Originally Posted by
agharah1
For me, betting is about looking for consistency of play, and soft lines. CBB has both. Whereas Soccer has the tie option, baseball and hockey can be skewed by a hot pitcher or goalie, NBA players taking games off, and NFL lines being too sharp, CBB offers:
-Massive Home Court Advantage: The NCAA discovered a few years back that about 70% of college basketball games are won by the home team. Unlike NBA Arenas, College teams tend to play in smaller gyms where the students sit closer to the court.
-Massive Talent Disparity: The gap in talent is huge even between members of the same conference. Occasionally you might get burned by a game where a team will get unusually hot from 3, but mostly your average college basketball player can't hit a wide open jump shot more than 35% of the time. Teams with NBA talent have a much easier time scoring than those that don't.
-More motivation: The NBA has 82 game seasons with more than half the teams making the playoffs. You better believe teams and players are taking games off. In college conference title races, and positioning for seeds, and trying to get off the bubble makes practically every game a must-win no matter where you're ranked. In college basketball if you're a team with nothing to play for, its probably because you're really really bad, the type of team that would lose to a tournament team by double digits even at home.
-Soft lines: Someone pointed out last week that as awesome as Indiana/Butler was it still had worse ratings than the New Mexico Bowl, even though the basketball game was on CBS and the bowl game was on cable. Once I turned on the radio in my car during the first weekend of the NCAA tournament when there were numerous exciting games going on at once and all they were talking about was the NFL Draft. Face it: people just don't care about anything that isn't football. The books don't put much effort into making lines, especially since with 347 D-I teams there are so many games. During conference championship week, the lines are so soft it will blow your mind.