Are You Ready To Bet Some Football?

By Ted Kane
8-10-06

It may not feel like it in this heat, but football season is right around the corner. Whatever the relative merits of other team sports, football is king when it comes to sports wagering. Baseball, for example, is a sport with a wonderful tradition and it is a pleasure to take in a good ballgame. But with a regular season of 162 games, not every game can be equally meaningful. The regular season in the NFL team is less than a tenth of that number at 16 games, leaving teams with a very small margin for error. So, while the manager of a baseball team has some freedom and even the imperative to rest his stars now and again during the season, a football team has to give full
effort week in and week out. This makes football games especially compelling not only to viewers, but to gamblers as well. There may be
no sure bets anywhere, but your odds are surely better when the players can be counted on to give a full effort.

The 2005 NFL season offered an interesting anomaly at betting windows across Las Vegas, with Dave Tulley at the Daily Racing Form reporting that the favorites covered the point spread in 58% of NFL contests. It will be very interesting to see if this trend will carry over into this year. With sports books tending to lose money when the favorites beat the spread, my guess is that a correction will be in order.

Betting on the winners, either straight up or against the point spread, is only one way to go with your wagering. Thanks in part to some questionable officiating, the Seattle Seahawks were not able to beat what I thought was a generous point spread in the last Super Bowl. Yet despite this miscalculation on my part, I made money on the day
nonetheless because I prevailed in my propositional bets.

There are any number of propositions open for wagering during a sporting event. Some are based on individual performances--will a given player exceed 100 yards rushing, who will score the first touchdown--while others involve one or both teams. You can even bet on which team will win the coin flip in some outlets. The most popular
bet is the over/under, and for my money it is one of the best wagers out there. The over/under will specify a number of points to be scored
by both teams. Sometimes you can look at two teams that appear so evenly matched that you can't figure out which one will win. But if
you have followed them during the season and looked at the statistics they have generated on offense and defense, you should have a pretty
good idea what type of points each team is capable of both putting up and allowing to the other team.

I remember being in Vegas a few seasons back when the Cowboys and Ravens were playing each other; at that time, both teams were weak on offense and fairly strong on defense. Looking back, I have no idea who won or lost that game, but I do remember cleaning up taking the under--I played every scenario in my mind that I could think of prior to the actual contest, and none of them involved the two teams combining for anywhere near the 34 or so points that the casinos had it pegged at. As I recall it, the actual number tallied was somewhere around 27.

The under, in my experience, is usually a pretty good bet. For whatever reason, the betting public seems to be overly optimistic about the amount of offensive fireworks that a given football game will produce. Perhaps it is another symptom of ESPN; because everyone sees a thirty second highlight of touchdowns and dramatic field goals, they
tend to forget about the other 59:30 of the game that consists of such events as long, clock-managing drives and three and out series leading to long punts inside the twenty yard line.

Occasionally two offensive juggernauts will face off against each other to light up the scoreboard, and when you spot such an exception you should adjust your strategy accordingly. Of course, just like betting on whether a team will win or lose, sometimes the smart play is just to watch. When the Colts beat the Packers 45-31 in September, 2004, I sat out the wagering; the over/under number was 50, and though the teams combined to demolish it by more than half as many points again, I didn't feel comfortable taking the over when it meant I could still lose with seven touchdowns scored in a game. But whatever conclusions you draw on your own, propositional wagers including the over/under need to be part of your wagering playbook.

Ed Note:  Check out BodogSportsbook to bet on all your favorite NFL football teams.