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.)

Week 16 was a bloodbath for the unders; by the lines I posted, they went 4-11-1. If you bet an even amount on every game (and got -110 odds on each bet) you would have lost 46% of your stake last week, which at $10 per bet would translate to $73.64 in losses. Since we've started tracking, unders have gone 71-72-4. If you bet an even amount on each game, you'd be down 5.1% (almost entirely because of the vig), or $74.55 at $10 per bet. If you'd instead started with $160 and allocated an equal amount of your remaining bankroll to every game, you'd have $66.22 left, a loss of $93.78.

The Hardest Weeks of the Season to Pick Games

Picking games is never easy, but the last few games of the regular season are the hardest weeks of all. In addition to accurately judging team strengths, you also have to play armchair psychologist and guess who is still going to be motivated and which teams will be mailing it in. Plus, teams will start their fourth-string running backs or third-string quarterbacks, and you'll have to make educated guesses about just how much worse those teams are as a result.

Or at least, that would be the case if we were profitable bettors. Fortunately for us, we're not! One of the greatest and most freeing parts of realizing that we're not sharp enough to beat the market is that this also means any strategies we're using to pick games don't perform any worse once the picking gets tougher. Because Vegas is setting relatively efficient lines, we should expect to go 50/50 (and lose the vig) whether we're picking between two equally-motivated teams at full strength or two differently-motivated teams starting a fistful of players who've never taken meaningful snaps before.

This also means there's not really any benefit to waiting for more information or better lines. Lines are sharp, which means they've baked in all publicly available information (and potentially quite a bit of information that's not publicly available, too) and are about as likely to move in one direction as another. This isn't to say that you can't still benefit from a bit of line shopping-- at a particular moment in time, there might exist some lines that are more favorable to the side you want to bet than others. But in terms of predicting what things will look like tomorrow (or even just three hours from now), there's no real point.

This is good because who knows what these lines will look like in two days. I'd venture that more than any other week of the season, there'll probably be major discrepancies between the lines I'm seeing and the lines you're seeing.

Whatever system you've been using to choose your bets so far, if it's been working for you, stick with it. Whether that's betting based on your rooting interests as a fan (or betting against your rooting interests in a "fan hedge") or picking whichever team has the better quarterback or betting based on who your mom has heard of or picking whichever coach you think would win in an arm-wrestling contest or even using a pseudorandom number generator. (Not that anyone would ever use a pseudorandom number generator to pick NFL games, right?)

And if it hasn't been working for you, feel free to change it up. As I keep saying, being a profitable bettor is a ton of effort with a lot at stake. But betting recreationally? It's a pretty sweet gig where virtually anything goes (provided you aren't wagering anything you can't afford to lose).

Lines I'm Seeing