Beating the NCAA Football Point Spread

Over recent years, professional sports betting has grown to be a multi-billion dollar industry. College football is one of the most popular sports that individuals bet on and has become a major contributor to the overall size of the sports betting market. There exists many different types of sports bets that can be made on college football games. The most popular one is the point spread bet. Point spread betting involves a number known as the “spread” which represents how much a team is favored to win by. For example, if a team has a spread of -7 then the team is favored to by win 7 points. Therefore, a person placing a bet on a team with a spread of -7 will only win if the team wins by more than 7 points. The purpose of the point spread is to create a fair betting market by offsetting a priori biases towards a given team. Point spreads are not static values in that sports bookmakers continually update point spreads to account for changes in the betting market. In theory, either team in a given match-up would have roughly a 50% chance of winning when the spread is taken into account. Expert sports bettors believe that achieving a consistent success rates of 60% or higher has become extremely difficult as bookmakers have begun to employ more sophisticated techniques in creating spreads [2]. Another type of sports bet is the straight bet. This is simply a bet on which team will win a given match-up without regard to the spread. In this project we focus on both the point spread bet and the straight bet.