Photo: USA Today Sports

Gambling on the NFL is big business, especially after a 2018 Supreme Court decision striking down a federal ban on sports betting. Recent estimates suggest that as many as 46.6 million people will place a bet on the NFL this year, representing nearly one out of every five Americans of legal gambling age. As a result, there's been an explosion in sports betting content, most of which promises to make you a more profitable bettor. Given that backdrop, it can be hard to know who to trust.

Fortunately, you can trust me when I promise that I'm not going to make you a more profitable sports bettor. And neither will any of those other columns. It's essentially impossible for any written column to do so, for a number of reasons I detailed here. (I'm not saying it's impossible to be profitable betting on the NFL, just that it's impossible to get there thanks to a weekly picks column.)

This column's animating philosophy is not to make betting more profitable but to make betting more entertaining. And maybe along the way, we can make it a bit less unprofitable in the process, discussing how to find bets where the house's edge is smaller, how to manage your bankroll, and how to dramatically increase your return on investment in any family or office pick pools (because Dave in HR and Sarah in accounting are much softer marks than Caesar's and MGM).

If that sounds interesting to you, feel free to join me as we discuss the weekly Odds and Ends.

Twice Covered, Thrice Shy

They say it's hard to beat a team three times in the same season. (Who is "they", you ask? They're a rhetorical foil I use when convenient to make a point, now shush.)

That's not exactly true. It's relatively rare to beat a team three times in a season (happening just 16 times since the merger), but that's mostly because it's relatively rare to play a team three times in a season. You'd have to reside in a division that sends at least two teams to the playoffs, and then you'd have to navigate the seeding to bump into each other once there. And even then, it's all for naught if the regular-season series was split.

Given that divisional foes meet in the playoffs and that one rival won both regular-season games, it's not really any more difficult to win the third game than it would be to beat some other random opponent. Indeed, there were two matchups last week that involved a team trying to win its third game against a rival, and both times the team was successful in their bid. San Francisco took its third match against Seattle, and the Bengals won yet again against the Ravens.

Is it perhaps harder to cover the spread against the same team three times in a season? Three teams were aiming for their third straight cover of the year (San Francisco and Cincinnati, but also the Miami Dolphins, who beat the Bills once as underdogs and lost by a closer-than-expected margin in the second matchup). Two of those teams covered a third time (Miami with another close loss and San Francisco with another blowout win), while the third (Cincinnati) got the win but not the cover.

In general, it should be harder to cover the spread three times in a season than it is to win three times in a season. Mostly because if a team wins twice against a rival in the season, it's likely a better team and also playing at home, which makes the third win more likely than not. Indeed, "sweeping teams" are 16-9 all-time in the postseason.

On the other hand, I don't have spread data all the way back, but I'm betting that "spread-sweeping teams" probably win about 50% of the time against the spread in the third match. Because virtually everything wins about 50% of the time against the spread. That's the nature of the spread and it's why making money betting on it is so darn hard.

Lines I'm Seeing

Last week we looked at teams trying to "avenge" their performance against the spread. Teams that covered in the regular season were 4-2 against the spread in the Wildcard round. This week only features two rematches: the Chiefs were favored by 9 against the Jaguars in November and won by 10, while the Eagles split against the Giants (favored by 7 and won by 26 in the first matchup, favored by 16 and won by 6 in the second).

This week, I want to look at how teams did in all of their games, not just the rematches. So for each of the eight surviving squads, here's their record against the spread this year.

New York Giants: 14-4
Cincinnati Bengals: 12-5
San Francisco 49ers: 12-6
Dallas Cowboys: 11-7
Buffalo Bills: 8-8-1
Jacksonville Jaguars: 9-9
Philadelphia Eagles: 8-9
Kansas City Chiefs: 6-10-1

Overall, playoff participants are 80-58-2 against the spread, a 58% winning percentage. Does this conflict with my claim that everything should be expected to go 50% against the spread? It does not, it's simply selection bias; the teams that make it to the playoffs are either good teams that perform to expectations or mediocre teams that overperform expectations. There are an equal number of mediocre teams that underperformed expectations; they're just watching this weekend from the couch like the rest of us.

What should we take away from this information? Should we like the Giants more because Vegas keeps underestimating them? Should we prefer the Bengals because they've been strong against the spread recently while Buffalo has struggled? Should we be fading the Chiefs?

You certainly can if you want to. I just present it because it's interesting. Whatever your preferred narrative is, this might give you some ammo to support it. And that's all we're ever doing here, betting narratives. Ideally, betting narratives make the games more fun for us.

Vegas is in the business of self-scouting. If they truly underrated a team, they've figured that out by now and adjusted. (If they haven't and the team has just been getting lucky, Vegas has figured that out, too.) Season-long performance against the spread, recent performance, performance in games under 30 degrees at kickoff, performance in games on a Saturday with the wind blowing from the east... we can split up the data however we want and convince ourselves that we're doing something, we're finding an edge, but it won't change the fact that none of this is the least bit predictive. It's all just narratives, stories we invent and then tell to ourselves.

So I say lean into that. Pick your preferred story and put a few bucks down on it, so you're more invested in the outcome. Football is the most popular sport in America, and it's also the most narrative sport in America. I'd argue those facts are not unrelated.

Pick of the Week

Buffalo (-5) vs. Cincinnati

Buffalo had to sweat out its game against the Dolphins far more than the 13-point opening line would suggest, but luckily for us the name of the game is "survive and advance", not "cover and advance". (I mean, as far as gambling goes, the name of the game is "cover and advance or not, whatever", so... sorry if you lost some money betting on a good story.)

Cincinnati fans are livid that this game is in Buffalo, and they're right. When the AFC Championship was potentially impacted by the canceled game between the Bills and Bengals in Week 17, the league ruled it would be held at a neutral site. When the Wildcard match between the Bengals and Ravens was potentially impacted by the canceled game, the league ruled that home field would be determined by a coin flip. But this Bengals/Bills playoff match was every bit as impacted, and the league took neither option to remedy the unfairness. Had Cincinnati won the canceled game, they'd be hosting this weekend. It's an egregious double standard from a league that went out of its way to make sure every other eventuality was covered.

But as bad as I feel for Bengals fans who are missing out on a chance to see their team live in action, we've already committed to a narrative (Damar Hamlin holding the Super Bowl trophy), and that narrative doesn't leave room for them. They'll have to content themselves with sympathy from me and five points from Vegas because I'm taking the Bills.