How to bet NFL totals
+NFL 22 Week 18 Monte Carlo Simulations & Value Bets
Statistics and NFL Betting
In between my weekly ISW NFL blogs, I spend an inordinate time culling through all the NFL data I’ve collected over the years. While I’ve taken some graduate level statistics, I do not possess a math background.
Nonetheless, I try to treat math like a I do elements of physical fitness — math is like a muscle that we must exercise, challenge, and improve if we are to remain sharp.
The NFL betting market is fascinating for many reasons, but what has drawn me like the gravitational pull of a black hole has been the power of descriptive statistics, the wonders of probability, and the often normally distributed data produced by the NFL — a combination that is ripe for leveraging via an ensembled systematic handicapping framework.
There’ve been 540 NFL games spanning the 2021–22 regular and postseason through week 17 of the current 2022 regular season. In this article, we are going to look at one aspect of the data (NFL Totals), and a couple of different ways that we can use statistics to inform our betting process and decision making.
Figure 1.0 (above) lists the 15 most common NFL total results through the aforementioned 540 game sample size. Roughly 1…
