Pro Tips On Handicapping NFL

Our family has been handicapping NFL professionally for more than forty years. We wrote the best-selling football handicapping book in history, titled How Professional Gambler Beat the Pro Football Point Spread by J.R. Miller. Tens of thousands of sports bettors around the world trust our NFL picks, and for good reason. We are experts in everything NFL. Our NFL picks incorporate point spreads betting, money line betting and over-under betting (totals).

Each league has its own unique advantages from a handicapping perspective. The NFL is certainly no exception. More money is wagered on the NFL than any other league. This despite the fact that only a few hundred games are played each year.

What does this mean for the NFL bettor? It means the line maker must take public opinion into account more than any other sport. Public opinion can be predictable. For one thing, the public tends to lean to favorites and overs. That results in posted lines that are generally tilted against favorites and against overs. Ask most any successful sports bettor and he will tell you that he bets more underdogs than favorites and more unders than overs. Underdogs and unders can be regarded as being a "positive universe" because over time underdogs cover more than fifty percent of the time and unders beat overs more than fifty percent of the time.

In recent years, scores in the NFL have been much higher, as a result of the measures implemented by the NFL to protect quarterbacks and other offensive personnel. The effect has been anti-defense. The NFL is vigilant in fining and suspending players and teams for unnecessary roughness or illegal tackles. Maneuvers once considered normal are no longer tools in the defense's arsenal. This has naturally led to higher individual team scores all around.

The average total score for an NFL game historically has been 43.1 points. However, total scores today average around 46 points per game. Five of the ten most common total scores in NFL today are routinely over 50 points for the first time in history.

So does this mean bet the farm on overs? Nope. First of all, the linemaker determines if overs or unders predominantly cover. With that said, the NFL is very concerned about changing too quickly. They are certainly aware of the drastic change in scoring and no doubt are working behind the scenes to slow it down and perhaps reverse the trend. There do not appear to be any overt rule changes on the horizon to directly counter the surge in scoring, but the NFL is very good at making things work they way they want them to work through behind-the-scenes measures. For instance, instructions to the officials on how aggressive to be on certain plays or against certain sides of the ball play a big role in how NFL plays out. We expect the NFL's officials to be a lot more aggressive calling penalties against offenses for a while (offensive holding, false start, offensive passing interference, etc.)

Home field advantage faded in the late 2010's, but bounced back after the Covid-19 fiasco. The general default value for home-field advantage is 3 points, but some teams could be much less and other much more. You must do your research.

We handicap 64 NFL teams. Each club has a home team and an away team. These teams -- even though the same group of people -- are often as distinguishably different as any other two teams. Therefore, be careful considering conventional statistics which combine home and away because the stats are misleading. They are skewed.

Like all sports, we we isolate as many "positive universes" as we can. When we identify a bias, we try to look within it to find logical areas that can be eliminated from the group, thereby intensifying the bias. If we can subtract niches that are 50/50 or less, the winning percentage of the remaining universe increases and often increases dramatically.

Like each sport, and for varying reasons, the NFL betting season changes as the season progresses. To demonstrate the thought process, we’ll use an example of over/under statistics...

From 2005 to 2020, the total number of games that went over the line has been 1,863, while 1,901 have gone under and 56 were pushes.  This is a small bias of 50.5% under. However, if you break down by month, you find an interesting result:

Month               under %

September        52.60 %

October             51.09 %

November        52.40 %

December         47.99 %

The December aberration is caused by the public wanting to bet unders because they think the weather will cause lower scores. The linemaker takes this into account. (By the way, it is not true that scores are lower in December.)

By taking out December, we can say 52.03% of games went under during September, October and November.

We also quantify games by the line itself. In all September games, for instance, when the over/under line was 44 or greater the results were under 56.7% of the time.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that logic. And if we apply our projected scores to the data, we can further enhance the outcome. If the projected score is less than the line and the line is greater than 44, the outcome is now 60.5% under.

Always keep in mind that the criteria must be logical, but while each sport has its own advantages and quirks, the method of research is the same. Find a large ‘positive universe’ and then ask relevant questions to try to eliminate low value categories within that field.