American Football Betting

There are two primary leagues for American football betting.  There is the NFL, a professional league, and the NCAA, an amateur league played by student-athletes at colleges and universities.  The rules for betting on each are the same.  There are two primary betting types, point spreads and totals.

We’ll look at point spreads first, as this is the most popular way to bet on football in the US.  Point spreads assign numbers to each team in the contest, a negative number is assigned to the favorite in the match up, while the underdog will have the positive number.  For example:

Notre Dame -10 vs Michigan +10

In this point spread, Notre Dame is favored by 10 points over Michigan.  This means that if you bet on Notre Dame, they would need to win the game by more than 10 points for your bet to be a winning one.  If you bet on Michigan in the game, you would win if Michigan won the game, or if they lost by 9 points or less.  The standard fee for placing American football bets on point spreads is 10% of your wager, or $10 for every $100 wagered.

The second most common way to bet on American football is called the total, or the over/under.  With these bet types your goal is to guess whether the total number of points scored by both teams will be more or less than the number set by the odds maker.  A total might look like this:

Dallas Cowboys vs Green Bay Packers OVER/UNDER 42

If you bet on the over in this situation, you would hope that the teams would combine to score more than 42 points, say a final score of 35-21, a total of 56 points scored, making your wager a winner.  Taking the under, you would want a score more like 24-7, or 31 total points.

Now that you have a basic understanding of American football betting, you can get predictions from our expert football handicappers.  Their job is to provide their customers with winning football picks year after year.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• How to Bet College Football
• Football Picks: Notre Dame at Michigan
• USC at Notre Dame Free Football Picks
• 2010 Mid-American Football Predictions
• How to Bet on Football

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