College Basketball provides a great opportunity through the autumn and winter months for sports bettors to bet on a huge number of games in a short period of time.
There are over 30 NCAAB conferences with 350 Division I NCAA basketball teams, and each team has about 33 games per season.
That works out to over 11,000 NCAA College basketball games to bet on – upwards of 30 games per day in some cases.
It can be stressful and confusing to try to figure out which games you should bet on, so we recommend first learning how to bet on the NCAAB, then we can look at strategies, or maybe you can pick a few teams to follow and wager on throughout the season.
How to Bet on College Basketball Odds
Let’s look at popular betting types and how the college basketball odds might be displayed. This is a great way to determine which betting options are best for you and your NCAAB betting strategy.
College Basketball Moneyline Odds
All you have to do when placing a college basketball moneyline wager is choose the winner of the game. It’s that simple! You will look at the NCAAB odds, and find a game that interests you, and when you see a team you think will win the game outright, you can place a wager on them.
But first, let’s look at an example and how to read the odds quickly to determine if the bet is worth placing.
You can win more money betting on an underdog, but you don’t want to limit your betting strategy to only betting underdogs. Teams are favored for a reason, as they are more likely to win the game.
A quick way to identify the favored team will be to look at the college basketball odds – favored teams will have a negative number (-120) for odds. The underdog team will have a positive number (+300) and the higher the number, the more unlikely the team is to win.
Let’s say you have Baylor vs Gonzaga:
Baylor -145
Gonzaga +150
In this situation, we can identify Baylor as the favored team and Gonzaga as the underdog. These odds show us that it’s expected to be a tight game, as the odds numbers are quite low. Odds on either side with a high number reflect a bigger favorite or a bigger underdog.
If you want to bet on Baylor, you will have to wager $145 to win $100. If you want to bet on Gonzaga, you would win $150 on a $100 wager. You can bet any amount, it’s just a quick way to identify how much you would win by betting $100 on American odds.
There are other odds formats like Decimal and Fractional if those are easier to understand.
College Basketball Point Spreads
When it comes to betting on point spreads in college basketball, it can be a little more complex, but still, a great NCAAB betting option, especially when you feel like there isn’t a moneyline outright winner in the game.
The point spread gives the underdog team an advantage, using a point spread as an imaginary head start. The negative number still will represent the favored team, and that team will need to win by that amount.
The positive number will represent the underdog team, and there are two options when betting on an underdog: they either have to win, or they can lose by less than the point spread.
If we use the same teams as above:
Baylor -8.5
Gonzaga +8.5
This means that Baylor is favored and will need to win the game by more than 9 points for your wager on them to cash. Gonzaga is the underdog, and they can either win the game or lose by less than 8 points.
College Basketball Totals
Totals betting in college basketball is an easy way to place wagers on a game when you don’t know exactly which team will win.
You might have an idea how many points a team gets roughly in a game, so you could bet the totals, which allows you to bet on the total number of points both NCAAB teams will score during the game.
If you have Baylor and Gonzaga playing and the total is set at 150, you would have to decide if you think the total number of points scored by both teams will be higher or lower than 150. If the score is 90-78 (168) the over will cash, and if the score is 84-61 (141) the under would cash.
College Basketball Prop Betting
There are some great props available on any given NCAAB game, from team props to player props – and you can find even more NCAAB prop odds during March Madness.
Prop bets are either rare occurrences that will happen during a game or betting on something a particular player or team as a whole might do.
You can bet an over/under style of bet on how many points a player might get, or how many points a team might score in the first quarter, or any quarter for that matter.
There will be a vast selection of props on the NCAAB odds board, and you simply have to decide which options are a good fit for your betting strategy.
College Basketball Futures Betting
Futures are events or outcomes that will occur in the future that you can wager on a year, months, weeks or days in advance. You can bet on which team you believe will win March Madness almost as soon as the previous year’s tournament wraps up.
Usually mid-season it’s a great idea to review your top teams and make a selection once you know the teams that will likely be top contenders heading into the tournament.
Now that you have an idea how to bet on college basketball, the next step is to sign up over on the sportsbook.
You can create your BetUS sportsbook account for free, make a deposit and take advantage of our great welcome bonuses, and start betting right away!