These football handicapping tips are designed to assist you in playing Clickoff Classic, Bowlnet and Clickoff Playoff. However, we make no guarantees that this advice will help.

Using point spreads to pick winners

By Steve Cheski
When you play Clickoff Classic, Bowlnet or Clickoff Playoff, you're picking straight-up winners with no point spread.

However, examining the point spread for every game can improve your chances of picking the winner.

College and NFL point spreads are set by sportsbooks in Las Vegas, the only place in the U.S. where sports gambling is legal.

Many factors determine the point spread -- past performance, injuries, weather, where the game is being played, whether a team has been hot recently, etc. 

The spread usually is stated as a plus or minus i.e. Michigan -3 against Purdue or Purdue +3 against Michigan. That means that if you bet on Michigan, they must win by more than three points for you to win. If Michigan wins by exactly 3, the bet is a "push." or tie.

The purpose of the point spread is to make a bet on either team attractive so that the action will be close to even and the sportsbook will make a guaranteed profit on the "vigorish," or service charge it collects on each bet -- usually 9-10%.

For example, if the Rutgers football team is playing at Ohio State, no one is going to bet on Rutgers to win. But they might bet on Rutgers +51, meaning that Ohio State would have to win by more than 51 points.

But if you're picking winners straight-up with no point spread, seeing that Ohio State is a 51-point favorite over Rutgers should help you determine that Ohio State is the better pick.

Of course, that's an extreme example but it occurs fairly frequently in college football where there are many mismatches every week.

NFL point spreads tend to be much lower, in the 3- to 6-point range. It's unusual to see an NFL team favored by more than a touchdown. When you do, you probably want to pick the favorite.

You might think that picking winners without the spread is easy. Well, it's not. 

Traditionally, the Clickoff Classic college winner has been in the 75-80% range while the NFL winner has been at 65-70%.

And the competition always is close -- a recent year's overall winner outpicked more than 9,000 entrants by scoring 389 out of a possible 535 (72.7%), beating three other players by one game.

When we ask Clickoff winners about their picking strategy, almost all of them point out that it's important to pick a few upsets.

Analyzing the point spreads can be particularly helpful in spotting potential upsets.

Home-field advantage is worth about 3 points in the NFL and about 6 in college.

So when you see an NFL team that's only a 1- or 2-point underdog on the road, you may have found an upset in the making.

The same applies in college, where a home team that's favored by less than 6 points may be headed for a loss.

Steve Cheski is president of  EnterSports Inc. and the creator of Clickoff Classic and March Madnet. He is a veteran gambler and sports bettor and won the national 1999 PredictIt baseball handicapping contest. He once picked a perfect 20 winners in Clickoff college competition, but, of course, wasn't eligible to win.