How to bet on college football bowl season like a pro handicapper

There’s no doubt that the college football regular season is a grind for bettors. With so many more teams to handicap than the NFL, opportunities exist for bettors, but they usually require more research and expertise to uncover.

College football bowl season, though, is a completely different animal — for both bookmakers and bettors. With coaches changing jobs, players entering the NFL draft, players entering the portal, suspensions, weather, motivation and other factors, every bowl game is more difficult to handicap than a regular-season game.

For The Win asked a bookmaker (Adam Pullen, assistant director of trading at Caesars) and a pro bettor (Paul Stone) how they prepare for bowl season.

“Constant news makes it difficult to book bowl season, you just have to get the info quickest and move accordingly,” Pullen said. “It started a few years ago with players sitting out, not wanting to hurt their draft status. Now, there is the portal as well. It’s going to be like this for the foreseeable future. Every one of us is monitoring social media because that’s where the information is. We have to stay on top of the latest injuries, the transfer portal, coaching movement, motivation … it’s crazy what it’s become in the past few years.”

For Stone, part of the difference between the regular season and bowl season lies in the handicap. The other part is timing out when he actually makes a wager.

“There’s a distinction between betting bowl season and regular season from my approach,” Stone told For The Win. “During the regular season when teams have their full complement of players, outside of an injury or two, I’m going to be first in line Sunday morning to bet at market-making books like Circa in Las Vegas, or other aggressive operators in the U.S. It’s all about getting to the number first before the market matures and ultimately having the best of the number more often than not. Closing line value is certainly not the only thing, but it’s a necessary thing for long-term success.”

In bowl season, though, his approach changes:

“In bowl games, I have to change hats and do a complete 360 in my approach. Patience now becomes a virtue. No longer am I betting early and often, I’m now much more conservative in my overall approach. Unlike the regular season, the bowls are not so much about the number, but more about the information. With all the player opt-outs, NFL draft declarations, it’s an exercise of who’s in and who’s out. I’m an old-school guy who takes notes and puts pen to paper. I currently have a new notebook with a sheet on every bowl team, listing players who are in the transfer portal and who have expressed their intention to enter the 2024 NFL draft. I’ve also noted what they’ve said concerning their plans to play or not play in the bowl game. You have to be careful in those instances, because players will sometimes initially say they plan to play in the bowl and then later change their position.

In that notebook, I additionally list high-ranking draft eligible players whom I believe may declare for the draft closer to game time, and ultimately choose not to play in their team’s bowl game. This morning, I spent the first 3.5 hours of my day trying to glean information from opt-outs, draft and other things from a few sites I’m using. It used to be easier to project which team will be more motivated, but now, more than ever, coaches and players alike are simply looking out for No. 1. NIL came into effect 2.5 years ago, and the changes we’ve seen in college football have been greater than the previous 50 years and it certainly bleeds into the handicapping process.”

While it certainly is a more labor-intensive process, there are gems to find around the 40-plus bowl games for those who put in the effort, according to Stone.

“I believe chaos, in general, equals opportunity for the hard-working handicapper,” Stone said. “If you specialize in college football and work hard at it, you should gain a little bit of an edge with the additional clutter.”