NFL Standings
Introduction to NFL Standings
The NFL standings are the easiest way to glance over and tell which team is doing well while which team is also doing poorly based on their records. There is a lot of importance in the betting world to understand what the standings are telling you and to comprehend exactly how they work. Today, we will go over all of that and more so we can use the NFL standings to make our betting selections a little bit easier.
Importance of NFL Standings for Bettors
The NFL schedule is 18 weeks long with each team playing 17 regular season games throughout the course of it. The standings are going to help you understand which NFL picks to make as if a winning team is taking on a struggling team, you can understand that information and simply get a rough estimate of what the point spread will be for the game.
It also gives you an easier idea of which NFL picks you want to attack each week as you can see which team has been winning in their home stadium or struggling on the road. The standings will also tell you if the team is on a winning or losing streak, which is valuable information going into deciding which games you will be placing a bet on.
How the NFL Season Works
The NFL season is one of the more basic schedule making throughout sports as you can know the games right at the end of the regular season as there is a formula to how the schedule is created. First thing is the divisional games, the division consists of four teams and each divisional opponent will play each other twice, one at home and one on the road.
The next thing is playing a team inside of your conference. The NFL schedule rotates every year so for example the AFC East would play all four teams in the AFC South one year and then wait another two years until they rotate through the other divisions to play against each other once again.
Next, is playing a full division in the opposite conference. Just like the previous example, a division rotates each year with a team in the opposite conference every four years and plays them.
Finally, for the final three games a team will face the opponents in their conference in the two divisions they did not play and one team in the opposite conference that finished the previous year in the same place in the standings in their division. So if a team won their division last year, they would play the winners of the division in their conference as well as a winner of the division in the opposite conference.
In short:
This is the breakdown of how the NFL schedule works: six games against your division, four games against a division inside of the conference, four games against a division in the opposite conference, two games against NFL teams in your conference that finished in the same spot in the divisional standings last year, one game against a team in the opposite conference that finished in the same spot in their division.
NFL Standings Frequently Asked Questions
Well, this is a pretty simple thing. If a team has a tie during the regular season, they will go based off winning percentage to determine where they are in the standings. For example, if a team finished with an 8-8-1 record and another team finished with a 8-9-0 record, the team with the tie would be ahead of them as the tie is technically better than losing that extra game.
The NFL standings tell us a lot more than the overall record of a team. The standings essentially tell us how to bet on NFL games as they give us advanced numbers like home and away records, record in the division, record in the conference, the current streak a team is on, points for, and points against just to name a few. It tells you almost everything you need to know heading into a new week of games.
The NFL has set tiebreakers to ensure we can tell which team wins the division. There are 12 steps to decide which team officially wins the division that begin with head-to-head record, better divisional record, and eventually if the first 11 things are all equal, they will go to a coin flip to determine the winner of the division.
