We are less than 3 months away from NFL betting on the 2024 regular season. With the NBA and NHL seasons completed, fans who are not crazy about baseball may be turning their attention toward their betting strategies for the upcoming NFL season.
Maybe you’ve built a regression model to predict what NFL spreads should be and will use that to adjust your bets accordingly this season. Maybe you’ve found a handful of sites with prediction models that you want to follow closely this season to judge how accurate they are at predicting spreads and totals to use in your NFL betting.
No matter what your strategy is, you hope to find the best value with your NFL bets. That means getting the best number at the best price from a top-rated sportsbook. Sometimes that means placing a bet very early in the week and getting closing line value, and sometimes it pays off to wait until game day and place the bet at the final number if you feel you’ve identified good value.
We wanted to show some examples and data from last season for why value can be misleading in NFL betting, and why you shouldn’t always sweat over the number you ultimately chose to bet.
What Really Makes the NFL Betting Lines Move
For those new to NFL betting, we want to stress how the lines work at sportsbooks. If the Chiefs open as a 3-point favorite against the Ravens, that doesn’t necessarily mean Vegas and the offshore sportsbooks think the Chiefs will win by 3 or 4 points. They could even think the Ravens are going to win outright or that the Chiefs might win by a full touchdown or more.
But they are setting that line with the expectation that it will attract the 2 main types of bettors: professional (sharp) bettors and public bettors who see this as more of a recreational activity.
Sharps vs. Public Bettors
If the sharps see value in the opening line, they will pounce on it early and with a large bet, which makes the sportsbooks take notice. In fact, those wagers may be limited early in the week just to make sure they are not getting destroyed by sharps for putting out a bad opening line.
Meanwhile, public bettors often place smaller bets and tend to go for the teams who are favorites and have recently played well or have a popular player like Patrick Mahomes or Christian McCaffrey.
Adjusting the Lines
For a sportsbook, the goal is to adjust the lines so that both sides are getting close to equal action, and they are not left hanging with a huge liability on a game should the big money side win.
Basically, the books want to make sure we’re doing the big gambles and they’re not by taking too much action on one side. If sharps are pouring in money on a line of Chiefs -3, then you can expect the books to adjust that line to Chiefs -4 or higher to interest people to start taking Ravens +4 instead.
Ultimately, the bettors are the ones who move the lines with their money wagered, not the sportsbooks. If too much action is going one way, then the line will be adjusted to bring in money on the other side to get it closer to even. Sportsbooks profit by collecting the vig on the lines, which is why you are often picking between odds of -110 and -115 instead of even money or better.
The books are very good at staying in business, but that doesn’t mean their opening lines are perfect.
Closing Line Value Is Ideal But Not Everything
You’ll hear a lot of bettors, especially on social media, talk about closing line value (CLV). This happens when you bet on an opening line early in the week and there is significant line movement leading up to kickoff that makes the final number worse than yours.
For example, if you bet on the Eagles as a 2.5-point favorite against the Cowboys and the line closed at Eagles -4, then you got CLV. If you bet on a Lions-Packers game to go over 51 points, and the line closed at 49.5 points, then you didn’t get CLV.
1️⃣What is it?
The odds and spread on any given game are always moving as you know, positive closing line value is when the line you get is better than the line by kickoff/tip-off/puck drop etc.— Matty Covers (@MattyCovers1) February 27, 2024
Some bettors love to brag about CLV, but it is often an exercise in hindsight theatrics:
- If you got CLV and the bet won, then it’s (allegedly) the best day of your life.
- If you got CLV and the bet still lost, then what good was it? You backed the wrong horse all week.
- If you didn’t get CLV and the bet still won, then you should enjoy being on the right side.
- If you didn’t get CLV and the bet lost, then you had a bad week.
So, if someone bet the Texans to cover a 3.5-point spread with -115 odds and someone else bet the Texans to cover a 3-point spread with -110 odds, then the latter bettor got CLV. But if the Texans lost the game, then it feels a bit cheap for the latter bettor to say “at least I got closing line value.” Yeah, that’s about all you got out of it.
Don’t get me wrong. Getting CLV is ideal, and the bettors who get it more often are (in theory) likely to be more profitable in the long run than those who don’t get CLV that much.
But it’s not everything and celebrating losses with CLV should feel beneath you. You’d be better off figuring out why you were backing the wrong side all along. Being on the right side is always more important than CLV, and we want to show you the data from 2023 to see why you shouldn’t sweat it too much if someone got a better number than you did for the same or better price.
How Favorites Performed Against the Spread in 2023
In the 2023 NFL season, favorites were 142-134-9 ATS, meaning they covered 49.8% of the time and they covered or pushed 53.0% of all games (playoffs included). It’s one of the toughest markets to crack.
But in how many of those games would a swing of 1.5 points (either direction) have made a difference with the spread pick? Remember, most spreads are going to stick within 0.5 or 1 point from the opening line barring some unexpected injury news or extreme weather change.
- 49 games (17.2%) finished within 1.5 points of the final spread.
- 34 games (11.9%) finished within 1 point of the final spread.
- 25 games (8.8%) finished within 0.5 points of the final spread.
- 9 games (3.2%) finished exactly on the spread (push) and 7-of-9 games were a 3-point spread.
That’s still just under 12% of games that ended within a point of the spread.
Meanwhile, you can find 67 games (23.5%) where the favorite covered the spread by more than 10 points. None were more outrageous than in Week 3 when the Dolphins, a 6-point favorite, beat Denver 70-20, exceeding the spread by 44 points.
Also, you can find another 55 games (19.3%) where the favorite underperformed the spread by at least 10 points. That usually means the underdog won outright, but it also includes some games for Buffalo where the Bills were favored by 12.5 or 15.5 points and barely beat the Giants (14-9) and Chargers (24-22).
Those extreme results are more common than the games that are right up against the spread, which tells us maybe we need to take more chances on alternate lines if we really want to maximize value.
How Often Was the Total Close to the Final Line?
When it comes to the total points, we see even fewer games in 2023 that were within 1.5 points of the final line than we did with the spread:
- 35 games (12.3%) finished within 1.5 points of the final total.
- 23 games (8.1%) finished within 1 point of the final total.
- 18 games (6.3%) finished within 0.5 points of the final total.
- 6 games (2.1%) finished with the exact final total (push).
The Raiders under interim coach Antonio Pierce played in the 2 most extreme games of 2023 and they happened 4 days apart:
- In Week 14, the Raiders lost 3-0 to the Vikings with an over/under of 40 points for a minus-37 differential.
- In Week 15, the Raiders beat the Chargers 63-21 with an over/under of 34 points for a plus-50 differential.
That 63-21 game that got Los Angeles coach Brandon Staley fired was probably a great example of going against the grain and conventional wisdom. Justin Herbert was injured, the Raiders were coming off a 3-0 loss at home indoors, and people were loving the under on a Thursday night game. But they smashed the over in the biggest way of any game last season.
The bloodbath is finally over
Is this the last time we see Staley walk off the field as the Chargers HC? 👇
✅ Raiders -3 pic.twitter.com/YD0iTyX2sy— Bookmakers Review (@BMRReviews) December 15, 2023
Sometimes you have to zig when everyone else wants to zag. Remember, doing things that “everyone else does” in NFL betting is one of the easiest ways to ensure you won’t have an edge. That does not mean you should make a big bet on the moneyline of every double-digit underdog your thing, but you have to be willing to experiment and find what works best for you.
Getting value is nice, but being on the right side and cashing a winning ticket is still ultimately the goal. That’s why you won’t see anyone framing their past MVP bets for quarterbacks Mitch Trubisky (2019) and Trey Lance (2022) despite their supposed “good value” before the season.
