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'll detail over the year. (I'm not saying it's impossible to be profitable in the long-term by 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.

Checking In On the Unders

In Week 7, I noted that unders had been hugely profitable so far this season and discussed structural reasons why unders tend to outperform overs (though usually not by enough to beat the vig). I also said I'd track the performance of the unders going forward to see if we could be profitable merely by mass-betting them every week. (My hypothesis was that unders would win somewhere from 50-52% of the time going forward.)

Unders finished 7-8-1 in Week 12, which with the vig resulted in just a hair over 10% in losses. Overall, unders have gone 47-37-3 since we started tracking; if you bet an equal amount on every game (and you saw all the same lines I saw, and all action was at -110), you would have turned a 6.6% profit. At $10 per bet, your total profit to date would be $57.27. If you had instead started with $160 and invested an equal percentage in every bet every week (rolling over your winnings or losses), you'd be up $58.30, or 36% of your starting bankroll.

Let's Talk About Narratives

For most people, betting on football is an act of storytelling. We craft a narrative to explain an outcome and then bet that outcome. I like to lampshade this by picking a preferred narrative every season as a lens through which I analyze the matchups.

Last year, I tracked "revenge games", positing that a given team might be more likely to win because their fourth receiver was facing his third team who he played for five seasons ago. This year, I've been picking Super Bowl* Rematch(es)* of the Week (patent pending), hypothesizing that the outcomes of games from 40 years ago provide extra motivation to players who weren't even born at the time.

These are bad narratives. (Some more obviously bad than others; plenty of bettors genuinely believe in and bet based on revenge narratives, though I don't think anyone else out there is making picks informed by the fact that Earl Morrall once threw three interceptions on 17 attempts against the Jets in 1969.)

There's nothing wrong with this; our purely narrative-driven picks last year went 17-16. So far this year, they're 10-10-1. You're not losing money by betting on games based on half-century-old storylines. (At least, no more money than you'd likely be losing betting on games based on any other factors.) The flip side of the fact that there are no good narratives to inform your betting habits is that there are no bad narratives to inform your betting habits, either.

The problem is that while I'm honest with you and will tell you that all narratives are basically 50/50 bets, others aren't quite as above the board. If you read a lot of gambling columns, you'll hear about things like line movement or reverse line movement ("when the line moves in the direction of one team, bet the other"). You'll hear that all of the "sharp money" (the so-called profitable bettors) are on one side of a bet, and you should get on that side, too. You'll hear about Team X's record against the spread in its last eight primetime games, or Team Y's record against the spread when the temperature is below 40 degrees, or Team Z's record against the spread against teams coming off of games on Thursday Night.

These are all narratives, and they're all bunk. None of them are any more likely to return a profit than our unique almost-patented formula of picking games based on who was good when your grandparents were kids.

(For starters, the idea that the majority of the sharp money is ever on one side of a contest is just objectively wrong. The majority of the sharp money is sitting in reserve at all times, waiting to punish the sportsbooks if they ever publish a bad line. If the books move a good line because they're getting a lot of "square money" on one side, the result wouldn't be a perfectly offsetting amount of "sharp money" on the other side to balance their risk; it would be a flood of "sharp money" coming in trying to make an easier buck. The lines are always good because the consequence of bad lines is untenable.)

Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that "square money" or "reverse line movement" or "performance in last five road games with temperatures below 43 degrees at kickoff" are bad narratives to bet on. The narratives the other guys are pushing are no better or worse than the narratives I'm pushing. If you want to bet against Team Y in cold weather or Team X in primetime, go for it. It's a 50/50 shot. If you want to bet in favor of them to be contrarian, go for that, too. It's still a 50/50 shot. The fact that these narratives are uncorrelated with reality means they won't help you, but they won't hurt you, either. For most of us, betting is just the act of searching for whichever story we find most compelling.

Carl Sagan once wrote, "For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." Personally, I don't mind a bit of satisfying delusion (I operate this entire column under the premise that I'm being rather clever here), but I figure since it's your money at risk, you should probably know the truth.

Lines I'm Seeing