Diary of a Football Handicapper

By Robert L. Carneiro

This journal captures the day-by-day, week-by-week excitement of a fall season spent challenging the sports books of. Reno as the author tries to beat the point spread betting college football. While basically the story of one man, armed with a system, going head to head against the oddsmaker, it is also an ethnography of the sports books of Nevada.

The author, a professional anthropologist, presents the mo detailed account ever written of just how sports books operate.

How is the point spread made? By whom? How does it change, game by game, in response to the money bet? All this and more is revealed. .. . . .

But beyond that here is a very human story of an avid football fan, indulging his passion and his hobby, trying doggedly to outsmart the oddsmaker. Moreover; the book catches the flavor of the gambling scene in Reno, as well as reflecting the color and pageantry of college football.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 10, 2006
• ISBN: 9781452093246

Robert L. Carneiro

Robert L. Carneiro is an anthropologist who has worked for many years at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He has done ethnographic field work with three different tribes in the Amazon, and has published extensively in the field of anthropology. He grew up in New York and went to the University of Michigan, where he received both his undergraduate and graduate degrees and watched many good football games. He combined his passion for football with an interest in numbers to generate a system for predicting winners, which he employed during his visits to Reno. Besides following college football and basketball and major league baseball, his hobbies include reading, traveling, cartography, and chess. He is married and has one son. A previous book of his, a novel also published by AuthorHouse, is entitled In Solemn Conclave.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

In the pages that follow, you will find an account, reported day by day, of the six weeks I spent in 1979 living on the shores of Lake Tahoe and driving to Reno every Wednesday to place my bets on college football games. It was an all-out battle of wits, me against the sports books.

The question that may have entered your mind is, Why now, a quarter of a century later, are you getting this book into print? By this time, isn’t it terribly dated? The answer is yes and no. The yes is obvious, but let me tell you about the no." Every major aspect of betting on football in the sports books of Nevada has remained the same. The basic elements are still in place. Thus, the dedicated football bettor of today will instantly recognize and understand much of what he’ll read in these pages. Not only are the mechanics of wagering in a sports book the same as they were then, the emotions involved are too. The doubts that assail him as he watches his money threatening to evanesce on every dropped pass or blocked punt are no different. The knotting of the stomach and the churning of the gut are for him today, just as they were for me in 1979. And the exultation of coming from behind to beat the spread in the last minute of play is no more glorious today than it was then.

I’m a cultural anthropologist by profession, and one of the things I’ve attempted to do in these pages is to write an ethnography of the sports books of Reno. To be sure, anecdotes and personal experiences are liberally sprinkled among the ethnographic facts. But altogether—if I may rise above modesty—the book before you constitutes the most comprehensive, authoritative, and detailed account of football betting in the state of Nevada ever put together.

Still, "An anthropologist, writing about gambling? you might ask. Is that not like a fish thrashing around on dry land? Not at all. Over the years, anthropology has expanded its reach enormously until by now it has swallowed up half of what used to be sociology. No longer do we limit ourselves to ye savage customs of ye heathen." No longer do we go only to New Guinea or the Amazon to find our subjects. More and more frequently these days, anthropologists are staying in their own country and studying cocktail waitresses, weightlifters, and stripteasers. Honest. The rule seems to be, if it moves and if it talks, anthropologists are ready to study it.

One of the standard methods employed by field ethnographers is called participant observation. The logic behind this method is that you never understand anything so well as when you take part in it yourself. Well, if that’s the case, in this journal you’ll find participant observation carried out in spades! In fact, the central focus of this book is on one man’s struggle, mano a mano, against the sports books of Reno, trying doggedly to bring them down and come out money ahead. The ups and downs of wagering—the exhilaration of winning and the desolation of losing—are all here, graphically described, game by game and week by week. Here you will find portrayed the raw and unvarnished truth about football wagering in the Land of Odds.

But there are other ingredients to the book as well. I’ve tried to inject into the narrative as much as I could of the color, the pageantry—and the wackiness!—of college football. And I’ve also tried, on a modest scale, to impart a little of the flavor of living in sparklingly crisp autumn weather above the spectacularly beautiful blue of Lake Tahoe. And I’ve also tried to present a touch of the subdued glitter of Reno, less tinselly, less garish than its big sister, Las Vegas. Still, front and center in these pages are the mechanics of how sports books work, and my unrelenting assault on them.

However, don’t be fooled by any of this window-dressing! Come right down to it, my trip to Nevada was undertaken, first and foremost, to have fun—to indulge a hobby and a passion. True, I did take with me some serious professional work to do between my dedicated efforts to pick winners—just to give the entire enterprise a thin veneer of respectability.

This journal has never seen the light of print before, but it came close. One publisher to whom I submitted the manuscript in 1980 told me he would have published it had they not already done a football book the year before. Two others said they would publish it if I included my system for picking winners. Perhaps misguidedly, I refused to disclose it. The irony here is that the Gamblers Book Club—yes, there is such a thing—somehow got wind of the existence of my manuscript and told me that if I could get it published, they would make it their selection of the month!

I had one last chance to get this book in print before this. In 1994 I learned that the University of Nevada Press had added a Gambling Series to their list of publications. Aha!, I thought, here’s my chance at last. They had already brought out Welcome to the Pleasuredome: Inside Las Vegas and Inside the Gambling Mind. Why, then, not something like Inside the Sports Books of Reno? After all, that’s what my book was largely about. So, convinced that I had a manuscript tailor-made for their series, I submitted it to the U. of N. Press.

But it was turned down, and the Press sent me the adverse comments of their one anonymous reviewer. It was crystal clear to me from his comments that although he might know something about casino gambling, he had little intimate knowledge of football wagering in a sports book. Still, I was not about to give up easily. I suggested to the director of the Press that they send my manuscript to the late Sonny Reizner, the knowledgeable and respected manager of one of the leading sports books in Las Vegas. Reisner would certainly be able to give an authoritative assessment of the book, and I was confident his judgment of it would be favorable. Moreover, I even offered to pay whatever stipend Reizner requested as a reader’s fee. But again, it was no go. The director of the Press declined to take me up on my offer, and so the manuscript went back into mothballs. Until now.

Finally, following the day-by-day account of my adventures with Reno sports books, which constitutes the main body of this journal, I have appended an Epilogue in which I’ve reported on what in the universe of football betting has remained essentially the same since 1979, and what has changed dramatically. First, though, I want you to turn this page and immerse yourself in what football wagering was like in Nevada a quarter of a century ago.

Friday, September 21

The wheels of the 727 came to a stop in front of Reno International Airport, and I pushed my way up the aisle in my hurry to deplane. I have waited a long time for this. Two years to be exact. Not long for some things, perhaps, but too long between bets. I first came out to Reno two years ago to bring the sports book to their knees, but my football betting system had not yet jelled, and I did little better than break even. Measured against my expectations, this was as bad as losing. But I’m back, adrenalin pumping, eager to get off the plane and out to the sports books.

The memories of my first visit here are still vivid. And painful. The sharpest twinge of all comes when I recall the Ohio State-Oklahoma game, which I watched on television. I had $300 riding on Ohio State, giving 1½ points to Oklahoma. With less then a minute to play, the Buckeyes were leading, 28-20, and had possession of the ball. I was already savoring my winnings.

Then Oklahoma got the ball and quickly scored a touchdown. Now they trailed, 28-26. If they chose to kick the extra point, making it 28-27, I would lose my bet. But I knew the Sooners were not going for that extra point. They were not interested in losing by one point. They had to go for the 2-point conversion. But they missed it and Ohio State still led, 28-26, the 2-point margin I needed to win my bet. I relaxed and again began counting my money.

However, Oklahoma tried an onside kick and the ball bounced off the belly of a big Buckeyes lineman, right into the arms of a waiting Sooner. Oklahoma had the ball at midfield with 30 seconds left and trailing by 2 points. A couple of plays took it down to the Ohio State 40, and now only 4 seconds remained. Nothing for Oklahoma to do but go for the field goal. Twice Uhve Von Schaman lined up for the kick, and twice Woody Hayes called time out, to let him think about it. Finally, with all time outs exhausted and Von Schaman, by rights, a nervous wreck, the teams lined up again. The snap … the spot … the kick … perfect! The clock ran out and the final score read: Oklahoma 29, Ohio State 28. (Expletive deleted.)

The game had cost me (discounting the vigorish) $600. In four seconds I had gone from +$300 to -$300. It also cost me part of my stomach lining. And neither the drama nor the artistry of the game helped any. Ironically, I like Oklahoma better than Ohio State, and would have rooted for the Sooners if I hadn’t had money riding against them. But my numbers said, bet the Buckeyes, and so I’d put sentiment aside and done so. A serious bettor stops being a fan as soon as his money goes down. A fan roots for his team, a bettor roots for his money. That’s what they say. And they’re right.

But that was 1977. Things are going to be different this year. My new and improved betting system has been forged in the fires of hundreds of college games since then, and honed to a fine edge by playing and replaying those games on paper. Had my new system been in place two years ago, I would never have lost $300 on Ohio State. The game would have been no play. And avoiding a losing bet is more important than making a winning one. The hundred-dollar bettor blows $100 on a losing game, but takes in only $91 on a winner. That has to do with the way football is bet. But I’ll get to that.

The Reno airport, which is being enlarged, was in a mild state of chaos, and baggage retrieval was agonizingly slow. On top of that, it took forever for my rented car to appear. But at last I started on my rounds of the sports books. Before leaving New York I had prepared my betting sheet for the week. On it I had listed every game for which I thought there’d be a point spread posted in Reno, and next to each game I had written down my own line. Following that, were four blank columns, each headed by the name of one of the four sports books in which I expected to bet: Harrah’s, the Reno Turf Club, the Press Box, and the MGM Grand Hotel. I was already familiar with the first three, but the MGM was new to me.

Eager to see this latest wonder of the betting world, I decided to make MGM my first stop. It was not hard to find. In fact, it was hard not to find. The MGM Grand Hotel looks like an enormous rectangular space rocket that has buried itself half-way into the ground. The low, flat casino section next to the hotel is longer than three football fields. Altogether, MGM is the largest casino hotel in the world, beating the biggest that Las Vegas has to offer. Reno is undergoing a boom, and the MGM is the most visible evidence of it.

The MGM sports book is also huge. Not only can you bet football here, you could probably play it. On the big board showing the point spread for each game, team names appear on translucent plastic panels, with fluorescent lights behind to illuminate them. The betting is computerized. A three-digit number appears in front of each team on the board and you bet by giving the ticket writer the number of your team instead of the name. It’s a little disconcerting to tell the ticket writer you want to bet $100 on, say, Number 356 instead of on Purdue. You’re sure the computer is going to botch it, and you’ll end up with a bet on Arkansas instead. But the system works. The ticket writer punches a few keys and the computer feeds out your receipt, with Purdue, the point spread, and the size of your bet all neatly printed on it. This receipt is what you present to collect on a winning bet.

My routine today, and every week I spend here, will be to make two rounds of the sports books. On the first, I will scan the board at all four sports books and copy down the point spread on each game in the corresponding column on my betting sheet. Then, after comparing all the books’ numbers with my own, and deciding which teams are a play for me, and where I can most advantageously bet them, I will make a second round to actually place my bets. So while I was at MGM, becoming acquainted with the place, I copied their line for each of the 27 college games they had posted.

Before leaving, I asked the pretty blonde in the sports cashier’s cage if MGM absorbed the 2 percent federal wagering tax, and she replied sweetly, We do indeed. That’s nice. Some sports books here make the bettor pay it. Thus, if you want to bet $100 on Alabama, you have to lay out $102.

From the MGM Grand, near the eastern end of town, I drove to downtown Reno. Harrah’s and the Reno Turf Club are located here, only half a block apart. The Reno Turf Club is a race and sports book and nothing else, but Harrah’s is part of a big hotel and casino complex. The last time I was here, Harrah’s absorbed the 2 percent wagering tax, but now, I learned, they no longer do so. Don’t they worry about losing business to MGM? Maybe most of their bettors are weekenders who just crave action, don’t want to leave the downtown sector, and don’t much care about giving away 2 percent of their bets. I disdain this display of amateurism. I’m out to maximize my chances of winning, even if it means carrying everything out to the third decimal place.

I spoke to a young woman ticket writer at Harrah’s whom I heard called Jill. She was pleasant and knowledgeable. Despite Women’s Lib, football betting remains an exclusively male bastion, and it seemed almost incongruous to see a woman operating so coolly in this setting. I asked her how many sports books there were now in greater Reno, and she said four. But when I inquired if the Press Box was the fourth one, she startled me by saying no, that it had gone bankrupt and closed down.

Too bad. I had spent some pleasant hours at the Press Box two years ago chatting with Dwight Simpson, the young man who had started it up. He couldn’t have been more than thirty, maybe less. He had been an economics major in college, he told me, but his hobby and passion was predicting football games, and he had developed a mathematical system for doing so. He had decided to put the two interests together and open a sports book. The Plantation Casino in Sparks, next door to Reno, gave him a concession and some space to set up his book. But otherwise he was on his own.

Unlike some sports book people I had talked to in Reno, Dwight was very free about discussing his operation. The only thing he wouldn’t reveal is how he made up his line. He offered the betting public his own line instead of using one of those coming out of Las Vegas, as the other Reno sports books did. He said he wanted a different line from Harrah’s and the Reno Turf Club’s, reasoning that no visitor to Reno would take the trouble to drive out to Sparks to bet unless he was offered spreads that differed from the ones available downtown.

But if a sports book is going to use its own line, it had better be a good one. And it’s not easy to come up with a line as good as those coming out of Vegas, especially the so-called official Las Vegas line put out by the acknowledged master of the art, Bob Martin, of the Union Plaza Hotel. Moreover, I didn’t think Dwight’s line was that good. I had found soft spots in it when I first saw it published in a Reno newspaper. For instance, Dwight had Indiana 5 ½ points over Michigan State, while I handicapped the game as Michigan State by 4. I was eager to get money down on this one, but by the time I got to the Press Box the game was off the board and could no longer be bet. The next day Michigan State tied Indiana, 13-13, so if I’d been able to place a bet, I would have had a winner.

Perhaps Dwight had been a victim of too many soft spots in his line. Maybe the smart money had discovered them, come over to Sparks, and cleaned him out. That’s one advantage the bettor always has over the house: he can restrict his betting to those games in which he thinks he has an edge, while the house has to put out a line and accept all bets on the 30 or so major games of the week.

Then too, being a small entrepreneur, Dwight probably had very limited capital. Two or three straight weeks of bad luck could have wiped him out. A sports book like Harrah’s, being part of a casino hotel complex, doesn’t suffer from that disadvantage. It had plenty of reserve cash to tide it over a losing spell. Dwight had no such buffer.

At any rate, Dwight was gone. I was sorry about that for two reasons. First, I liked him and hoped to learn more about the operation of his sports book. Second—maybe even first—I expected to make money off him. Perhaps he’s still living in town. Once I’m settled, I’ll try calling him if I can find his name in the phone book.

A question remained in my mind. If the Press Box wasn’t the fourth sports book in town, what was? I asked Jill and she said it was Winners Circle, located in Sparks. Hmm. Never heard of it. It must have opened since I was here. So off I went to give it the once over.

After driving in circles for a while I finally located Winners Circle on South Rock Boulevard. It does look new. And big. Inside, it was cavernous, like MGM. On the back of its parlay card, Winners Circle calls itself the World’s Largest Race & Sports Book. Architecturally, that may be true, but in terms of number of bettors, it must run fourth in town. They also advertise the World’s only drive-up window for race and sports wagering, but somehow I missed seeing that.

Unlike MGM, Winners Circle is only a sports book. There’s no casino or hotel connected with it. I didn’t even see any slot machines inside, and in Reno even drug stores and laundromats are lined with slot machines. Back home I once formulated Carneiro’s Law, which states that no matter where you are in Manhattan, you’re never more than 3 blocks from a liquor store. Here in Reno there is some such law waiting to be formulated about slot machines. Only the distance to a slot is undoubtedly much shorter.

The ticket writer at Winners Circle told me that they, like MGM, absorb the 2 percent wagering tax. For that, they can count on a good chunk of my business. They might be pleased to hear that. But it would be their mistake.

The Winners Circle board had a betting line on 27 college games, and I copied them all down. Comparing the spreads at all four sports books, which I now had before me, showed them to be remarkably alike. Here’s just how close they were:

In not one of these 27 games were the four lines any further apart than 1½ points.

When I was in Las Vegas in December, 1977, and visited the Union Plaza, the Castaways, the Stardust, and Churchill Downs, I found lines that were even closer together. For the 12 upcoming bowl games 7 were posted at exactly the same spread at all four books. In 4 of the other 5 games the lines varied only ½ point among themselves. Only in one game did they vary by as much as 1 point.

Lines so close together must have a common origin. There is no way in the world that independent handicappers, each with his own individual method of figuring a game, are going to come this close on so many games. And it seems pretty well established that the ultimate source of these lines, those in Reno as well as in Las Vegas, is Bob Martin’s line at the Union Plaza.

Another factor which at times can help account for the similarity of lines is convergence. Lines which may start out more disparate on Tuesday will, by Saturday morning, have come closer together. Through comparative shopping bettors find where they can get the most favorable spread on the team they want to bet, and will go there and bet it. The cumulative effect of these bets is to force the lines to converge as sports books check with each other, anxious not to be the one whose line sticks out the most and thus gets picked on.

Let’s take a hypothetical example. Suppose that at three sports books Indiana starts out as –7 over Kentucky, and at the fourth one Indiana is –9. All the big money that wanted to bet Kentucky would make its way to the fourth sports book. This would create a big disproportion in the amount of Indiana and Kentucky money that that sports book was holding. To reduce this disproportion by attracting more Indiana money, the sports book would no doubt lower the spread on Indiana to something approaching the –7 of the other sports books.

This leads me to lay down the following preliminary betting rule: In places like Reno or Las Vegas, where there are several large sports books, bet early in the week to take advantage of whatever initial differences in the lines there may be. As the week progresses, these differences will tend to narrow, diminishing your edge. On the other hand, if you are betting with small bookies in a big city, wait and bet late in the week. Most bookies don’t know beans about handicapping. They use the official Las Vegas line, Bob Martin’s line. Thus when they first come out with their lines, on Monday or Tuesday, they will all be pretty much alike. By the end of the week, though, great disparities may have arisen in the amount of money a bookie is holding on two opposing teams. One bookie might have $2,000 on Indiana and only $400 on Kentucky, while another might have $900 on Indiana and $1,500 on Kentucky. Assuming they both started with Indiana at –7, the first bookie might raise the line to –9, while the second might lower it to –6. This 3-point difference is clover honey to the smart bettor. You go out of your way to find it. Over the course of the season, taking advantage of 2- or 3-point differences in available lines may make the difference between an empty wallet and a fat one. So, wherever you bet, it’s always an advantage to have as many different lines as possible to pick from.

With the point spread of all four sports books down on my betting sheet, I was now ready to determine which games to bet and where.

Over the last 5 years I have developed and refined a numerical system for predicting the outcome of college football games. I’ve applied it on paper enough times to know that betting on games where my system differs by 4 points or more from the point spread, I win, on the average, about 57 percent of the time. Since all it takes to make money betting football is to win more than 52.38 percent of the time, I fully expect to come out ahead following my system. What is this 52.38 percent? I’ll tell you later.

Now, some sophisticated handicappers don’t believe in systems, won’t have anything to do with them. For example, Gerald Strine and Neil Isaacs, in their book, Covering the Spread, say: We feel that there are no straight systems of any kind for beating the game. With the point spreads as sharp as they are, and with the football having the funny shape that it has, the bookies’ eleven to ten will wear a system-player down…. We reject a ‘system’ of any kind. I disagree. But all I’ll say right now is, to each his own, and, see you at the end of the season.

Let me repeat, according to my system, a game is a play if the line on it offered at any sports book differs from my line by 4 points or more. When this is the case, I bet the game against whatever line differs the most from mine. For example, my own handicapping of the UCLA-Wisconsin game this Saturday has UCLA winning by 13 points. Both MGM and Winners Circle have UCLA by 6, while the Reno Turf Club has UCLA by 5 ½ and Harrah’s has them by 5. Clearly, I have a play on the Bruins, and Harrah’s is the place to bet them.

Let me make it clear that I don’t bet teams, I bet spreads. If I’d doped out UCLA-Wisconsin so that UCLA was only a 2-point favorite instead of a 13-point favorite, then the game would have been a play for me on Wisconsin. And I would have bet the Badgers at Winners Circle or MGM since that’s where the spread would be most advantageous to me. If a game is a play, and all four sports books offer it at the same spread, then I will bet it at either MGM or Winners Circle, saving myself the 2 percent wagering tax. But a ½-point advantage overrides the wagering tax. So that, if Harrah’s or the Reno Turf Club, which don’t absorb the tax, give me a ½-point advantage on a game over what is offered at MGM or Winners Circle, I will bet it at Harrah’s or the RTC. And I will do so without hesitation. Half a point is worth more to me in cash value than the $4 tax I lay out on a $200 bet at those two books. I’ll give you one example of the correctness of this strategy. Two years ago the extra ½ point I got on Texas Tech against North Carolina at the Reno Turf Club over what Harrah’s (which then absorbed the tax) was offering, saved me from losing $300 on that game.

Since I now knew all four lines, before I left Winners Circle I bet the 5 games for which they provided me with the most favorable line. Then I hopped into my rented car and started making my second round of the other books. I still don’t know the best way to get from Winners Circle to MGM, or from MGM back to downtown Reno, so it took some extra winding around. But I finally got to the other three books and placed my bets, $200 on each game. All told, I bet on no fewer than 16 games, and here they are, with the point spreads, home team given in italics:

At Winners Circle

Notre Dame +3 over Purdue

San Jose State +16 ½ over California

Florida State –9 ½ over Miami (Fla.)

Texas –17 over Iowa State

Arkansas –10 over Oklahoma State

At MGM

Clemson +4 over Georgia

Southern Cal –22 over Minnesota

Washington –9 ½ over Oregon

At Harrah’s

Penn State –10 ½ over Texas A&M

Nebraska –17 over Iowa

UCLA –5 over Wisconsin

Kentucky +7 over Indiana

South Carolina –6 over Duke

Alabama –17 over Baylor

At Reno Turf Club

North Carolina St. –13 ½ over West Virginia

Stanford –17 over Army

Let me return to the point I made earlier about the importance of having many lines to choose from. I had clipped and brought with me from New York the point spread for all college games from last Tuesday’s New York Daily News. When I compared the line at which I had bet these 16 games here in Reno with the line at which I would have had to bet them in New York if only the Daily News line was available to me, the results were striking. On 14 of the 16 games I had obtained a more favorable line here than the one carried in the News. Of these 14 games I did ½ points better on 7 games, 1 point better on 4 games, 1 ½ points better on 1 game, 2 points better on 1 game, and 3 ½ points better on 1 game. This is the kind of betting edge you like to roll over your tongue.

Beginning next week I will come into town to bet on Wednesday. The only reason I’m here betting on a Friday this time is to save a couple of days of vacation time. I find Wednesday a more congenial day to bet. Things are quieter and the line is more stable. Friday the line gets the jitters. Sudden changes occur in it which disrupt and bedevil the methodical bettor. Nebraska-Iowa was a case in point.

On my first swing around the books today, Nebraska was –16 ½ at Harrah’s, -17 at the Reno Turf Club, -17 at Winners Circle, and –18 ½ at MGM. Since my line on the game was Nebraska –22, the Huskers were a play for me at any of the first three books. And the best of the three was obviously Harrah’s, where, taking Nebraska, I’d be giving Iowa only 16 ½ points. But when I got to Harrah’s on my second swing I found that their line had gone up to –17 ½. So now the best line for me was Nebraska –17 at either Winners Circle or the Reno Turf Club. Since Winners Circle absorbs the 2 percent tax while the Reno Turf Club does not, I would have preferred to bet it at Winners Circle. But at that moment the Reno Turf Club was only half a block away, while Winners Circle was a 20-minute drive. I didn’t feel like going that far just to save the $4 in tax that it cost me to bet my normal $200 at the Reno Turf Club. For ½ point I might have driven out to Sparks, but not for four bucks. Besides, it was nearly 5 o’clock, and I still had to drive out to Lake Tahoe, where I had rented a house and would be living.

So from Harrah’s I walked over to the Reno Turf Club, ready to bet Nebraska at –17. But damned if their line hadn’t climbed to –18! Now my choice was between walking back to Harrah’s and taking Nebraska at –17 ½, or driving out to Winners Circle if I wanted the Huskers at –17. However, even if I went back to Winners Circle, what assurance did I have that their line hadn’t gone up? Botheration! Back to Harrah’s I went, resigned to betting Nebraska at –17 ½. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found that Harrah’s had dropped the line on Nebraska back to –17. So I put down my $200 feeling lucky I was giving away only half a point more than the original 16 ½ points.

Still, I hate this fluttering of the line. It creates too many problems and uncertainties. So that’s why, from now on, I’ll bet on Wednesdays, before the solid early line has a chance to thaw and resolve itself into a dew.

Since not everyone knows just how football is bet, let’s go over the mechanics of it. The whole