National Championship Spiced Up With Prop Betting

Sports News - January 7th, 2010 - Written By John

Everything is behind us now. All the furor of the college football bowl season has subsided, and the national champion will finally be crowned on Thursday night.

Storied programs Alabama and Texas will face each other for the first time in Pasadena, where either Mack Brown or Nick Saban will join an elite coaching group with two national titles.

It is also the fifth time in the last six years that the Heisman winner will be in the National Championship, after Mark Ingram capped a remarkable year with the award in early December. Since then, all of the attention has been divided among the cluster of bowl games over the last three weeks, highlighted by Bobby Bowden's final game, a dominating run by the Big Ten and upsets in three of the four BCS bowls.

Thursday night, all eyes will be on Pasadena. And all that attention means one thing for gamblers: unique prop betting that can turn in-depth knowledge into cash.

Like on BetUS, which has over a dozen of said bets available anywhere from team point totals to individual scoring. Probably the most common, and easiest to track, is team point totals. Alabama has scored fewer than 24 points only three times this year, and has topped 30 eight times. It closed out the schedule with big wins over Mississippi State and Florida, and averaged 33.5 points in the last four. The proposed point totals are:

0-7 Pts +1200
8-14 Pts +350
15-21 Pts +250
22-28 Pts +175
29-35 Pts +250
36-42 Pts +700
43-49 Pts +900
50-56 Pts +1800
57 or more Pts +1500

Although they were in the 26-32 range in three of their last four, including a 32-point performance against a then-second ranked Florida defense, but it will surely have a tougher time against a Texas team that has won it's last four bowls, three of them being BCS games.

The Longhorns have only surrendered 30 points once this year, and that was in the regular-season finale against high-scoring Texas A&M.

The real enigma of the came comes when trying to predict Texas' point total. It is among the highest scoring teams in the country with 40 or more points in eight of it's 13 games, but was stymied in the Big 12 Championship against Nebraska.

And things aren't going to get any easier. Alabama boasts the nation's no. 1 defense with a handful of all-Americans like Terrence Cody, Javier Arenas and Rolando McClain.

0-7 Pts +1000
8-14 Pts +300
15-21 Pts +180
22-28 Pts +180
29-35 Pts +350
36-42 Pts +900
43-49 Pts +1800
50-56 Pts +2500
57 or more Pts +2000

The Crimson Tide are favored in almost every wager, including first to score, according to College Football Betting Lines. Texas scored first in seven of it's 13 games this year, although it waned a little bit at the end. Alabama, however, scored first in 12 of it's 13 games.

Texas TD +200
Texas FG +325
Texas Any Other Score +5000
Alabama TD +150
Alabama FG +325
Alabama Any Other Score +5000

Ingram, and Longhorn quarterback Colt McCoy are the top-two candidates to wind up with the game's MVP, according to the betting site. Ingram gets a slight edge because it is predicted that Alabama will win the game, but McCoy has been stellar in his own right, winning the Walter Camp Player of the Year award, along with the Johnny Unitas Golden Arm trophy.

Cody Johnson +2000
Colin Peek +2000
Colt McCoy +200
Dan Buckner +2500
Darius Hanks +2500
Greg McElroy +500
James Kirkendoll +1800
Jordan Shipley +700
Julio Jones +700
Malcolm Williams +2000
Mark Ingram +175
Marquis Maze +1500
Tre Newton +1200
Trent Richardson +2000
Field (Any Other Player) +1200

Other sites, like BetED, also provide betting lines for the game:

- Will the final score be odd or even in the game?

Odd -160
Even +110

- Which team will score last in the game?

Texas -105
Alabama -135