The true road to success lies in one thing: the numbers. That’s why my sports betting strategy system is based entirely on numbers. No emotions, no half-cocked ideas, no gimmicks. Looking at the NFL though, studies show there is another statistical bias that can be taken advantage of and it occurs later on in the NFL season. This advantage has to do with, drum roll please … the home ‘dog.
Overall it’s a terrible sports betting strategy to follow, with winning percentages falling well below the needed 52.4% needed to make even the smallest profit with 10 cent juice. However, research has shown that later on in the NFL season the Home Underdog play starts to make more sense. Up until Week 14 a bet on the Home ‘Dog will only cover 51.4% of the time, that’s a losing proposition. But after Week 14 that percentage jumps to a remarkable (and profitable!) 60%. This is a huge advantage to have going into the late season schedule. If you’re lucky enough to find a home underdog in the playoffs, these come in at a success rate of 77.8%.
Some more important points:
- playoffs offer a limited schedule – not as many options for Teasers or Parlays
- Weather is a more pronounced factor – make sure you are very careful about playing a warm weather road team going to a cold environment.
- The Home Effect
In his study about late season home dogs, Richard Borghesi of Texas State University found that there was a statistically significant number of wins by home underdog teams to justify a winning formula. In studying NFL games from 1981 to 2000, he found that late season home dogs (weeks 15-18) beat the spread by an average of 4.46 points. You do have to keep in mind that there aren’t a ton of games to choose from so the sample size is relatively small, but there were enough samples to justify a statistical trend. In the playoffs, the home dog won by an average of 11.3 points (again small sample).
You may wonder how this lines up against weeks 1-14. On average, visitors win by .09 points when taking into account all of the games (damn those odds-makers are good). In weeks 15-18 however, home teams win by an average of 2.06 points, and home teams in the playoffs win by an average of 2.86 points. Betting late home underdogs was profitable in each of the 5 year increments studied from 1981-2000.
Borghesi also found some interesting trends about cold weather teams and weather’s effect on them. In August-September, cold weather teams lost against the spread by an average of 1.3 points. In October, they won by .84 pts against the spread. By November, they were winning by an average of 1.49 points and by December-Jan it was up to 1.93 points.
The bottom line is it doesn’t pay off to buy into the hype about a certain sports betting strategy or hot tips. But when you do find one that works, and has worked over a long period of time, you’d be foolish not to take advantage of it.
