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Everyone wants to hit the easy button.
The siren song of the NFL betting angle is calling. Imagine being able to make a profit just by following a trend; you don’t need to worry about football strategy, injury reports, or the habits of the betting public. Trends take almost no brainpower, and you can spend your valuable time on other tasks instead.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. If you find an angle that works, you’d be foolish not to use it. Sadly, trends have a shelf life. Even the best ones, the rare few that actually work, become useless over time as the betting public jumps on the bandwagon. Once that happens, someone has to find a new angle – which takes all the time and effort we were trying to avoid in the first place.
The good news for open-minded handicappers is that so many people do succumb to the allure of the trend. Rules of thumb like “bet the sandwich game” and “bet the home dog” have become so ingrained in the minds of the betting public that they’ve developed a mythology all their own.
Casual bettors often just need to hear one piece of so-called evidence to support the team they wanted to bet on in the first place. Fact-checking is not on their agenda. By being the contrarian that’s concerned with facts, you always have the advantage.
Time to separate fact from myth.
Myth No. 1:
The home underdog
It’s common practice for bettors to separate teams into two camps: home and away, favorite and underdog. Home-field advantage in the NFL is significant enough that many visiting teams who are better on paper will lose. The combination of “home dog” becomes a potentially profitable one; in reality, during the 2007 season, home dogs went 56-50-2. That’s 52.83 percent, just barely above the break-even mark of 52.38 percent on the standard –110 betting line.
Home-field advantage has been the subject of much academic research over the past decade. Richard Borghesi’s oft-cited 2003 paper showed that the advantage is concentrated from Week 15 onward. Suggested reasons for this include the weather, the accumulated rigors of travel, and the influx of casual bettors as the playoffs approach.
Looking at the 2007 campaign, home dogs were 14-8 ATS from Week 15 through to the Super Bowl. The rest of the year: 42-42-2 ATS. Betting the home dog blindly all season long is clearly not supported by the numbers.
Myth No. 2:
The sandwich game
The sandwich in this case is made of two good teams (the bread) and one lousy team in the middle (the tasty filling). The theory goes that a team will play a “letdown” game against the poorer opponent, having come off a grueling game the week before and looking ahead to the next big matchup.
There are two problems with this approach. One is determining ahead of time which teams are good and bad. That’s proven to be a challenge with parity the way it is in the NFL. The Cincinnati Bengals started last year with what looked like a sandwich situation:
| Week 1 vs. Baltimore |
| Week 2 at Cleveland |
| Week 3 at Seattle |
Cincinnati did indeed cover the spread against the Ravens and Seahawks while honking a 51-45 loss to the Browns. But those Browns surprised pundits by finishing 10-6, while Baltimore was unexpectedly awful at 5-11. Making a sandwich like that in real life will leave your hands messy.
The other problem is that the sandwich angle doesn’t work. Even when looking at only the second half of the season, when we’ve got a firmer grasp on which teams rule and which teams drool, research at Two Minute Warning found the sandwich teams were 98-92 ATS. That’s a 51.58-percent success rate, below the break-even mark.
Myth No. 3:
The winning tea
Here’s a line of thinking that traps many novice bettors: Teams that win straight up usually cover against the spread. This is true; according to respected handicapper Andy Iskoe’s research of games between 1988 and 2004, the SU winner also cashed in 82.7 percent of the time. The leap of logic many fledgling handicappers (and some pros) make is to take that statistic as a license to ignore the pointspread and just focus on picking the SU winner.
This is blatantly wrongheaded. Getting the SU pick right isn’t the simplest exercise in the world. The margin between winning and losing a football game is often razor-thin: three points or fewer about one-fourth of the time. Steering clear of close matchups isn’t going to help, either.
The greater the discrepancy in talent between the two clubs, the larger the spread is going to be, making your SU choice increasingly dubious. If you simply took the favorite in 2007, you would have been right 65.35 percent of the time, but only 49.38 percent ATS.
The “just pick the winner” concept, along with the aforementioned “sandwich” angle, is a typical case of inductive (as opposed to deductive) reasoning. Induction is when you’re given a set of information and you arrive at a conclusion that falls outside of that set.
The information that SU winners cover 82.7 percent of the time should lead to only one deduction for bettors: you need to pick 63.88 percent of the winners across the full spectrum just to break even – that’s close games, mismatches and everything in between. Where’s the angle in that?
Myth No. 4:
The bye week
Football takes an amazing physical toll on its players, so having an extra week off is a major advantage for an NFL club. But that advantage shrinks when the bye week comes earlier in the season, when a team is relatively healthy. It also doesn’t do as much good for a team that is already performing well.
The 2007 regular season saw a definite split in the fortunes of those who got time off too early. There were seven teams who had their byes in Week 4 or Week 5; they went 4-3 SU and 3-4 ATS the following game. The rest of the league went 16-9 SU and 16-8-1 ATS after enjoying a week off. That includes a perfect 4-0 SU and ATS for the lucky teams that got the bye in Week 10.
So, as it is with the home underdog, later is better. Yet it’s the Divisional round of the playoffs where the betting public has really gone overboard with this trend. Last year’s home teams went 2-2 SU and 1-3 ATS after sitting out the Wildcard round; the year before, it was 2-2 SU and 0-4 ATS.
That’s a 15-yard penalty for piling on the bandwagon. |
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