Sports Betting News: NFL Team History | NFL Football Betting | College Football Betting | Baseball Betting | Basketball Betting | College Basketball Betting | Hockey Betting | Golf Betting | Tennis Betting | Auto Racing Betting | Horse Racing Betting | Soccer Betting
09/07/2010 -
They didn't need to dust off the ol' Statue of Liberty play, never thought of pulling off a fake punt.
Save those for, say, Jan. 10 in Arizona. That may be the only time this season that Boise State has to dig into its bag of tricks.
OK, so the hugely entertaining win over Virginia Tech doesn't exactly guarantee the Broncos a spot in the BCS title game. There are still lots of games to play, even more polls to take, and a lot more debating to do.
But after yet another sterling performance on a national stage one thing is clear: Boise State is a grown up football team now, and maybe it's time to start treating them as such.
The voters in the Associated Press Top 25 poll already do, rewarding Boise with a No. 3 ranking. The teams they will face with a giant bulls eye on their backs the rest of the season certainly will.
And if the Broncos run the table in the regular season for a third straight year, the people running the BCS surely better.
This isn't the little team that could anymore. This is a big team that really can.
The Broncos had just 60 minutes Monday night to prove they weren't just pretenders. An hour of football to state their case or spend the rest of the season as an afterthought on gaudy blue turf.
They needed almost every second of it to win a thriller over Virginia Tech that was so big many Boise State players celebrated by taking a victory lap around FedEx Field.
``Certainly we're proving people right right now,'' quarterback Kellen Moore said.
Probably winning a lot of fans along the way, too. Say what you will about their weak schedule, but the Broncos always seem to find a way to step it up when it really matters and are certainly a lot more fun to watch than the two teams ahead of them in the national rankings.
The fun this time took place on the road before 86,587 mostly hostile fans. Up early, behind late, Boise State found a way to come back and win on a touchdown pass to Austin Pettis with 1:09 remaining.
A team that first gained national attention with trick plays that beat Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl also showed it can play football the old-fashioned way, too, more than holding its own in the trenches against a tough and physical opponent.
Indeed, the Broncos answered every question except the one about their schedule. They had to, because they will have no other chance.
Their coach tried to downplay it all along, insisting it was just one game in a long season. But the players, college students that they are, were too smart for that.
They certainly understood the difference between the BCS title game and the Sheraton Hawaii Bowl that one lucky Western Athletic Conference team will be in this year.
``We know how much was at stake for us, so it was kind of like a bowl game,'' Pettis said.
Whether the win over No. 10 Virginia Tech will be enough to keep the Broncos in the national title chase despite their weak schedule will be debated endlessly over the upcoming weeks by the talking heads on television. Oregon State is really the only team left on the schedule with an outside chance of an upset and the Beavers have to play in Boise, where the Broncos just don't lose.
So Boise State will run up the score on Wyoming, and try to win style points by blowing out New Mexico State. They'll need to win big against teams that have nothing to lose by trying to pull their own big upsets.
They'll have to satisfy both the voters and the computers, and they can't afford to let anyone even play them close.
``We're heading off to Wyoming, and it's going to be the biggest game at Wyoming ever,'' Moore said. ``That's the way it goes, and that's the way we like it. We like to be everyone's biggest game.''
In years past, beating up on bad teams would have gotten them a pat on the back and a conference title. The competition simply wasn't good enough for Boise to move all the way up in the polls.
That changed this year, though, which is what made the game against the Hokies so big. Boise came in as the No. 3 ranked team in the country, just behind Alabama and Ohio State, two teams with a lot more football pedigree.
The Broncos don't need to climb. All they need to do is tread water and hope that the two teams ahead of them can't make it through much tougher schedules undefeated.
Nothing terribly tricky about that.
----
Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlberg(at)ap.orgCopyright © 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
<< Edwards confident in reclaiming Bills QB job
ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. (AP) - Shortly after Buffalo Bills coach Chan Gailey finished discussing how much Trent Edwards has improved this preseason, the quarterback in question walked by and took a spot on a bench outside the locker room.``I think he's g
<< Rex, Woody visit helped seal Revis deal for Jets
FLORHAM PARK, N.J. (AP) - Darrelle Revis and Rex Ryan looked at each other, huddled in a conference room in Florida, and immediately knew they had the same game plan.The New York Jets' star cornerback wanted to get back on the football field.The bra
<< Padres end skid at 10, nip Dodgers to stay alone in first
San Diego, CA (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - Nick Hundley homered and drove in two runs,
and the Padres snapped a 10-game skid with a 4-2 win over the Dodgers to
barely maintain first place in the NL West.
The San Francisco Giants threatened to
<< Indians use Choo's single in ninth to edge Angels
Anaheim, CA (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - Shin-Soo Choo's single in the ninth inning
scored Michael Brantley with the game-winning run, as Cleveland opened a
three-game set against the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim with a 3-2 victory.
Jayson
Report: Bush to be stripped of Heisman >>
Sunnyvale, CA (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - Former Southern California star Reggie Bush
will reportedly be stripped of the Heisman Trophy he won in 2005.
According to Yahoo! Sports, the Heisman Trophy Trust is close to completing
its investigatio
Tiger gets Ryder Cup nod >>
New York, NY (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - Tiger Woods received one of Corey Pavin's four
captain's picks on Tuesday and will play for the U.S. in this year's Ryder
Cup.
Zach Johnson, Stewart Cink and Rickie Fowler were Pavin's three other picks to
A's aim to extend home win streak over Mariners >>
(Sportsbook Betting Lines) - Oakland has played well at home this season and nobody
knows that better than the Mariners. The two AL West rivals will go at it
again tonight in the second test of a three-game series from the Coliseum.
Oakland recorded i
Fading Angels hope to stop home slide against Indians >>
(Sportsbook Betting Lines) - With their postseason fate hanging by a thread, the LA
Angels of Anaheim look to stop a four-game home losing streak tonight in the
second portion of a three-game series versus the Cleveland Indians.
The Angels are 9 1/2 g
Ten years ago, at just about this time, I called Alan Boston in Vegas and left him a voicemail that went something like this (abridged version): "Hey Alan, Chad Millman from ESPN The Magazine calling. I want to do a book about wise guys, you in?"
A couple weeks later I got a message back (abridged version): "I don't know, maybe," Boston said. "Call me and we'll talk about it. But not later today. I got $1,000 on Andre Agassi to win the French Open at 40-1, and he's in the finals."
Here's what happened next (abridged version): Agassi won his tourney. Boston won his $40,000. I wrote sportsbook.
In the ten years since, how much has been wagered on the big-time tennis events? Put it this way: The Nevada Gaming Commission doesn't even track the number year by year because it's so small.
"Tennis makes up about one-tenth of one percent of our take," says Lucky's bookmaking boss Jimmy Vaccaro. "The last big golf major we probably had $100,000 worth of bets. In tennis, we might have written two big tickets."
Tennis' lack of popularity amongst the American bettoratti is no surprise, really. For starters, the biggest sports betting holidays -- the Super Bowl, the NCAA tourney -- are must see TV. People, at least the degenerates I know, plan vacations around watching those events in Vegas sports books.
But Wimbledon? Doesn't exactly reel in the whales. "Seriously, it's the nuts as an event," says Boston. "But who even knows when it's on?"
Here's another reason that helps explain why golf gets traction, something I call "The Bubbe Theory." My Bubbe is pushing 95 and has cataracts so bad that, to her, even the most crystalline Chicago day is mostly cloudy. But she still listens to the Cubs games, and she still calls me in a fit if she disagrees with something Rick Telander writes in the Chicago Sun Times. She's a sports fan. If she doesn't know you, you're just filling a niche. And niche players, even historically good ones like Roger and Raf, don't drive betting volume. Only the highest profile names attract square money, which inflates wagering totals like a shot of saline to the lips. Bubbe, and the public, loved Agassi, tennis' last cross-the-rubicon, mainstream draw. She also has a crush on Tiger. She's given me standing orders to put a sawbuck on the big cat whenever I walk through a sports book (or mistakenly tap into one via my Internet machine.) That explains why the Masters is getting $100K in action at some books while the four tennis majors might not get that combined this year.
This isn't a case of tennis being a difficult sport to bet. In fact, in Europe, it's probably the second most popular sport for gambling after soccer. Granted, as the WSJ football betting last week and The Mag's Shaun Assael examined in even greater depth last year, that might be because gamblers across the pond see it as an easy game to fix. But it could also be because, over there it holds the kind of sway the big two do over here.
Street corners in Spain are peppered with public courts and kids doing their best Raffy impressions. In some war torn parts of Eastern Europe poverty-stricken kids view tennis as an escape route, like football or basketball here. A couple years ago The Mag's Lindsay Berra wrote a great piece about Belgrade's Jelena Jankovic, Ana Ivanovic and Novak Djokovic. They learned the game as kids while bombs were raining down on their homeland. They practiced in drained swimming pools. Not exactly Nick Bolletierri conditions.
In the United States, casual fans think tennis is played four times a year. But on the tightly packed European continent, national interest in homegrown talent runs deep every weekend. Of the ATP's current top 20 players, only two, tennis betting and James Blake, are American. Fourteen are from Europe, representing six different countries.
No wonder fans from Lisbon to Bhudapest get jacked up for the net game, whether it's Wimbledon or a low-level tourney like the Estoril Open in Portugal (congrats to Spain's Albert Montanes for winning that one, btw). Chances are good that someone representing their flag will not only be playing, but have a shot at winning.
And that's all any bettor can ask for.
To visit this sports book go to MySportsbook.com for all your football betting needs.
In any football or basketball game (the main sports that use point spreads) there are two teams playing against each other.
Those teams, though, are rarely exactly evenly matched – meaning that typically one team has a better chance than the other to win the game. If bettors were allowed to bet on who was simply going to win the game, smart ones would obviously bet on the better team (likely winning more than 50% of the time in the process).
If winning were that easy the Las Vegas and online sportsbooks would stop taking any bets! This is where the point spread comes in: the basic function of the point spread is to balance the likelihood of each team “winning” by adjusting the final score by the point spread. After this adjustment is made you get the Against The Spread result (ATS result for short).
Let’s look at Super Bowl XXXIX, New England Patriots vs. Philadelphia Eagles. Most people believed the defending champ Patriots to be the better team – so if betting were simply based upon which team would win the game, an uneven majority of people would have wagered on New England. But, by using the point spread, the bookmakers adjusted the terms of the bet, evening the proposition so about half the people believed the Pats to be the smart bet, while the other half considered Philly to be the smart bet.
New England Patriots -7 vs. Philadelphia Eagles
The better team, called the Favorite, is expected to win the game and must “give” or “lay” points to the weaker team. The favorite is listed with a minus sign and the number of points they are favored by (e.g., New England -7)
In the case of our example, New England must not only win the game, but they must win by more than 7 points for Pats bettors to have a winning ATS result. An Eagles bettor wins his bet either if:
There was also the possibility that the final score could land exactly on the spread number (for example, the Pats winning 28-21 when -7), which is called a “push” or “no action” and a refund is then issued to bettors of both teams.
The same game with the same point spread can be considered from the weaker team’s perspective: The Underdog (Philly in the case of our example) is not expected to win the game and online football betting thus receives or “gets” points given by the stronger team. When a game is stated from the underdog’s perspective the team is listed with a plus sign and the number of points they are underdogs by:
Philadelphia Eagles +7 vs. New England Patriots
Keep in mind that Philadelphia +7 and New England -7 is the same point spread on the same game, simply stated differently. The first is from the underdog’s perspective; the later is from the favorite’s.
Not a must, but for some a mathematical approach is insightful. You can determine the ATS winner by either:
Let’s look at the actual result of Super Bowl XXXIX: New England 24 Philadelphia 21
The favorite, New England, won the game but not by more than the point spread they were favored by (7), so the ATS result was a LOSS for Pats bettors.
Looking at it from the underdog’s perspective, Philly did not win the game, but they lost by less than the point spread (7), so the ATS result was a WIN for Eagle bettors.
Mathematically considered, 24 for the favorite Pats minus 7 equals 17, which is less than the 20 the Eagles scored, so the underdog Eagles win the ATS result (or you could figure 20 plus 7 equals 27 for the Eagles, which is more than 24 for the Pats).
Emily’s boyfriend understood the point spread and wagered $100 on the Eagles at +7. The Eagles may not have gotten a Super Bowl ring, but since they won the ATS result Emily’s boyfriend cashed his bet – giving him money to take her out to a nice dinner.
And now hopefully you understand how to read point spreads, putting you one step closer to joining the fun of sports betting.
To visit this internet sportsbook go to MySportsbook.com for all your football betting and World Series odds.
Sports Betting News: NFL Team History | NFL Football Betting | College Football Betting | Baseball Betting | Basketball Betting | College Basketball Betting | Hockey Betting | Golf Betting | Tennis Betting | Auto Racing Betting | Horse Racing Betting | Soccer Betting