The start of the NCAA football season is mere weeks away. The major mobile sportsbooks have posted regular season win totals for futures bets that can be placed on more than 130 teams — everyone from your Alabama Crimson Tides to your Louisiana-Monroe Warhawks.
And for the savvy line-shopper, those futures odds can be profitable. By focusing on the weakest numbers instead of the best teams, a bettor can greatly enhance his chances of beating the vig if willing to tie up some funds for the next four months. You can do the same with NFL win totals and player props, as prior articles have shown.
By weakest numbers, we mean vulnerable ones where a sportsbook has — for whatever reason — deviated from its peers. We looked at the NCAA win totals posted this week by five widespread operators — FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, Caesars Sportsbook, and Barstool Sportsbook — to find the most glaring instances where one was zigging while the other four zagged.
Now, it’s not quite so obvious as one sportsbook projecting a team to win four games and everyone else picking them to win six. It’s more nuanced, but it’s still a substantial difference when you can bet a team +110 on one site to go over its win total while everyone else has them at a minus price — or at even money at best — to reach the same number of victories.
To make this exercise potentially still more rewarding, we looked for betting options where you could get a plus price offering the potential for significantly better profit than would be possible among competitors.
In this case, you don’t even need to win a majority of our eight bets below to come out ahead. Hit any four of the eight, and you can buy extra Christmas presents in December (remember, these win totals are only for the regular season). Even if you go 3-5 on the bets, you’ll be fine. If you only win one or two, well, they don’t call it gambling for nothing.
So here, in no particular order, are four “overs” for win totals and four “under” bets worthy of consideration, with one sportsbook in particular standing out as being a little different most often — to a bettor’s potential benefit. (Odds listed are as of Tuesday night and subject to day-by-day change.)
Arizona Wildcats o5 +120 (Caesars)
Arizona went 5-7 (3-6 Pac-12) in 2022 after getting only one win the season before. It finished strong with wins over UCLA and Arizona State in its last three games. It has a strong returning quarterback in Jayden de Laura, who led the Wildcats to an average of 31 points per game. (The defense gave up even more, hence the losing record.)
But this is more about how the sportsbooks line up than how the team stacks up. While two of them set Arizona’s win total at 4.5 with juice of -165 or more required, Caesars is one of three that set the total at 5. DraftKings sets the “over” at even money and BetMGM even requires the traditional -110 vig for it.
If Arizona can pick off the likes of Northern Arizona and UTEP on its non-conference schedule and pick up one more Pac-12 win than a year ago, Caesars’ +120 makes for a tidy profit for those backing the Wildcats.
Boise State Broncos o8.5 +134 (FanDuel)
It’s hard not to like the ever-winning Broncos with their crazy-colored turf and perennial ability to scour the Idaho hinterlands (or wherever they find their players) to scrape together a Mountain West powerhouse.
Boise State was 9-3 (8-0) in the regular season last year in continuing its streak of a winning record every year in this millennium. Of course, it needs to do better than just go over .500 to win this bet. It will be challenged by a non-conference schedule that includes games at Washington and Memphis on top of hosting UCF and North Dakota.
Most of the Broncos’ key skill position players are back, however, and the defense was one of the best in the nation last year, though the unit has lost six starters.
Three of the sportsbooks used here make Boise State +110 to get over 8.5 wins, and Barstool offers just +105. Our friends at FanDuel see this threshold as a bigger challenge, which means it is comparably quite generous at +134 for anyone backing Boise State.
Wyoming Cowboys o6.5 +140 (Caesars)
Remaining in the Mountain West, we have the favorable offer above on a Wyoming team that finished 7-5 (5-3) in 2022. In a decade coaching the Cowboys, coach Craig Bohl has shown he always has his defense up to the task, with the team quietly posting winning records in five of the past seven years. It managed to do so last year with a weak offense, and most players from the stellar defense suit up again this fall.
So we Wyoming “over” bettors just need all that to happen again. DraftKings and Barstool also set the over/under at 6.5, with the difference that their payoff for seven or more wins is just +115. Even anyone who flunked math in seventh grade should be able to figure out just how good the Caesars number is by comparison.
Temple Owls o5.5 +120 (BetMGM)
At first blush, we were a little skeptical about considering this (or any) “over” number for a Temple squad that hasn’t been good in a long time and went just 3-9 (1-7 AAC) last year. But everyone seems to think the Owls showed great promise in coach Stan Drayton’s first year and will get even better while led again by quarterback E.J. (son of Kurt) Warner, who threw for 3,000 yards and 18 TDs as a true freshman.
They’ll have to do better on defense and in the running game, but the Owls have enough potential that three of the sites make them a favorite of at least -105 to win six or more games. Only BetMGM is willing to offer a plus price, and significantly so, to boot. Temple’s non-conference schedule includes games against Akron, Rutgers, and Norfolk State to help get its winning ways started.
Kentucky Wildcats u7 +110 (Caesars)
Now we start going the other way, betting “unders” — or against these teams — and somehow, in each case it’s Caesars that is the one rewarding us the most if we’re correct to do so.
We have nothing against Kentucky, which has done quite well in a past decade guided by coach Mark Stoops, with seven straight bowl appearances. The Wildcats were 7-5 (3-5 SEC) last year and have most of a very good defense returning, which should dominate non-conference opponents like Ball State, Eastern Kentucky, and Akron.
But they do play in conference against the world’s toughest football competition (OK, some might make a case for the NFL over the SEC, but … ) and they did lose quarterback Will Levis to the NFL. Ultimately, we end up favoring the under here because DraftKings and BetMGM both require juice — at -105 and -115, respectively — to bet it, while Caesars stands alone willing to more than double our money.
Notre Dame u8.5 +120 (Caesars)
Anyone who watched the Fighting Irish win seven of their last eight games last year to go 8-4 in the regular season under first-year coach Marcus Freeman might blanch at the notion of betting them to do no better in 2023.
Notre Dame does have a strong returning core back and a transfer portal quarterback in former Wake Forest starter Sam Hartman, who has already thrown for nearly 13,000 yards to go along with 110 TD passes in his pre-South Bend college career.
So, yes, the Irish should be good, but to bet them under 8.5 wins, the other sportsbooks charge juice. Caesars welcomes the same bet at a plumply plus price. All hail Caesars!
Appalachian State Mountaineers u6.5 +130 (Caesars)
It’s been 16 years since everyone in the world outside of Ann Arbor became an Appalachian State lover when the Mountaineers upended fifth-ranked Michigan to open the 2007 season. Based on what the numbers say, however, we have to go against Appalachian State this year.
Appalachian State went 6-6 (5-3 Sun Belt) last year, which made things more disappointing than usual in Boone, North Carolina as the team lost three of its last four games. While the Mountaineers have a lot of returnees, there will be a new quarterback, so there’s no telling if they’ll be back to their days of accepting bowl invitations.
You can bet Appalachian State under 6.5 at the other sites and get a return of up to +110 if you’re right and they don’t improve. We’re not sure why you’d do that, however, if you can use Caesars and get +130.
Florida Gators u5.5 +125 (Caesars)
There were times in the history of the University of Florida football program when the idea of betting them to fail to get six wins would have been laughable, ludicrous, and just giving your money away. Now you can do that and make a nice profit for yourself … maybe.
See, Florida went just 6-6 (3-5 SEC) last year, its second straight six-win regular season. If it does that again this season, the bet loses, but the Gators have a tougher non-conference schedule this year that includes a ranked Utah squad as well as traditional rival Florida State. And, of course, there are all those ranked SEC foes like Tennessee, Georgia, and LSU to deal with.
Second-year coach Billy Napier has had to replace new NFL starting quarterback Anthony Richardson as well as a lot of other departing players by using the transfer portal. Plus he has new coordinators on both sides of the ball.
We don’t know what the result of all that will be — we just know that Caesars is offering +125 to bet against Florida while no one else will give us more than +110. That’s all we need to know.
