Most bettors get excited for the start of each football season. Football is the most popular sport in the United States both to watch and bet on. At the start of the season, people think that this is the year they will finally do well, so they proceed to read every article they can and try to accumulate as much knowledge as possible. However, I am a strong believer in being efficient and working smarter not harder. As a result, I am going to do a series of these articles to get bettors ready for the up-coming football season that doesn‘t consist of a preseason ranking. Instead of doing in-depth previews of each team, I will review football betting keys and theories to get bettors thinking in mid-season form, so that they don’t have to use the first few weeks to remember things that were successful last year. Last season, I was making things too difficult in September, which resulted in having a horrible opening month. Once I simplified things and used these theories that will be discussed over the next few weeks, I was able to have an absolutely dominating rest of the season. Bottom line, these theories will put bettors in a position to be successful throughout the entire Fall. The second part of this series is going to talk about what strategies work best in the first few weeks of the college football season. One of the best early season keys is to fade teams that had great success the season before but lost a majority of their talent and maybe even their head coach heading into this season. At the start of the 2009 season Ball State lost outright at home to North Texas to open the season, despite being 16 point favorites. The Cardinals had lost their head coach, Brady Hoke, to San Diego State, as well as several other key players that allowed them to have a one loss regular season the previous year. These type of teams are popular with public bettors in their first few games the following season because everyone remembers their great season from a year ago, but they don’t realize just how much talent is lost sometimes. Look for popular teams from last year who normally aren’t known for being that good, while losing some key players and/or coaches. Two teams that come to mind for the 2010 season could be Cincinnati and Central Michigan. Another early season key is look for scheduling or motivational spots, including some that are unique to the start of the season. One example is a team that has a very big game in the second week but face an easy opponent as a large favorite in week one. It’s likely that a team like that won’t want to play hard or show much because that could give their opponent the following week an edge. That big favorite won’t be likely to have much motivation to cover a large spread because they are looking ahead to next week‘s game. Another good motivational key to look for is teams coming off of a bad end to their previous season. It’s likely that coaches kept reminding their players of the bad ending throughout summer practices and will want to come out strong to get rid of last year’s bad memories. One overall strategy to apply to the first few weeks is to focus on unders and favorites. Offenses tend to struggle early on while getting in rhythm, especially if they are breaking in a new quarterback and/or a new offensive line. Defenses are generally ahead of offenses as well at the start of the season. Unders are great to look at in early season big games, especially if one or both teams have new quarterbacks. These new leaders of the offense are likely to be very nervous and coaches will scale back game plans because of it. Also, offenses will play more conservative in these bigger games because coaches will be less likely to take risks, knowing that their offenses don’t have much game experience yet that season. Favorites are good to look at early on because the betting public and oddsmakers haven’t adjusted to just how good some of the better teams really are. Finally one of the biggest keys is to look at the quarterback, offensive linemen, and defensive front seven that are returning, as well as the quality of those units. Positions such as running backs, wide receivers, and the secondary are not as important. The offensive line are the most critical positions on offense early on because who can forget Oklahoma quarterback Sam Bradford getting hurt in the first game of the season because of poor line play. It took the Sooners all season to get their offensive line in-sync as well because of inexperience. In addition, a strong defensive front seven, especially a great defensive line, can make up for mistakes in the secondary. If pass rushers and blitzes are getting to the quarterback, then that will make up for a lack of quality cornerbacks and safeties. However, it’s very hard for even great cornerbacks and safeties to make up for a poor starting front seven. Using the above philosophies will put you in a position to win more early on. Understanding what strategies to apply to each time of the season is critical to having success throughout the year.
 

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