The 2024 NFL draft is coming soon on Thursday, April 25. There will be many NFL draft bets placed at the NFL betting sites, including matching players to teams, how many players will go in the 1st round at a certain position or from a specific college conference and whether a prospect will go higher or lower than the line set for their draft slot.
However, when is the best time to place your NFL draft bets to maximize your potential return and for your hedging strategies?
We have a 2-step approach to this. It comes down to being early and being late.
Step 1: Make Your Early Bets
Some sportsbooks will start posting futures bets on the NFL draft right after the Super Bowl is over. Some may wait for the scouting combine to wrap up and big boards start to materialize better.
Still, the earliest you can get your bets in to start the process, the better. There can be some great value found there as the groupthink on many top prospects hasn’t fully set in, the rumor season is just taking off and a lot of odds are going to shift later.
Here are some examples from last year’s NFL draft season of how getting early value really helped with your NFL draft bets:
- A little over 5 weeks before the 2023 NFL draft, C.J. Stroud was the favorite with -250 odds to be the top quarterback selected, beating out Bryce Young (+200). In the end, Young was the No. 1 pick by Carolina.
- Weeks before the draft, Jaxon Smith-Njigba was the favorite with -115 odds to be the first wideout selected, which he was. Those odds only got more lopsided as the draft approached.
- A month before the draft, Michael Mayer (-125) was favored over Dalton Kincaid (+180) to be the 1st tight end drafted. It ended up being Kincaid (No. 25 to Buffalo), and Mayer (No. 35 to Raiders) was actually the 3rd tight end off the board after Sam LaPorta (Lions) jumped ahead of him with the No. 34 pick.
The Mayer slide at tight end was great value for Kincaid bettors, but terrible news for the people who took the over 1.5 tight ends drafted in the 1st round at -500 odds, a losing bet. But the general tight end strategy should be to expect them to go later than people expect as NFL teams often treat them that way, Kyle Pitts in 2021 withstanding.
Quarterback is a position where you can stand to be strong in your conviction that a player will either be over-drafted high in the top 10 or slide past the 20th pick, if not out of the 1st round entirely.
In this year’s draft, it has been assumed for quite some time that Caleb Williams was going to be the No. 1 pick to Chicago, a bet that has about -5000 odds now. If you were going to get in on that, you needed to do it as early as possible, especially before the team traded Justin Fields to Pittsburgh and made it all but a certainty.
However, look at the changes in the market on the No. 2 pick to the Commanders. North Carolina’s Drake Maye opened as the favorite with -180 odds before it was close to even between Maye and LSU’s Jayden Daniels in early March after the combine concluded.
Even to start April, Maye was still about +125 to be that No. 2 pick after sliding to a bigger favorite for New England with the No. 3 pick. Still, if you wanted to bet now on the No. 2 pick, Daniels is -275 at Bovada (check our Bovada Review) while Maye is only +175. That’s one you needed to get in on earlier.
Unless you think Maye is still going to be Washington’s pick all along, then maybe you want to wait as late as possible to get the best number on that.
Step 2: Make Your Bets at the Last Minute
The 2nd strategy is to wait until the week of the draft, if not the day of the 1st round, to make those final bets. This way you can get closing line value or hedge your bets from March and early April.
However, the beauty of the draft is that experts get a lot wrong, and that includes the general managers in the NFL. The whole thing is largely a crapshoot, which is why teams are praised for trading down and getting more cracks at these prospects. Almost like buying more lottery tickets if you hope to hit a big win.
This can be exploited with your NFL draft bets too, because even with the draft days (or hours) away, crazy things are still out there for it. Remember when Kentucky quarterback Will Levis was favored to go No. 4 to the Colts last year?
That happened to the odds, but it didn’t come close to happening on draft night. The Colts used the No. 4 pick on quarterback Anthony Richardson and Levis slid to the Titans in the 2nd round with the 33rd pick.
That’s still not as egregious as the 2013 NFL draft when Syracuse quarterback Ryan Nassib was reportedly going to go to Buffalo with the No. 8 pick. This was widely reported the week of the draft. In the end, Nassib was the 110th pick in the 4th round to the Giants. Whoops.
We know quarterbacks can be volatile in the draft. If there’s a prospect you think is a fraud and will slide in the draft, you could wait until the last minute and take their over on draft position.
For example, maybe you don’t buy the hype on Michigan quarterback J.J. McCarthy, who has -325 odds at Bovada to be a top 5 pick. Maybe you think he’ll be lucky to go in the No. 11 or No. 12 range to the Vikings or Broncos, in which case taking his draft position of over 5.5 (+115 at Bovada) would be great value.
Last year provided some huge wins for doubting the quarterback class. There was an over/under 4.5 quarterbacks getting drafted in the 1st round in 2023. The consensus was that Bryce Young, C.J. Stroud, Anthony Richardson and Will Levis were all 1st-round picks. The question mark was Tennessee’s Hendon Hooker, who even got an over/under of 32.5 as his draft slot late in the draft process at sportsbooks.
In the end, only 3 quarterbacks were drafted in the 1st round with Levis going at No. 33 in the 2nd round and Hooker slipped to No. 69 in the 3rd round. Big win for doubting Hooker last year, who was coming off an ACL injury and played in a gimmicky offense in college.
This year, maybe you think Bo Nix and Michael Penix Jr. are both underwhelming prospects who should slip to the 2nd round. That would make the under 4.5 quarterbacks in the 1st round a favorable pick if you want to take it.
Social Media Shifting Odds at the Last Minute?
Finally, we wanted to call attention to something significant that happened in the 2023 NBA draft last summer. You can argue the 2024 NFL draft is the biggest sports draft event since that NBA draft, and there was some curious market shifting that went down for that draft that could happen again this year for the NFL.
Brandon Miller was the odds-on favorite to go to Charlotte with the No. 2 pick. However, hours before the draft, respected NBA insider Shams Charania tweeted that Scoot Henderson was gaining momentum for that No. 2 pick.
In turn, the odds started going crazy at top-rated sportsbooks with some saying they saw Henderson go from +370 to -370 to go No. 2 to Charlotte over Miller.
In the end, it was a nothing burger. Miller went No. 2 to Charlotte as expected all along and Henderson went No. 3 to Portland. But this caught a lot of attention and flack for accused market manipulation by Charania, who has a working relationship with FanDuel, the top sportsbook in America.
Sources: Scoot Henderson is gaining serious momentum at No. 2 with the Charlotte Hornets in tonight’s NBA draft. Hornets have been torn over the last week between Henderson and Brandon Miller. Team has final meetings today to settle on decision.
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) June 22, 2023
Could something like that happen on draft day in the NFL this year? Maybe it would involve a change of heart with the Commanders taking Maye over Daniels, or some headline news about McCarthy’s destination being New England (No. 3 pick) and going ahead of Maye.
Jumping on an insider’s tweet to bet now could be problematic if they are just putting out false alarms or trying to steer the odds a certain way. It’s just something to keep in mind as we enter another high-stakes draft in professional sports.
Remember, no one knows anything in the draft outside of maybe a generational talent getting picked No. 1 overall. Like, it didn’t take a genius to know Caitlin Clark was going No. 1 in the WNBA draft this year.
Still, the rest of the draft is a true battle of confirmation bias, groupthink and randomness. Good luck to anyone betting on it each year, but just remember, getting in early with your gut pick and hedging at the last minute is the way to go. Bet with the least information available and then again with too much information and everyone second-guessing everything after Adam Schefter tweets some cryptic message about where Brock Bowers might be headed.
