With the NBA and NHL wrapping up their seasons, the good news is we are less than 3 months away from placing NFL bets on the upcoming 2024 season.
That means spreads, totals, moneyline winners, dozens of player props, anytime touchdown scorers, and same-game parlays galore.
Maybe you are new to making NFL bets or only got a little taste last season and can’t wait to try more strategies and get better at it this year.
Thanks to the internet, there is more information readily available to sports bettors than ever before. But it can be a daunting task to figure out where to find the best data, how to analyze it, and how to use it to make better bets.
We wanted to share some tips to get you started. We have come up with a little guide on how to leverage technology to make more informed NFL bets this season.
Sadly, the NFL Is Way Behind the NBA in Data
The NFL is by far the No. 1 league in America, and it may be one of the only things left that unifies millions of Americans to experience something at the same time every week. Betting has helped the growth of the league too by making every game a little more interesting.
But when it comes to the league itself giving fans great data in this era of GPS player tracking and advanced metrics and analytics, the NFL is still doing a poor job in 2024.
If you go to the NBA’s official site, there is a wonderful database of statistics for teams and players that include advanced metrics and player tracking for play types (isolation, pull-up-and-shoot numbers) and a shot dashboard. You can see how teams are shooting on wide-open shots, how often a defense contests shots, assists vs. potential assists, and rebound opportunities for players in each game.
A lot of that data can be very useful in betting on NBA player props. For example, if Luka Doncic’s teammates shoot 3-of-12 on his potential assists in a game, you have to like the regression to the mean in the next game to hit and he’ll have several more assists.
NFL’s Data Shortcomings
But when it comes to the NFL, you can’t even get passer rating calculated correctly on their official site. You can’t get penalty data. You can’t get situational stats like red zone. It’s a bit of a joke to be honest.
There is a section for Next Gen Stats, which has some interesting player tracking data that is uniquely collected by the league such as the time to throw for a quarterback in a game or how aggressive they were at throwing into tight windows. Those metrics can be useful in figuring out if a quarterback is more likely to throw a pick by forcing the ball against a good defense, or if he’ll be more susceptible to taking sacks.
Other Sources of Data
But if NFL.com is your main destination to look up stats, then you are way behind the curve on gathering information about this league. There are way better options out there, including a site like Pro Football Focus that has a membership to access their premium stats.
Fortunately, there are sites that won’t cost you a thing to use as well to start making better NFL bets.
The best at forcing missed tackles over the past two seasons 💪 pic.twitter.com/dL35B1KISx
— PFF (@PFF) June 19, 2024
Get Familiar with Pro Football Reference
It’s been around for 2 decades, but Pro Football Reference is still the cream of the crop for football researchers. You can get lost for hours searching through that site with its team stats, decades of box scores, and thousands of players with full career game logs and stats.
There is a paid component to the site called Stathead, which we’ll get into below. But we wanted to highlight some of the key information anyone can get from Pro Football Reference:
- You can find where teams rank in a season in all the major statistics, including points, yards, penalties, turnovers, and their performance in situational football (3rd down and red zone).
- If you are betting on the props for a player who may be a secondary running back or wide receiver, you should check out their snap counts in their game logs to see how much they’re seeing the field each week, or how an injury to a teammate has affected their playing time.
- Drive stats give you a solid idea of which teams are averaging the most yards and points per drive, which is better context than team totals in yards and points.
- Since 2018, advanced stats are available to show things like how many dropped passes a quarterback has, how often he’s pressured, and how much play-action passing he uses.
If you’re looking to spot trends and gauge how teams stack up before the next game, you’ll want to spend some time on Pro Football Reference.
Taking Things Further with Stathead
If you’re using Pro Football Reference and want to run queries, you’ll need to upgrade to a Stathead subscription, which isn’t that costly and is definitely worth it during NFL season.
With Stathead, you can search for games going back to the 1970s with specific spreads and totals. You can run searches for streaks or stats over a specific span of games. You can run queries on those advanced stats we mentioned in the previous section for players.
There are so many things you can search for to help you make better NFL bets. Let’s use an example from the upcoming season. The Super Bowl rematch is scheduled for Week 7 when the 49ers host the Chiefs. We assume both teams will still be strong this year. So, if you wanted to see how Andy Reid’s Chiefs have done on the road in the Patrick Mahomes era against teams that make the playoffs, you can get that done in one query on Stathead.
Within seconds of building that query, I can see that in such games since 2018, the Chiefs are 13-8 SU, 12-8-1 ATS, and the over is 14-7. You can also do this search as single games, allowing you to see exactly which games go into this 21-game sample.
Leveraging Free and Paid Resources
You can always consult a free site like Team Rankings to find NFL spread and total data going back to 2003. They have some solid splits there and it’s quick to get results. But Stathead takes everything much further for the serious NFL bettor.
You can leverage Stathead’s resources by running queries to build your own massive NFL game database and run your own queries, quickly answering deeper questions like the following:
- What’s the spread record for a team with a quarterback making their 1st career start?
- What’s the spread record for a team coming off a 20-point win? A 20-point loss?
- If both teams scored 30 points last week going into their matchup, how often does the over hit in that game?
- How often has over ‘X’ points in the 1st quarter hit in a game coached by Matt LaFleur (Packers) or Kyle Shanahan (49ers) in their careers? Just adjust ‘X’ for the betting line that week for 1st quarter over/under.
- In games played in September between teams with a preseason win total of over 9.5 wins, what’s the breakdown on moneyline, spread, and total outcomes for the home team? For the favorite?
The possibilities are as wide as your imagination. Now, collecting all that data is going to take you some hours, especially if you want to be as robust as possible and have the data for the last decade or more of seasons. The league has changed enough to where you probably don’t need to go back to before 2007 or even 2011 at this point.
But once you get it together, you have an incredible amount of data at the tip of your fingers. However, you can still be content with the queries you run on Stathead and go from there in your research to make your NFL bets.
LEGENDARY: New #Ravens RB Derrick Henry has 3,928 rushing yards after contact over the past five years, noone else has more than 2850.
(Via @Stathead) pic.twitter.com/NOKil4SSGC— MLFootball (@_MLFootball) June 19, 2024
Self-Scouting Video Analysis
For some bettors, they could find their edges by watching games and dialing in on specific teams and players. Maybe your specialty is betting on props for tight ends, and while you know how good Travis Kelce is, you might need to see more young players like Brock Bowers (Raiders), Sam LaPorta (Lions), and Dalton Kincaid (Bills) to get a better feel for them.
Another valuable part of video analysis can be injuries and health. If you read that Jalen Hurts has a bad ankle, you might need to see him move on the field yourself to gauge if it’s going to impact his play or not.
Using Technology to Your Advantage
Thanks to today’s technology, going back and watching games has never been easier. Whether you are signing up for NFL+ (formerly Game Pass), have a subscription to Sunday Ticket, or are just watching games on YouTube or by other means, you can find the games, the drives, and the plays you need to see for research purposes.
Again, this is another area where the NFL has been lagging behind the NBA in the way the Game Pass site has performed poorly. It’s buggy, plays don’t load quickly, or they take you to the wrong play. But when it works properly, it is nice because you can search for every touchdown involving a player or see every target to a receiver in a game or season for multiple seasons.
But if you’re talking about the busy Sunday afternoon slate, it can be hard to dial into a game when so many are going on at the same time. That’s why some of the best live betting edges are for island games like the prime-time games where they are the only game on TV, and you can just pay attention to that while you place your bets on your device.
In-game betting during island games is a great way to entertain yourself during weaker matchups, and by watching them, you might pick up on some edges to exploit with your NFL bets.
AI Is Likely the Future
If you like to use X/Twitter for sports betting content, you may have come across an advertising tweet where someone brags about their success with using AI for their bets. Some even say they get over 80% of their bets right, which is almost certainly bogus.
But AI (artificial intelligence) is likely the future and it will have an impact on betting. It’s just not quite there all the way in 2024 to the point where you can log in to ChatGPT and ask for a list of the biggest longshots to score a touchdown in the previous season based on their odds at top-rated sportsbooks. It will tell you it can’t access those databases.
Maybe that changes down the road, especially as the internet collects and posts odds like that on a weekly basis during the season. But for now, we’re going to think of the value of AI for NFL bets to be in the form of computer models that are analyzing stats, trends, injuries, weather, and other factors to produce a prediction on each game.
These prediction models are not necessarily new, but you could lump them into where AI is heading. For instance, you can find a prediction model for the final score of NFL games at sites like Bookmakers Review. You can also see the list of sportsbooks and which one is offering the best numbers and prices.
It is always important to price shop and get the best number at the best price, and that is another value of using guides for the best NFL betting sites.
