My impression of American Football betting is that most people bet on the point spread between teams. For those unfamiliar with the concept of points spread betting, there is a really good explanation here (it even uses an NFL example!). This impression has mostly formed because of the 30 for 30 episode on Jimmy The Greek.
I only bet on the winner though, sometimes referred to as the 'money line' (unless you are having an online chat with your bookmaker and they don't understand the term 'money line'...). Another explanation from oddsshark on money lines here.
I take this approach for two main reasons. Firstly, teams don't compete with the point spread in mind (well, unless they or someone they know has a bet on it...). Instead, they play to win. If a team is 1 point up with a minute to play they will run out the clock, not carry on playing to beat a 3.5 point spread.
The other issue I have with the point spread is that, Elo modelling, in my opinion, is far more suited to pure a win or loss situation for American Football. Fivethirtyeight had to derive some contrived method, incorporating logarithmic functions, in order to make their model work with point spreads. Whenever you add assumptions into any predictions, you add sources of error. Fivethirtyeight admit themselves, in that link above, that their point spread model is not accurate enough to beat the bookmakers. In fact, they are only correct 51% of the time. My model picks the correct winner ~64% of the time.
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