Brad Adgate @badgate On this date in 1939 the 1st college football game was televised, Fordham beat Waynesburg Coll 34-7, aired on W2XBS an experimental station
Just a random thought connected to this--- when exactly did they start using point spreads? I know in the early 30's they were still all money lines. I've read about this in the past, but can't remember where.
Just a random thought connected to this--- when exactly did they start using point spreads? I know in the early 30's they were still all money lines. I've read about this in the past, but can't remember where.
Back then, that was the only way to make a bet on a football game. But things changed in the early 1940s when a man named Charles K. McNeil came on the scene. McNeil was a University of Chicago graduate who spent most of his youth at ballparks, where he began betting on props associated with the game.
Next pitch, a ball or strike?
Would a batter get a hit this trip to the plate?
After graduation, McNeil became a bank analyst, but a few years later he realized he was making more money playing and setting odds on certain events.
He quizzed himself numerous times on how to make a straight bet more palatable than laying odds. He felt more people would invest their time and money in his new product, which he called “wholesale odds”. It would soon evolve into what we all now know as the 'point spread'.
He used his own technique and opened his own bookie joint, and he immediately started to cut into the other shops around Chicago and quickly got the lion’s share of the business. Soon, a betting culture started to change around the area where bettors now only cared about how much a team won by, instead of whether or not they won the game at all.
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