Tools for Researching College Basketball Bets

Betting on college basketball can be daunting as there are over 300 teams in Division I alone. Where do you start and what are the guides and resources you can trust?

We’ve compiled a list of the best sites that can help you study up on teams, games, conferences, players, coaches, and more during the course of a season. Here are just some among a wider pool of information sources which can be very helpful to researching college basketball bets.

KenPom

The Ken Pomeroy site is considered the gold standard among college basketball analysts and the people who study analytics in and around college basketball. The site has an established reputation and has been able to track and sort data within individual seasons and also on a historical basis. The treasure trove of information is invaluable. This and other analytics sites such as Bart Torvik’s site and Haslametrics or BPI don’t guarantee certain specific results, but they do offer helpful benchmarks in terms of measuring how good teams are in certain areas of play. KenPom is merely the most high-profile site with data on points per possession and weighted evaluations of offensive and defensive efficiency.

I am so there for December 9th: DePaul and Louisville are 174 and 175 next to each other in KenPom.

DePaul had a shot at Payne becoming their next HC. It’s just very hilarious and sad at the same time. pic.twitter.com/fnkiQcpDRW

— Dave (@davetorrez) November 12, 2023

The value of a site such as KenPom is also found in that it has its own methodology and formulas for measuring success and failure. You don’t necessarily have to view KenPom as the only reputable source or the college basketball Bible for analytics. The value is in being able to look at a site such as KenPom, compare it with Torvik, compare that with Haslametrics, compare that with BPI, and see if you find both common threads among the various sites or some data points which turn out to be outliers or, at the very least, relatively inconsistent data points among the analytics sites out there. Consulting a variety of sources gives you more information to compare and draw from, and that’s really one of the central keys to good college basketball research over the course of a full season of play.

Outlier

I know, I know: we’re plugging ourselves here. However, it’s important to highlight that this is a very valuable resource. Outlier.bet can give you a really good insight into player props and that can help you either handicap those props or the games overall.

When you log into your Outlier account, you’ll see a full list of the latest and best player props under Insights. The application is constantly scanning both stats, player metrics and trends, and cross-referencing them with the odds on the board. Then it presents to you the best options on the board.

Whether you take those and then go and do more research, or whether those help you handicap the games themselves, that’s up to you. The bottom line is you want to incorporate this into your diet to get as many data points in as possible.

Sports Reference College Basketball

The whole family of Sports Reference sites is really good in certain ways which can help you do your research on any sport. This is true for college basketball. Sports Reference is really good at compiling historical results between any two schools and thereby giving you head-to-head information. That’s where Sports Reference really shines. You also get historical records for each college basketball program with its historical results, so when someone asks you, “Is this college basketball program supposed to be good on an annual basis, or is it actually overachieving by being so good this year?”, you will be able to give a good answer. Sports Reference is the source which can get you that kind of information. You can also get answers to NBA players and other notable alumni of a specific school by researching the rosters from the past for each team at a given school. This is a great resource for historians and for being able to offer player comparisons between today’s stars and yesterday’s legends.

Jordan Majewski / Staring At The Floorboards

There are the mainline analytics sites and the mainstream sports history and research sites. Then there are the great off-the-radar blogs and websites from grassroots bloggers and researchers who love the sport and will go in depth in a lot of different ways which can help you as a college basketball bettor over the course of the season.

One really great example is Jordan Majewski’s Staring At The Floorboards blog. This site gives you analysis of the playing styles and strengths and weaknesses of each team. Does this team play zone and does that team have the shooters to bust up the zone? Does this team have good guards and does that team have the defensive speed to keep up with those guards? Does this team rebound well and does that other team have the size and strength to compete on the glass? You will get those kinds of questions answered at this blog. You will also get lots of late injury information just before tipoff of these games.

Jordan Majewski has a Twitter handle — @jorcubsdan – where you will get tweets and updated information on roster changes, players who are unavailable to play right before tipoff, and other related pieces of information. This is such a good in-the-moment resource for people who want to know if a star forward or a key guard is going to play in a game against a quality opponent. This is a vital resource for anyone who wants to be a more informed bettor on college basketball from November through March Madness.

Heat Check

This online college basketball site is a website for the true college basketball junkie. These are not generic previews or overviews. These are really detailed, in-depth, deep-dive, focused profiles of specific college basketball players, teams, coaches and conferences. It’s less about the in-game betting angles and which players are injured or healthy, more about giving complete evaluations of players and connecting them to how they fit within teams and their overall philosophies and approaches to games.

Editor Eli Boettger leads a team of extremely sharp college basketball minds who produce first-rate college basketball articles on the central figures in the sport and the key players in all the conferences across the country. Few publications educate a college basketball audience as fully, as widely, or as comprehensively as Heat Check does.

Podcasts

Don’t forget the vast ocean of college basketball podcasts available to listen to. The publications mentioned above either do podcasts or have their commentators appear on other podcasts. You can also find podcasts on Twitter from the various elite college basketball commentators out there, such as Gary Parrish of CBS Sports and Jon Rothstein of CBS.

The @EyeOnCBBPodcast will be live on @YouTube momentarily. We'll touch on the weekend's biggest results — like Arizona over Duke, BYU over SDSU, Tennessee over Wisconsin and Memphis over Missouri.

We'll also look ahead to the Champions Classic.

WATCH: https://t.co/jEAWy5CghS

— Gary Parrish (@GaryParrishCBS) November 13, 2023

Supplementing the reading and social media analysis you do as a college basketball evaluator and bettor with podcast material over the course of the season will give you insights on a lot of different levels, giving you more perspectives and voices, which in many ways is the main thing you need to do. It’s less about looking for “the one source” and more about having lots of different sources you can compare and weigh to make more informed judgments about various games and topics.

Putting It All Together

From finding March Madness value to betting the first week of the season, there are a lot of good places where you can research college basketball bets. Make sure you have your outlets lined up because the more work you put in, the more likely you are to win.