How Often Do College Football Home Teams Cover the Spread?

Of all the primary sports that online sportsbooks like BetMGM offer, college football has a good case to be the one with the most powerful home-field advantage. 

College football – not the NFL – often has the largest stadiums in American football. It’s also a sport where many fans feel intense emotional connections to their team that run down to the core of their identity. They often voluntarily donate money to the program. 

Many sports bettors subscribe to the immense value of home field, targeting marginal teams in good spots on the back of this so-called advantage.

But how heavily does home field advantage actually weigh on the college football odds market? I crunched the numbers to give you a definitive answer. 

How Often Do College Football Home Teams Cover the Spread?

Since 2005, college football home teams playing in regular-season games cover the spread 49.1% of the time.

Since 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned PASPA, favorites have won at a slightly higher clip of 49.6%. 

Since 52.4% is the break-even point for standard -110 online sports betting, that means blind betting home teams is not a winning strategy. Bettors who attempt this would bleed money at around 3% annually. 

In fact, home teams are so unprofitable that there is not a single season on record at Bet Labs (since 2005) where home teams have generated a positive ROI. The best year was 2021 – perhaps spurred by the post-COVID environment – where home teams went 371-346-8.

That might be a winning record for home teams, but it’s still a -0.2% ROI. And the other seasons are all downhill from there.

Bettors should remember that there is such a thing as home-field advantage, but it’s already priced into the numbers they’re seeing in the college football spreads market. There’s rarely an extra angle to be played outside of rare situations.