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| Sammy wants YOU to make money on the NFL this season |
We at The Backup Quarterback Blog have been crunching away at a database of all 2,560 regular season games played in the NFL since 2002. Our aim is to come up with a few interesting results / theories applicable to your various football pools -- survivor pools, pick'em pools, etc.
It's harder than it might seem. When it comes to betting on games (you know, if gambling were legal), the "vig" makes it a lot harder to make money. For those uninitiated, the vig (or vigorish as it was known in the days of the
original Ocean's 11) is the "house edge" on any wager. The standard vig is -110, meaning that a bettor has to wager $110 to win $100. So if you assume a wager is a 50/50 proposition and win once and lose once, when you win you'll win $100 but when you lose you'll lose $110, for a net loss of $10.
If you run the math on this, it basically means that a betting strategy has to be correct
52.4% of the time to be profitable. Turns out, a lot of "blanket" bets -- e.g. "always take the underdog," "always take the road team because home field advantage is overrated," etc. -- are right more than 50% of the time but less than 52.4% of the time, meaning they'll lose money in the long run.
We at BQB, however, strive to find at least a few betting tidbits that should make money in the long-run. Keep in mind that our sample size may be minimal here, but our first strategy would have only lost money once in the last 10 years and would yield an average return on investment of 7.5% . . .
