Successfully tested my first college basketball betting model

The college basketball betting system model designed to project the spreads, totals, and outcome probabilities of possible outcomes in college basketball games.

Below you’ll learn more about my simple college basketball betting model

I wanted to describe NCAA basketball games with simple basketball betting ideas that were already implemented for NBA and European basketball betting model predictions. With this, I wanted to project the games, where I will get my:

• projected spreads
• projected totals

College basektball spreadsheet

The college basketball betting model was created in Google Spreadsheets. The projected spreads and totals are represented in a spreadsheet, where big discrepancies between my projections and bookmakers’ lines are highlighted.

Simple betting system

The idea was to find advanced and useful statistics for college basketball and then add them into the model so that it gives reasonable results and projections.

Because of the simplicity of the model, where you basically need 10 seconds to prepare after it is already created, I started to track bets based on:

• 5pts difference (or more) between my projected spread and bookmakers spread (Exaple: my projected BYU -15 Bookmakers BYU -10; I would take BYU -10 because it is 5 pts difference or more)
• 6pts difference (or more) between my projected spread and bookmakers spread (Exaple: my projected BYU -15 Bookmakers BYU -9; I would take BYU -9 because it is 6 pts difference or more)
• 7pts difference (or more) between my projected spread and bookmakers spread (Exaple: my projected BYU -15 Bookmakers BYU -8; I would take BYU -8 because it is 7 pts difference or more)
• 8pts difference (or more) between my projected spread and bookmakers spread (Exaple: my projected BYU -15 Bookmakers BYU -7; I would take BYU -7 because it is 8 pts difference or more)
• 9pts difference (or more) between my projected spread and bookmakers spread (Exaple: my projected BYU -15 Bookmakers BYU -6; I would take BYU -6 because it is 9 pts difference or more)
• 10pts difference (or more) between my projected spread and bookmakers spread (Exaple: my projected BYU -15 Bookmakers BYU -5; I would take BYU -5 because it is 10 pts difference or more)

The results of the CBB model after 1008 projected games (pushed bets are excluded):

5 PTS DIFF

• Record: 388-343, +13.96 Units
• Spreads: 219-189, +12.48 Units (BTL: 52.99%)
• Over/Under: 169-154, +1.48 Units Units (BTL: 48.66%)

6 PTS DIFF

• Record: 295-279, -7.60 Units
• Spreads: 170-153, +3.40 Units (BTL: 52.71%)
• Over/Under: 125-126, -7.60 Units Units (BTL: 51.23%)

7 PTS DIFF

• Record: 225-196, +11.00 Units
• Spreads: 133-113, +9.36 Units (BTL: 52.15%)
• Over/Under: 92-83, +1.64 Units Units (BTL: 64.75%)

8 PTS DIFF

• Record: 166-141, +11.72 Units
• Spreads: 100-84, +8.00 Units (BTL: 50.66%)
• Over/Under: 66-57, +3.72 Units Units (BTL: 55.67%)

9 PTS DIFF

• Record: 124-95, +19.08 Units
• Spreads: 100-84, +8.00 Units (BTL: 47.37%)
• Over/Under: 66-57, +11.08 Units Units (BTL: 54.55%)

10 PTS DIFF

• Record: 79-65, +7.68 Units
• Spreads: 50-44, +2.00 Units (BTL: 48.75%)
• Over/Under: 29-21, +5.68 Units Units (BTL: 51.16%)

The record is based on -108 odds.

What I have learned from my College Basketball Betting Model?

Focus on College Basketball only at a time

There is a lot of games every day. With 353 teams we also have a lot of games every day. I believe that if you go really deep with this league I think this is the only league you should bet on at a time. Lines also move very quickly and the odds can open later or not at the same time for all games.

Pay attention to team names

In the first games, I struggled a little bit with team names. For example, somewhere we have Virginia Military, somewhere we have VMI and there is a couple of such examples. I would recommend new bettors to take the first year to get familiar with the teams and the league. Betting smaller amounts of money.

Home Field Advantage

At some point, games are played on a neutral field and this has to be taken into account. Some games were played in Jamaica, Bahamas and then I had to optimize numbers without home-field advantage.

The best results of my model

The best results so far are on games, where I look for a 9 pts difference between my projections and bookmakers numbers. Both for totals and spreads.

• 9pts diff ROI (Yield) = 9.5%
• 10pts diff ROI (Yield) = 7.3%

5% of games are qualified for betting

Tracking the percentage of qualified bets based on my mode shows that around 5% of all games are qualified for betting. Based on the best results, which was a difference of 9 pts between my projections and bookmakers spreads/totals, there were 219 qualified bets out of 1008 analyzed games.

Final thoughts

College basketball is one of the most popular sports for betting in the USA and it can be a profitable sport for many sports gamblers all around the world, especially because more and more online betting sites, offer college basketball odds.

This simple college basketball betting model is available to download as part of the betting masterclass.