NFL Week 6: Beware the “Sure Thing”
The trend in the NFL this year has seen big favorites go down in flames. Does that tell us something about how games are being handicapped?
At Stations Casinos in Las Vegas there is a contest called “Last Man Standing.” For $25, you can enter a winner-take-all, no juice handicapping contest where you pick one game against the spread per week. If you win, you move on to the next week, until it quite literally comes down to the last contestant who hasn’t been wrong, who ends up taking the whole pot of around $100,000. This season’s NFL Last Man Standing contest started with roughly 4800 entrants. By the end of the first week, it was down to around 800 still alive. That’s right- only about 1 in 6 entries got their first pick right! So how could 5 out of 6 people get wiped out on what is essentially a coin flip? It was because the New England Patriots were supposed to be a sure thing.
As we all know, the coronation for the defending champs didn’t go as planned, as the the Chiefs won outright as 8 1/2 point underdogs. After last week’s debacle by the Steelers at the hands of the Jaguars, there is a long-standing trend that’s now back at the forefront: Big favorites end up getting hammered in the NFL. Let’s review every game in which a team was favored by 8 1/2 points or more (the criteria for being a “big favorite” is a spread that’s more than 2 scores) and see how they’ve fared this year:
Week 1: NE -8.5 Lost by 15, PIT -10 Won by only 3
Week 2: PIT -9 Won by 15 OAK -14 Won by 25 SEA -13.5 Won by only 3
Week 3: NE -13.5 Won by only 3
Week 4 NE -9.5 Lost by 3 ATL -8.5 Lost by 6 SEA -12.5 Won by 28
Week 5: PIT -8.5 Lost by 21
First, it may come as a little bit of a surprise how few games actually fall into this category, but the reason is simple: Sportsbooks know that the NFL has an incredible amount of parity. So out of the 10 games so far that qualified as having a spread of more than 2 scores, the favorites are only 3–7 ATS, and lost 4 of those games straight up. Had you blindly bet $110 on each underdog ATS and $100 on the money line, you’d be up $370 on the spread ($700 won minus $330 lost) and up $800 on the moneyline ($370 won on KC, $400 on CAR, $330 on BUF, $300 on JAX minus $600 in lost bets) for a total of $1170 up on $2100 bet. That’s a pretty good return, and considering how the other 3 games were all barely covers by 3 points each, it could have been much better too.
So what’s the reason for this happening? Is this just a fluke due to a short sample size, or is this a trend? Data indicates that big NFL favorites have had trouble covering for a while now.
According to this analysis, the larger the spread, the harder it is to cover. Seems like common sense too, right? And for the most part, it is. However, common sense when it comes to betting is not the same thing as common sense as it’s normally understood. “Common sense” in the betting world is to bet the favorite because the favorite is the better team, and the bigger the line, the better the team must be! In analyzing over 1000 games between 2009 and 2012, it was found that 65% of money is bet on the favorite, regardless of the line. So to the sportsbook, losing money if a favorite covers is virtually inescapable, so they only way they can combat it is to inflate the lines to swing the advantage back to them. Then and only then does the discrepancy of results start to make sense. Underdogs win more often because lines on average are higher than they should be, because bettors bet the favorite too much. Since sportsbooks profit when the underdog wins, they skew the lines to make that happen more than it should. Is there any wonder why “the house always wins?”
So in order to beat the books, it’s time to embrace some uncommon sense. If books, in order to protect themselves, inflate lines because they know most action will be on the favorite regardless, then it seems that taking the underdog is a logical, positive EV play. And since the bigger the favorite, the more the underdog covers, the bigger the favorite the better it is to bet the underdog. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out.
I bring this up because week 6's games have the biggest slate of big favorites we’ve had all season:
All told, this week will have 5 games with favorites of 8.5 points or more. At first glance, it’s understandable why the betting public would take the favorites. Just look at the teams you’d have to bet on to take the underdog: The Browns, Jets, Dolphins, 49ers, and Giants are a combined 5–19. Considering how well you would have already done on this strategy, there’s no reason to shy away from it now, especially since some of these teams have already won this exact type of bet. Looking at the moneylines for the games, it gets even more interesting:
Above are the moneyline bets with the best odds circled. By shopping for the best odds possible, you can make it so that just winning one out of of these five ML bets will at least allow you to break even, since they are all at +400 or better. (+400 wins $400 on $100 bet, which would return $500 including your original bet. Therefore even if you lost the other 4 bets, you’d at least get your money back.) So if 3 out of 5 covered and 1 out of 5 won outright, that’s all you’d need to have happen to end up a modest winner.
Now that you can see the big picture here, do you have the courage to pull the trigger on these bets? I can understand if you don’t- it’s that betting version of common sense whispering in your ear. “It doesn’t make sense to bet on the Jets or the Browns! etc. etc.” Of course, it didn’t seem smart to bet on the Chiefs week one, or the Jaguars last week either. But we all know what happened.
And if you need a further pep talk to take this action, I’d like for you to remember the words of the immortal Marcellus Wallace, who said it better than I ever could:
Of course, Bruce Willis still ended up screwing him over, so keep that in mind.
Alex Brigandi has been a in-game reporter with STATS LLC since 2002 and has analyzed the NFL from a betting perspective in Las Vegas since 2007. You can contact him on twitter with any questions, comments, or syndication requests.
