I remember in the 70's, there was 1 guy in vegas who set the lines for all the games. He was super accurate but later died. It was a crap shoot after that.
My ex brother in law is/was a big gambler with all his theories on gambling. I know many believe that they set the line so they get equal betting on both sides so they can make the juice. According to my BIL, he said that is what they want you to believe. The juice money is peanuts to them. What they want is for the betting to go all one sided and win the big bucks. Most bettors make poor choices. That's why gambling so hard to win consistently.
You are talking about Bob Martin. He was heavily revered when I arrived in town in 1984, to the point it was sacrilegious to say anything that could be deemed as a knock. The older guys in particular got wide eyed and gushed over Bob Martin.
I didn't care. I was a young confident guy who had already purchased all of the record books at Gamblers Book Club. Bob Martin relied on feel. He generally had a very good feel for the NFL. But his college numbers were very weak. I would go back a decade or so, apply my basic statistical formulas, and be astonished at how bad those numbers were, especially in comparison to what I was dealing with during the mid '80s. Bob Martin did not give nearly enough respect to the college powerhouses, especially the line of scrimmage mismatch games. That was the running era, the wishbone era. I looked at the old spreads and it was like you were getting a free 10 point teaser on one game after another.
Bob Martin had essentially retired by 1984. A young guy named Michael Roxy Roxborough took over. He was more savvy than Bob Martin but obviously had to earn the trust of the sports book industry, which was being run by lots of old-time bookmakers. Roxy had some tough times early, especially with some USFL numbers that he later admitted were the worst work he'd ever done.
By the late '80s I was established enough that I started being invited on the top sports handicapping radio programs. Roxy was co-host on the most popular one, the Stardust Line. Once it was obvious we respected each other I told him off-air that I had done plenty of research and that his college lines were far superior to Bob Martin's, regardless of conventional wisdom. Roxy offered a coy smile and said, "You're exactly right. Some of those numbers were dreadful."
It felt like a shared knowledge that both of us understood we couldn't blab all over town. Nobody wanted to hear anything negative about Bob Martin.
The famous sports bettor Billy Walters is nothing but a crook. I've detailed that on countless sites. Walters doesn't do anything without a manipulated advantage. He became rich and famed due to his Computer Group years of wagering on college football. No kidding. He was betting into those soft Bob Martin college numbers, which were particularly pathetic in the late '70s and early '80s. Martin was getting old and preparing to retire so it's sensible he didn't devote as much time or was simply faltering. I was in college during those years and feasting on college football. One year I intentionally delayed paying my fee bill so I'd have more cash to wager with. The bookie's son at Troy Hall used to call me late every Saturday night and scream at me, saying they would get all the money back the next day in the NFL.
He was mostly correct. Damn. It sickens me to realize that the Cream/Crowd/Crap system was already available and thriving at that point. I just hadn't discovered it yet.
Billy Walters and his Computer Group dominated college football wagering from 1980 through 1983. That was the end of the Bob Martin era. You didn't need a computer. I was beating those lines simply by playing the line of scrimmage mismatches. Once Roxy Roxborough took over he jacked up those favorites. The giveaways were steadily gone, especially after Roxy established his footing and surrounded himself with sharper oddsmakers. By the time I met Billy Walters in 1989 he was running an increasingly desperate and deceitful operation, no longer able to beat the college numbers on the square. Too bad the feds didn't pin any of the early sports betting charges on him. They were legitimate. They finally got him on stock market shenanigans.
