There are a multitude of different angles, trends, and tendencies that can help a person pick winners in college basketball. Some of them are well known and some are only known by a few people. Some are obvious and there are some that are obscure.Some, such as the trend to play on an unranked home team if they are playing a ranked team and the home team is favored, become almost urban legend. Often these types of trends will have a supposed unbelievable gaudy record attached to them. Like many trends, they might work for a while until enough people have found out about them and drive the line too far in one direction and subsequently the trend starts losing. Also, the linesmakers might discover the trend, after all, that is their job, and help end its profitability. They do this by adjusting the line enough against the trend that it can go from a winning angle to one that burns sports bettors’ money.
I don’t know how many sports bettors realize there are different tendencies in college hoops for certain days of the week. What results teams have in certain situations on Saturdays might be totally different than the same situation has on Wednesdays. Thursday games might have an opposite pattern to Sunday games.
Why do we see such contrasts in ATS and O/U results on different days of the week? There are a number of potential reasons. Very rarely is a game during the week, Monday through Friday, played during the day. Almost 100% of these games, unless on a holiday, take place at night.
A good portion of the games on Saturdays and Sundays are during the day. Teams can play differently during the day as compared to in the evening.Weekday games at many venues won’t draw the same size of crowd as weekend games. The students at a Tuesday night game will probably be more subdued with classes and tests the next day than they would on a Saturday. Alumni attendance might very well be down and the alums more reserved with a full day of work looming ahead. Home-court crowds with their noise and fervor do influence teams, both home and visitors.
Most conferences play a basic schedule during league play with variations thrown in, many times for television games. There are two main basic schedules, the Thursday-Saturday and the Wednesday-Saturday formats. The obvious difference is the extra day of rest the Wednesday-Saturday schedule provides.
With games being played on Thursday night, Friday in most all cases becomes a travel day. Depending upon the length and mode of travel, any practice or preparation time for their Saturday opponent can be greatly reduced. This is compounded even more so if the Saturday game is being played during the day. There are many significant differences in a team’s results playing on Saturday as to whether the team is off of a Thursday game or one with more rest, such as a Tuesday or Wednesday clash.
Conferences that are on the Thursday-Saturday type of schedule are the Big Sky, Big West, Horizon, Ohio Valley Conference, Pac-10, Sun Belt, Southern, WAC, and West Coast Conference. Everybody else is on the Wednesday-Saturday timetable with a couple of exceptions. The Ivy League is the most unique playing their conference games on Fridays and Saturdays. The Metro Atlantic’s base is a Friday-Sunday agenda, but has variations just like most all conferences. All trends cited start with the 2000 season and only pertain to games between two teams of the same conference.If you just look at the most basic results of Saturday games, about the only thing worth noting is big home favorites of 14 or more points don’t do well, 336-404, 45.4%, and big road dogs obviously do. This is not a situation you want to bet blindly, but it is enough of an edge to be aware of before you place a wager. There was not even a trend that good for the basic results with no additional qualifiers of games being played on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday.
However starting with Monday, there are some situations worth talking about. In conference play, if a team had a game on Saturday and is now playing two days later on Monday, there is a strong overall bias to the Under, 518-400, 56.4%. The Under is strongest if our team is a road favorite going 78-51, 60.5%. There is a sweet spot if the away team is favored by 3 to 6.5 points, 40-17 Under, 70.2%. Wagering on the Under on away dogs getting up to 6.5 points also does quite well, 97-61, 61.4%.
There is only one side play on Monday teams playing with just one day of rest that is worth noting and it is just a small slice. Home dogs of 3 to 6.5 points have only been covering the point spread 41.7% of the time since the 2000 season.Now let’s look at games played on Monday by a team with more than one day of rest. While home favorites with just one day of rest covered the point spread 49.2% of the time, our better-rested home squads laying points are beating the number just 37.9% of the time. That is a huge differential. We no longer have an overall Under bias, in our previous Monday example, 56.4%, now just 50.5%. Road favorites now actually have a small lean to the Over, 50.9%, as compared to a 60.5% Under trend.
Our Monday, teams with more rest are doing well as single-digit road dogs cashing tickets at a 58.3% rate versus a 51.4% clip for teams who played Saturday. The amount of rest a team has when playing on Monday definitely makes a difference.
How about if we add a qualifier into this Monday game mix. What if our team is off of a road win? Will the additional rest give us a contrast in results? It shows a huge difference between home favorites of the teams with extra rest versus the ones with just one day, a 32.3% ATS mark compared to a 56.5% record respectively. The team with extra time to think about their road win and be congratulated by their fans and media does much more poorly than the squad who has a very quick turnaround playing their next game.
Incidentally, those Monday home faves off of a Saturday road win are an excellent Under wager, 66.2% winners. The sweet spot here is from pick’em to less than a seven point chalk, an amazing 25-4 Under mark. With such interesting differences in teams playing on Monday off of a road win, let’s see what the same situation in Saturday games provides.
A great play against spot is when a team wins a road game on Thursday and is now put in the position of a home favorite on Saturday, 45-77 ATS, 36.9%. A fantastic optimum wagering spot is if the home team is favored by 10 to 20 points, a pitiful 24.4% record of covering the spread. As compared to home favorites on Monday off a road win with a quick turnaround, we get the opposite results if the game happens to be played on a Saturday.
Now looking at a team that has more than one day of rest playing on a Saturday and their previous game was a road win, there is nothing of ATS significance as a home favorite, almost an exact 50% rate. However, if they are a single-digit home fave they have been going Over the lined total 55.3% of the time.
There is a 56.0% ATS edge if our rested team playing on Saturday off of a road win is still on the road and is favored. If this team is an Away dog, there is a sweet spot of 58.2% ATS if they are getting 3 to 10 points.
Games played on the same day of the week can show widely different results depending upon how much rest a team has and the results and location of their previous game.
Jim Kruger of Vegas Sports Authority wrote this article.
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