The college football betting season is broken down into basically three phases which are the pre season that features mostly games out of Conference in September. The conference NCAA football betting season that is basically from late September through Thanksgiving, and then the post season which includes the conference football betting championship games and bowl games. Non-conference NCAA football betting can be tricky for a wide variety of reasons. First, most non-conference games take place at the beginning of the season which is always a difficult time to handicap college football betting due to the roster changes from the previous football betting season.
Some NCAA football betting teams are loaded with everyone back while others were decimated by graduation. Some have new coaches with new systems and yet others may appear loaded with experience and yet have poor players that are returning. It often takes a good first month’s read before a NCAA football betting fan can truly be comfortable with what he knows about the teams.
Another challenge when analyzing non-conference NCAA football betting games is that many of the matchups are mismatches or between teams that are on different playing levels. You will often encounter NCAA football betting matchups that have one super conference team hosting a team from a mid major conference.
An example would be Alabama of the Southeastern Conference hosting Southern Miss from Conference USA . Many times, the college football betting oddsmakers will set an artificially high pointspread on the better known and regarded favorite and this often turns the dog into a live value. Further, these mid major type NCAA football betting teams are always fired up at the having the opportunity to take on a major big time opponent and have the edge with motivation and preparation. A couple of football betting seasons ago, in fact, the Mid American Conference had a phenomenal record against teams from the Big 10 and SEC in particular with several key straight up upsets.
A final challenge when analyzing non-conference college football betting games is that there are often matchups without a lot of historic data to go back on. While football betting games such as Michigan versus Notre Dame don’t have that problem games such as Missouri versus Troy , or Oregon versus Indiana are difficult to read without any history or rivalry factors to fall back on as a football betting handicapper. It is of paramount importance to be prudent and careful in the NCAA football betting season’s first month, particularly in non-conference action.