Who says that betting is only for professional sports? The NCAA landscape is growing more interesting, year after year, for boys competitions and girls’ tournaments as well. A lot of operators are offering bonuses and opportunities to whoever would like to try his or her luck on March Madness or on the new NCAAF playoff format, which has been a resounding success last winter.
Given the growing trend and popularity of these challenges, it is not surprising that more and more operators are offering their own odds on youth tournaments, even before they actually begin. The services offered are also growing in numbers, involving betting tips and parlays, such as the one that Sportsgrid offers to its users. On the platform, bettors can find detailed analyses and statistical data for responsible and informed betting on the superstars of tomorrow.
What happened last March was real madness
Whoever would like a confirmation on what we just wrote could just look back to last March. The estimates tell us that 3.1 billion of dollars have been bet on the final stages of the college basketball championship, way more than the 2.7 billion bettors burned in 2024 on the same matches. These figures, obviously, refer only to legal betting. We don’t have data on the illegal bettors but nowadays it is allowed to bet in 38 States so illegal wages are becoming rarer and rarer.
According to these trends, it is easy to predict that next year there will be even more bettors, eager to try to guess where powerhouses like Duke, Florida or Auburn will get in the tournament. Since 2018, legalized sports betting has exploded, all over the country and even abroad (where people tend to bet on the pros), after the historic Supreme Court decision to leave the States free to decide on how to move with betting laws. In the next few years, the words March Madness won’t be related just to the players on the court, but also to the bettors in front of their screens.
Women can play too, and bettors know it
Someone may be surprised by the sudden surge in betting on women basketball. Historically, hoops was always a men’s sport, not as much as football of course but, nonetheless, women’s matches didn’t attract a lot of supporters and enthusiasts. Luckily, in the last few years a lot has changed and these talents began to find the recognition they deserve. The main reason for this is the rise of arguably the best woman ever to play basketball: Caitlin Clark.
Her college stats speak for themselves and there’s no need to underline what kind of phenomenon Clark is. What matters to us is the unprecedented impact she had on college betting. From 2022 onwards, college betting on women basketball increased by 25%, give or take, every year, with a sensible decrease after Clark’s departure for the WNBA. There’s a strong and obvious correlation here. Iowa superstar guard was so relevant in college to lead, almost single-handedly, the growth in women’s college basketball, on the court and at online sportsbooks. Clark's rise began in 2022 and continued through her Iowa's trip to the NCAA women's national championship game, which the Hawkeyes lost to LSU. It continued in 2023, as Clark became the NCAA's all-time leading scorer in a tournament where she was the Polar Star for almost three years.
What about football?
We don’t have solid data on NCAAF betting but we know that wages on football are always on the rise, because the NFL is becoming more and more popular. During the summer, a lot of bettors try to place their slips, before the odds change after week 0 and week 1. Since the beloved winter sports are on a hiatus, there’s a desire to speak and think about football. Sportsbook odds are a way to read the room and understand which colleges are among the favourites and which are doomed for a rebuilding season.
