge that a bettor has (or doesn’t have) in a particular matchup. That means parlays are best deployed when a bettor thinks they have an edge in a game’s correlated outcomes.
Who Takes Their FCS Blowouts Seriously?
Most FBS teams play at least one FCS opponent per year. Each program’s coaching staff can approach this game in a variety of different ways.
For some teams, it’s a way to ease into the season by building confidence and running base against an inferior opponent.
For others, it’s a way to run up the score and build expectations and trust with the fan base.
Sometimes, it’s just a way to get benchwarmers some playtime.
For bettors, it’s important to study the history of a program (and, just as important, the coach) to understand how they’ll likely perform during an FCS game versus market expectations.
There are a ton of program-specific angles to find here. For example, Georgia Tech is 7-1 ATS in its last eight games against FCS opponents. Nebraska is 4-1 to the under in its last five games against FCS opponents. Duke is 6-1 to the over in its last seven FCS games. Oklahoma State is 9-4 ATS vs FCS opponents under Mike Gundy, including last year’s cover against reigning FCS national champion South Dakota State.
Don’t Get Cute With the Outright Market
College football futures are my absolute favorite thing in the world, so I’ll leave you with a couple of important thoughts in that department.
If you’re looking at the college football national championship odds market, it’s important to remember that college football is a sport of haves and have-nots. This is a game with 85 scholarship players, which means championships are won by amassing huge amounts of extremely high-level talent.
You know who isn’t doing that? Mid-major programs. G5 teams. Anyone picked to finish ninth in their conference.
Many of the most recent national champions had 10 or more NFL players on the roster. Sometimes, there were NFL players who had to wait to crack the starting lineup. That is what a college football national champion looks like these days.
So, when you predict who you think will win the national championship, don’t get cute. Don’t bet on the seventh-place Big Ten team at 80-to-1.
Don’t bet on the trendy sleeper who hasn’t won a conference title since 1927.
Don’t bet on Boise State.
Those teams don’t win the final game of the season. Champions come from the top of the table.
(For more analysis here, bookmark my national championship analysis article and come back every week! Or, even better, forget the outright market and just bet the College Football Playoff odds, where you have 12 times the chance to cash a ticket.)
Hedging Win Totals
This isn’t a trend, strictly speaking, but it’s still a helpful note.
College football isn’t Major League Baseball, where there are 162 games. It’s not the NBA, with 82 games. College football has 12 games.
Twelve.
Late-season games are incredibly high-leverage moments in the win totals market, which is why some vigs are so ridiculously high. But in many instances, you can use that leverage to your advantage by hedging.
Let’s say you bet an Over 4.5 wins for Purdue at +145. If Purdue is 4-7 going into its final game of the year, you’ll win your bet if Purdue wins and lose your bet if Purdue loses.
Because of your juicy +145 future price, you have the opportunity to hedge by buying the other side of Purdue’s final game. That way, you can arbitrage the market by owning both potential outcomes.
Of course, if you tail some of my best college football win totals predictions, you might not need to hedge at all. There are always hidden gems in this market, and I’m quite good at digging them up throughout a long summer. So always check in with my analysis over on that page, too.