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 first part in this series is going to discuss college football coaches and how they should affect your betting decisions. The average bettor doesn’t think about who the coaches of each team are before making their bet, but they should. Before writing this article, I picked some coaches off of the top of my head who I thought seemed to always have their teams well prepared over the last few years. Here is the list I came up with: Chris Peterson (Boise State), David Cutcliffe (Duke), Paul Johnson (Georgia Tech), Bo Pelini (Nebraska), Brian Kelly (Notre Dame), Randy Edsell (Connecticut), Nick Saban (Alabama), and Bill Snyder (Kansas State). I would have put down Urban Meyer (Florida) but didn’t think of him initially when I came up with the above list. I didn’t even think of covering point spreads when thinking about those coaches. They just always seem to have their teams playing consistent football and step up in big games. I then went and looked up their team’s against the spread records from last season. I was a little surprised that every single coach had a winning ATS record last season with the average record being about 8-5 ATS. Brian Kelly went 6-5 ATS last season with Cincinnati because he wasn’t coaching Cincinnati in their bowl game against Florida. Based on the above results, bettors generally speaking want to back these teams more often than not because their head coach has them better prepared than their opponents, as most of these coaches had teams ranked in the top 30 with their against the spread records last season. It wasn’t that these coaches liked to run up the score, but it was because they had their team ready to play every week with a great game plan. Conversely, I thought of coaches who seem to have their teams under perform and have a tendency not to show up in every game. I came up with Bill Stewart (West Virginia), Mike Price (UTEP), California (Jeff Tedford), and Missouri (Gary Pinkel). There are much worse teams and coaches out there, but these teams seem to just not show up all the time and/or not show up in big games. I was a little surprised to find out that all of the schools had losing ATS records last season, except for Cal which was 6-6 ATS, but still not a winning ATS record. Looking at the coach can be a great handicapping tool when a point spread is considered. This is because teams with solid coaches tend to cover point spreads as underdogs and win those tough featured games against a good team. Meanwhile, teams with coaches who have a tendency to fold, usually have teams who can’t cover point spreads as favorites and fold in bigger games. Who can forget the way UTEP routinely lost as a favorite last year and allowed better teams to blow them out, or the way that Missouri hasn’t been able to step up to the next level as well as getting completely destroyed by Navy in last year’s bowl, or the way that West Virginia didn’t perform up to their potential last season. These are coaches who don’t put their team or bettors in a position to consistently win. Bottom line, look to back teams with good coaches who have a proven track record and fade teams who have weaker coaches, especially when their teams are larger favorites or playing in big games.th
 

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