Notable bets: College basketball tips off 'sharp bettors' paradise
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David Purdum, ESPN Staff Writer
The busiest three weeks in sports betting begin now.
College basketball tips off Monday with a slate of more than 100 games. College football and the NFL continue with the NBA and NHL seasons both underway. Bookmakers are stretched thin, and savvy bettors know it.
The college basketball market in November is made up of primarily serious bettors, while the casual betting public is focused on football. Oddsmakers must keep up with more than 300 college basketball teams, many of which feature drastically different rosters from last season. Betting limits are smaller and lines are volatile, but the pros love it.
“It’s the most challenging of the sports to book,” Adam Pullen, a longtime Las Vegas bookmaker with Caesars, said. “It’s hard to keep up with every single team and know everything about every game. You’re just trying to scrape by until we get to the conference season.
“College basketball is a sharp bettors’ paradise.”
Pullen said he’s still making his team at Caesars the favorite to come out ahead on college hoops in November, but knows they have their work cut out for them.
November college basketball is so lucrative that betting groups will stop playing college football and the NFL altogether. They also ramp up their efforts get access to more sportsbook accounts.
Right Angle Sports, an influential betting syndicate commonly referred to by bookmakers as RAS, says it dedicates 14 people to college basketball, dividing the 362 teams among them. In contrast, sportsbooks might have just a handful of bookmakers responsible for college basketball.
On Sunday, New Jersey-based professional bettor Gadoon “Spanky” Kyrollos said on X, formerly known as Twitter, “Tomorrow the real craziness begins,” and encouraged followers to consider a “betting partnership with my crew.”
Betting communities on social media, like the GoldBoys Discord, also are eagerly awaiting the beginning of college basketball, a time when eagle-eyed bettors spot almost daily blatant mistakes by overwhelmed bookmakers. There’s a legendary, unconfirmed tale from last season about a sportsbook listing an IUPUI game twice on its betting menu. Bettors used parlays to make a big score.
“College basketball season, oh, yeah, it gets brutal,” Matt McAfee, a professional bettor and content producer for GoldBoys and other outlets, said. “I mean, it’s money every day.”
That hasn’t been the case for the betting during football season. October was especially expensive for bettors, but Sunday was different.
Favorites fuel winning day for NFL bettors
Heading into the Monday night game, NFL favorites are 9-4 against the spread in Week 9, with only two outright upsets.
Caesars Sportsbook and the SuperBook each reported a losing Sunday, capped by the favored Cincinnati Bengals‘ win over the Buffalo Bills in a heavily bet Sunday prime-time game.
“We didn’t have many decisions go our way today,” John Murray, executive director of the SuperBook in Las Vegas, told ESPN. “We didn’t have a good weekend on the collegiate or professional gridiron, but the Breeders’ Cup was very successful for us. We had a great weekend on the horse side.
“We are off a stretch of three straight big weekends in both college and pro football [for the house] so there is no need for your readers to pity us,” Murray joked.
“I know they want to. They love to feel pity for the bookmaker. But please. Not this time. I do not accept.”
NFL betting notables
• Ten of 13 games in Week 9 went under the total, and 61.7% of games this season have gone under, the highest under percentage through nine weeks in 33 years.
• The line on the Dolphins-Chiefs game crashed Sunday morning before kickoff, with some books closing with Miami as the favorite. The Chiefs opened as 2.5-point favorites and attracted some early interest from sharp bettors during the days leading up to the game in Germany. But, as the week progressed, the action was lopsided on the Dolphins.
A lot of Miami money showed up this morning,” Tom Gable, sportsbook director at The Borgata in Atlantic City, told ESPN on Sunday.
Craig Mucklow of Caesars Sportsbook said the line had been holding steady at Kansas City -2, until Saturday, when “it all just came in on the Dolphins.”
Mucklow said the Chiefs’ 21-14 win over the Dolphins produced the biggest win of the day for Caesars.
• October had produced weekly big NFL upsets, leading to a monster month for sportsbooks. But only two underdogs — the Vikings and Commanders — won outright this week.
“In weeks past, we’ve been fortunate to have one of those big favorites lose outright,” Pullen of Caesars said. “That did not happen this week.”
Caesars was slightly ahead for the day entering the Bills-Bengals game and needed underdog Buffalo to avoid its first losing NFL Sunday in a while. Cincinnati won 24-18, covering the 1.5-point closing spread.
• The highly anticipated Cowboys-Eagles game Sunday attracted relatively balanced action at sportsbooks, including at The Borgata, which is almost always inundated with Philadelphia money. Gable, The Borgata’s sportsbook director, told ESPN that his book never was forced to move the point spread off the key number of Philadelphia -3 and had only a small decision on the game.
• Texans quarterback C.J. Stroud is a -450 odds-on favorite to win Offensive Rookie of the Year, after his prolific performance (470 yards, five touchdowns) in a win over the Buccaneers.
Week 10 lines [via ESPN BET by Penn National]
[As of Monday]
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Carolina Panthers at Chicago Bears (Thursday) (-3.5, 40.5),
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Indianapolis Colts (-2, 43.5) at New England Patriots
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Green Bay Packers at Pittsburgh Steelers (-3.5, 36.5)
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Cleveland Browns at Baltimore Ravens (-6, 38.5)
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San Francisco 49ers (-3, 44.5) at Jacksonville Jaguars
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Tennessee Titans at Tampa Bay Buccaneers -1, (-105), 40.5
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New Orleans Saints (-2.5, 40.5) at Minnesota Vikings
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Atlanta Falcons (-2.5, 41.5) at Arizona Cardinals
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New York Giants at Dallas Cowboys (-15.5, 39.5)
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Washington Commanders at Seattle Seahawks (-6.5, 44.5)
College football betting notables
Notable opening lines: [via Las Vegas-based sportsbook Circa Sports, one of the first books to post weekly college football lines]
• The total on Saturday’s Rutgers-Iowa game opened as low as 28.5, which would be lowest total in at least the past 24 years, according to ESPN Stats & Information.
The total on last week’s Iowa-Northwestern game at Wrigley Field opened as low as 29.5, which would’ve been the lowest for a college football game since at least 2000, but bettors bet the line up to 32 at kickoff. Iowa won 10-7.
Fourteen of Iowa’s past 20 games have gone under the total.
