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.)

We finished the season with one last winning week, with unders going 9-7 and returning a 7% profit (provided you bet an equal amount on every game at -110 odds). That brings the unders to 80-79-4 since we started tracking, a nearly perfect 50% winning rate with Vegas skimming the vig off the top. If you bet $10 on every game, you would have lost $62.73. If you would have instead started with $160 and allocated an equal portion of your remaining bankroll entering the week to each game, you'd be down $88.89.

Remember, at the time we started tracking, unders were 58-34-1. A $10-a-game bettor would have been up $187 in just six weeks. This highlights the futility of betting against Vegas based on past trends; by the time you've noticed something, they've also noticed and corrected it.

A Look Back at How We Did

I started Odds and Ends this season knowing I couldn't make you better gamblers but hoping I could make you better-educated gamblers. We talked about how Vegas makes its money (and most gamblers lose theirs), how to outperform other recreational bettors in casual game-picking pools, how much of your bankroll to bet on individual games, and different kinds of bets you can make that may or may not be more entertaining.

I can't evaluate whether we're all better-educated at the end of the season, but I can test the hypothesis that I wouldn't make you better gamblers at least! I know I said earlier in the year that you can't really trust touts when they tell you what their record is on picks. But I'm not trying to sell you anything or convince you how good I am, so you can trust me. (Or you can go back through the archives and verify for yourself if you're the skeptical type. When it comes to sports betting, I'm never going to discourage skepticism.)

Final Results Against the Spread

All of our picks this year were games that were rematches of past Super Bowls. Except for the picks that were instead rematches of past championship games. And also the games that weren't either of those things.

For each pick, I invented an imaginary grudge and pretended that players today would actually care about it. I'm not under the impression that the players actually care, but I am under the impression that it doesn't matter what story I invent to justify my picks because the lines are sharp, so one is as good as any other.

Indeed, our Super Bowl* Rematch* Picks of the Week went 18-15-2, which means we turned a profit! Granted, a 3.9% profit. Provided you were able to get the same lines that I saw-- which you weren't. And all action you found was at -110-- which it wasn't. But still, a profit! If you'd wagered $100 on all of my picks, you'd be up a grand total of $136.40 right now. Unless you also did the whole "bet on all of the unders" thing I suggested, in which case you're only up $73.67 on net.

But still, just imagine what you could do with another $73.67 in walking-around money! You could treat yourself to a nice dinner, say. Not too nice, though. Maybe like an Applebee's or something.

And I haven't even gotten to the PEX Pipe Lock of the Week, which finished the year 8-5 for a 17.5% return! Of course, the PVC Pipe Lock of the Week went 0-1. And the Galvanized Steel Pipe Lock of the Week also went 0-1. And the Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene Pipe Lock of the Week also went 0-1. And the High-Density Polybutylene Pipe Lock of the Week also went 0-1. You see, I kept changing the name of my Lock of the Week so that, at the end of the season, I could talk about the great record of my (Specific Name) Lock of the Week picks.

If you'd bet all of my Locks of the Week (including the bad ones) at $100 each, you'd be down $172.70. So much for Applebees.

In total, at $100 per pick and $10 per under, we'd be down $99.03 this year. But we were playing on house money because the same betting strategy left us up $96.35 last year. Meaning the total cost of two years worth of nonsense and tomfoolery was just $2.68. We're within a whisker of breaking even.

Breaking even is a positive outcome! We got two year's worth of sweats essentially for free. That's about the best we can hope for in this hobby. At the end of the day, all I want is for you to have as much fun reading this column as I had writing it and not come out too much poorer in the process. I'll count this as a win.

Also, despite the "season recap", Odds and Ends will continue through the playoffs and end with a Super Bowl Prop Bet Extravaganza.

Lines I'm Seeing