Legitimate Football Betting Sites

What Makes Football Betting In The US So Popular

Many people wonder what makes football so popular among US bettors in the first place. Well, first and foremost, it's the most popular spectator sport in America. The physicality of the players, the speed of the game, the highlight-reel scoring – it all adds up to some serious excitement.

Because it's such a widely viewed sport, there are naturally lots of betting lines offered, including tons more props and live wagers than what other sports can support.

Due to this popularity, legitimate USA sportsbooks do their best to cater to US players interested in wagering on football. For instance, some sites will give you bonuses specific to football betting, timed to coincide with the beginning of the NFL or college seasons.

But even in the offseason, people can’t get enough football, and NFL futures betting remains one of the most active markets at any legitimate betting site.

Still, there’s always a betting lull when football season ends, and to fill that void of action – and to give bettors even more to choose from – new football leagues like the XFL (which kicks off the week after the Super Bowl ends) are trying to get a piece of the massive football betting pie.

What Determines A Good Football Sportsbook

If you’re looking for the best online sportsbook for football betting, there are several items to consider. Here are a few things that a sportsbook needs in order to stand out from the others on the Internet. At a minimum, a truly great sportsbook must:

• Offer early, competitive football lines
• Provide tons of betting odds and additional betting options
• Offer lucrative bonuses and ongoing promotions
• Have a stellar online reputation among active users
• Offer lines on national and international sports in addition to their football selections
• Provide quality 24/7 customer support
• Offer a seamless user interface with great graphics
• Offer mobile-optimized betting boards for iPhone and Android devices
• Provide multiple banking options including Bitcoin

What To Look For In A Top-Notch Sportsbook

When you're in the market for a quality, legit sportsbook experience, you should always bear the above in mind. Remember: You don’t want to just throw your money at the first football betting site that pops up in a random Internet search.

Now, finding the perfect XFL, NCAA, NFL, or basketball sportsbook might take a bit of extra time and energy on your part, but we’re here to help streamline that process by weeding out the thousands of online betting sites that don’t pass the test.

The following tips will help explain the difference between a solid, reliable sportsbook and an operator to avoid like Bill Belichick in the playoffs:

1. Fair Football Betting Lines

Most football odds are set by venues in places like Las Vegas, and these lines are periodically adjusted to entice action that's good for the house. Typically, this is a delicate balance with books playing for a respectable middle ground.

However, a shady sportsbook may tweak an over-under line to push all the action to the desired result. Thus, when the opposite hits, it's the operator that makes out like a bandit while the bettors take a bath. This is a risky practice, but then again, such illegitimate sportsbooks have little intention of paying winners out in the first place!

2. Selection And Variety Of Odds

Like local black-market bookies, shoddy online sportsbooks don’t tend to offer too many different betting options. They might have basic lines (i.e. straights, spreads, and totals), but with such operators, you’ll be hard-pressed to find things like prop bets and live football betting.

Legitimate online football sportsbooks, on the other hand, offer standard lines, quarter lines, halftime lines, alternate lines, player props, team props, game props, futures, specials, and sophisticated parlay systems to combine multiple bets into single tickets. When it comes to football sportsbooks, settling for less means settling for less money – which is kind of like spiking the ball on fourth down.

3. Sportsbook Reputation Is Everything

As with most businesses, the reputation of a company says it all. When you choose a football wagering site to place your amateur and professional pigskin bets, you should avoid any operator that is untested or brand new (unless they’re owned by an existing trusted player in the industry). There are tons of fly-by-night sportsbook scams on the Internet, and trust us, you don’t want any part of that.

Fortunately, there are also a number of reputable, long-lived sportsbooks that continue to get rave reviews from millions of US customers. These are the books you want to choose, and they’re the only ones we recommend. Gambling can be great fun, but gambling on an unproven sportsbook isn’t ever worth it.

4. Mobile Football Betting Options

When you join an online sportsbook, one of the primary reasons for doing so is the convenience factor. Without mobile support for iPhones, iPads, Androids, and other devices, there wouldn’t be much point in wagering online in the first place. The vast majority of football bettors wager on their smartphones and tablets, after all.

The best and most trustworthy sites will always have responsive, slick mobile UIs for their customers, but lesser sites won’t make the investment to upgrade. If the site you’re considering joining doesn’t have a betting portal optimized for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and other top mobile browsers, that’s a major 404 error!

5. Trusted Live Betting Software

All the best NFL, NCAA, and XFL sportsbooks employ cutting-edge software to drive their boards and live betting options. Lesser football betting sites can’t afford this kind of infrastructure, which means live betting support is one of the quickest ways to tell exactly how legit your chosen sportsbook is.

Remember, live betting is technologically advanced and expensive to implement, but it’s also the most popular way to wager on football in the US. As a result, good books will make the investment to provide their customers with a seamless, mobile-friendly live betting experience, while weaker books will punt on the opportunity. Fast, lag-free live wagering is a must, and you get that at the top betting sites.

Our Process for Finding Reputable Football Betting Sites

There are many online gambling reviews out there, but most of them won’t actually help you find a respected football wagering website. In fact, most of the people behind these reviews simply do a quick Google search and then list out the top results – they don’t even gamble at the sites they recommend!

As a result, such reviewers don't actually put in the necessary legwork to ensure player safety and satisfaction, or to even see if payouts are honored in a timely, guaranteed fashion.

But we take a different approach to our services here. We're gamblers ourselves, not seedy salespeople trying to make a buck. So rather than seeing what's popular and then simply passing on some useless search results to you, we only promote the sites we use ourselves. That’s right – we're active members at all these sites, and we have been shopping lines with them for years. The day we stop gambling at these venues is the day we stop recommending them to you.

Why You Can Trust Our Top Football Betting Sites

Because we're so detail-oriented when it comes to reviewing and rating the best football sportsbooks, we're not going to be listing off a dozen different operators for you to check out. In fact, there aren’t even a dozen good ones out there! If you ever come across a “Top 10 Football Betting Sites” list, you already know it’s a lie. Call BS, and then call an audible!

Instead of focusing on quantity, our focus is on quality. What we’re trying to offer are thorough, honest reviews on the best XFL, NFL, and NCAA sportsbooks we can find. This means that our list isn't going to be nearly as extensive as some other sites, because when quality is number one, there are only a handful of viable options.

When you're reading a review from Legitimate Sports Betting, you're not just reading some advertising puffery on the biggest names in the business. Instead, you're getting detailed information from actual gamblers to help you find the sites where betting on football is less Hail Mary and more First and Goal!

Common Football Betting Options

All of the sportsbooks found on this page offer the following options for betting on football games. Obviously, if you don’t see hundreds of lines and props per day of football action, your sportsbook isn’t a serious operator. Including live football betting, all of our recommended sites offer thousands of daily NFL odds, NCAA odds, XFL odds, and more.