College football betting odds are made by oddsmakers offshore and by a few people in Las Vegas. These college football betting odds are what the public bets into each week during the college football season. The job of the college football sports betting oddsmaker is to put out a betting line that will attract action on both sides of the game. In reality they don’t do that. They actually try and make a line that they believe will be shaded toward what they expect the public to bet.
College football betting oddsmaking is a lot of numbers and statistics but it is also partly a feel. A good college football sports betting oddsmaker will be able to see which way the public is likely to bet and make his odds accordingly. That does not always mean the line will be perfectly balanced as it should be. The line will probably be shaded toward the favorite in many instances because the public usually bets the favorite. It will also be shaded toward the popular teams like USC, Notre Dame, Michigan, etc. Oddsmaking can often be more of a feel than a true numbers game.
There are many college football betting oddsmakers that use power ratings to set their betting lines, but the good ones go beyond the numbers and include their gut feeling as to where the line should actually be. This applies more to the NFL than it does college football since the NFL is a huge public sport. College football betting odds have their public games, especially those that are on TV, but every NFL game fits that category. Very often in college football betting oddsmaking you will find that the oddsmaker will actually use more than one opinion before setting the official betting line. They will get three or four opinions on what the line on a game should be and then the main oddsmaker will make the final decision. This helps avoid the perception problem that can happen if only one person is making the line.
Usually the big time bettors or wise guys will hit the college football betting lines first and that helps the oddsmakers even more because they then will have an idea of where they might be weak in the line. Very often the sportsbooks will have wiseguys that they release the line to first so they can get a handle on exactly which way the line is going to go. If you thought that everyone sees the opening line at the same time you would be mistaken. The official opening line only comes from a couple of sources offshore and perhaps one source in Vegas and that line has been bet into before the public sees it. The offshore lines are what people mainly refer to, while the Vegas lines are just copycats.
College football betting oddsmaking is definitely a game of numbers and of feel and something that takes a long time to learn.
