The football bettor who specializes can often find a weakness in the line each week-if he or she focuses on particular teams or a conference. For example, those who set the line in past years had great problems with the Ivy League teams. Too many unknown factors affected the bookmaker's ability to put up accurate numbers-and bettors feasted on mistakes.

It's a rare sportsbook in Nevada that even offers Ivy League team wagering today. What were the factors that brought this about? Perhaps Harvard linemen or defensive backs decided serious practice was secondary in importance to final exams. Maybe the fields became quagmires at Columbia or Princeton for lack of extra funding to seed it properly before the season began. Whatever it was-it became a nightmare for bet-takers-and alas, we don't even see the conference listed even in the Blue Ribbon College Football Yearbook in 2000!

But there are other conferences where information might not be such tough pickin's-like Conference USA or the Mid-American Conference, also known as the MAC. Who's to know about Louisville or Memphis of the Conference USA or Eastern or Central Michigan of the MAC? It's tough enough for any under-pressure bookmaker or sportsbook to differentiate between Boston College and Boston U. sometimes-and indeed many years ago, the wrong lines went up on these teams everywhere, including parlay cards. It could have been disastrous if not caught at the last moment by proofreaders or fact-checkers.

The trick to taking advantage of such slip-ups is to read everything you can about these smaller teams, these less-famous conferences and to become expert on key players, stadium patterns, whether a coach is offensive or defensive-minded, major rivalries and revenge situation or potential Heisman Trophy showcase matchups.

So what is there to read? Sharp, incisive football magazines, newspapers, which concentrate on teams from that area, even Internet sites that offer roundups. When it comes to books-here are a few worth having:

Phil Steele's College Football Scorebook (310 pages, 8x11plastic spiralbound, $24.95) has an excellent section ofsmaller, sometimes bettable teams like Idaho State, Montana, Montana State and Weber State (all from the Big