The 2019 NCAAF Bowl Season is upon us and any Pay Per Head sportsbook manager worth their weight in salt knows that keeping their finger on the pulse of the world of sports is a must.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at some projections for the upcoming NCAAF Bowl Season to keep your online sportsbook one step ahead.
The College Football Playoff teams, along with the major New Year’s Day participants, won’t be announced for another two weeks. This gives us ample time to make a few early predictions on who to expect ending up where and get a head start on the competition when it comes to preparing your book for Bowl Season.
As we head into the final week of the regular season, more commonly referred to as “Rivalry Week”, we are on the cusp of action which will ultimately decide the 66 combatants who will do battle in the remaining 33 bowl games.
When all is said and done, 78 teams will be chosen to fill spots in 39 total bowl games in addition to the quartet of teams heading to the College Football Playoffs. Entering week 14 we currently have a mere 72 bowl-eligible teams in the nation as things stand. This marks the lowest number of eligible teams heading into rivalry week since 2014.
NCAA Football Teams Hunting for Bowl Eligibility
There remain 14 NCAAF teams who can play their way into bowl eligibility with a win in their next games. 13 of those teams will be heading into battle on Saturday while Army will have to wait two weeks until their annual tilt against the Navy Midshipmen.
The remaining 13 teams who still have a shot at snagging a bowl game are Boston College, Kent State, Liberty, Louisiana-Monroe, Michigan State, Mississippi State, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon State, TCY and Troy.
The math works out quite nicely six of those teams favored this week and just six spots left to fill. The remaining eight teams, all underdogs, would remain outside of the bubble if upsets didn’t happen in College Football. Obviously, we’re not going to see all six of those favorites win with each of the eight underdog teams taking a loss.
Quite frankly, with the strength of competition and generally sloppy play of each of these 14 teams, it’s not hard to imagine a world where only a handful of those spots are filled by truly eligible teams. This will cause a situation where the NCAA will have to choose from the field of 5-7 teams in order to fill out the remainder of the lesser bowl games.
With things still up in the air for many NCAAF bowl games at this point, the projection game can become a bit of an uphill battle. With many tie-ins a possibility to ensure conferences are all represented and straight guesswork if we get past that point and must rely on the committee choosing these teams.
Below is a full list of each of those 14 teams and their odds this upcoming week. All of these programs only need a single win to become eligible with the exception of Army who needs two.
- Ohio Bobcats -27 @ Akron Zips
- Mississippi State Bulldogs -2.5 vs. Ole Miss Rebels
- Kent State Golden Flashes +5.5 @ Eastern Michigan Eagles
- Nebraska Cornhuskers +4.5 @ Iowa Hawkeyes
- TCU Horned Frogs -12 vs West Virginia Mountaineers
- Troy Trojans +12 vs Appalachian State Mountaineers
- Liberty Flames -13.5 vs New Mexico State Aggies
- Boston College Eagles +9.5 @ Pitt Panthers
- Michigan State Spartans -21 vs Maryland Terrapins
- Oregon State Beavers +18 @ Oregon Ducks
- North Carolina Tar Heels -8 @ NC State Wolfpack
- Colorado Buffaloes +28 @ Utah Utes
- Louisiana-Monroe Warhawks +21 @ Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns
- Army Black Knights +3 @ Hawaii Rainbow Runners
- Marketing Bowl Season as a PayPerHead Bookmaker
A big advantage for our PayPerHead bookie agents with this week’s schedule is that there are meaningful games to promote from Tuesday onward. Take this time before Bowl Season kicks off on Friday, December 20th to prepare your email or text blasts to best convey to your clients how great the final weeks of NCAAF is going to be. You need to keep your marketing push going all through until the National Championship at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome on January 13th.
There are a number of ways you can go about exercising your creativity and utilizing your client list to make this your most profitable NCAAF Bowl Season yet.
One of the more powerful marketing tools you can offer clients is top of the line information. This can be presented to them in a number of ways, including an email blast or, even better, a blog post. This will ensure that your clients are also well informed about these games and therefore will be more keen to bet on them. This can be as simple as just sending players updated odds and game notes, to creating full-blown betting previews for some, or all of this year’s Bowl Games.
If you do in fact host these on a blog page, you can link directly back to your sportsbook’s NCAAF odds page and create a perfect path for your clients to follow. Providing consistent quality information in this fashion will not only increase your site traffic but also the number of bets you are taking in on a weekly basis. You can even go so far as shelling out a few bucks to a graphic designer to create eye-catching images to further direct attention to you and your sportsbook.
Another incredibly useful technique is to offer your players some form of incentive if they wager on Bowl Games at your sportsbook. Give them the opportunity to have their bet matched up to a dollar amount you feel comfortable with. Even just five or ten bucks will do a lot more to entice bets than you might think.
It is this type of outside the box thinking that will set you apart from the other independent outlets you might find yourself in competition with. In reality, this is just taking a page from the book of the large, offshore operations. This is something we bring up a lot in this blog, but it can’t be understated. Basically, there is a reason that every major sportsbook or casino in the world offers things like signup bonuses, ‘risk-free’ bets or cash-back promotions. There is no reason why the independent bookie of 2020 shouldn’t be utilizing these tried and true marketing tactics within their own business.
If you’ve made it this far into this article but have yet to sign up as a PayPerHead agent, we applaud your dedication to the joy of reading. We would recommend, however, heading over to our main site and take our product for a spin with a free live demonstration of our sportsbook software. If you prefer to speak with a human being with direct voice communication, you can always just give our customer service team 24/7 at 1-800-605-4767 with any questions you might still have. Either way, we will ensure you get started as an independent sportsbook owner with all the tools and resources you could ever need.
