Gross Bombs: NFL Props for Week 16
Josh Gross
Week 13 of NFL action is now in the books. We are rounding the home stretch of the playoff push. Teams at the top are fighting for a bye and/or home-field advantage for a round or two. Teams in the middle are fighting for their invite to the dance. The teams at the bottom are jockeying for draft position and trying to see if some of their young players locked up for a few years can develop.
It should be a fun end to the regular season. Let’s take a look at some of the emerging trends from Week 13 and how they can help us make money moving forward.
Against-the-Spread Report
Underdogs have been the better side against the spread in four of the last five weeks. They stormed back to take the lead, with a flat bet on every favorite holding a 5-6-1 record on the season. This week, favorites evened up the weekly count at 6-6-1. We had 14 games in Week 13 and favorites won eight of them ATS for a profit of 1.28 units on a flat one-unit bet on each game. Not a single favorite won while failing to cover. In other words, all six that didn’t cover also lost their games outright. All eight winning favorites covered the spread and did so by a wide margin. The strategy is now slightly profitable if you bet one unit on every favorite throughout the season, but we are talking about merely a 1%-2% return on a massive weekly investment to see any decent money out of it. The biggest takeaway here when looking at games against the spread is that they seem to be pretty accurate on the season. Most of the league is sitting somewhere around 5-7 or 6-6 ATS with a few outliers to the high and low end. Football markets are the most efficient and toughest to beat, which is why these numbers do make a lot of sense.
Underdog Records
We had only six of 14 underdogs win their games in Week 13, but a flat bet on them would have returned a profit with the plus-money payouts. The Lions were the big one for the underdogs, as they were +250 or higher depending on when you placed the bet. Other smaller dogs like the Chargers paid in the +150 range, so those two alone made up the difference in the negative units for losing eight bets this week. The other four winners were the Steelers, Seahawks, Patriots and Chargers. The odds above even money on any of those four plays added together gives you your profit. That now means a flat one-unit bet on every underdog has been profitable in nine of 13 weeks and overall has created a bigger profit on the season than betting favorites against the spread thus far. The old adage about never going broke betting dogs seems to be holding true for 2021.
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NFL Scoring Trends
No surprise here as the unders hit more often than the over again in Week 13. We had five games played to the over and nine to the under. This created a flat-bet profit of 3.19 units if you place a one-unit wager on every under in Week 13. For the season, the total number of overs now stands at 83, unders at 109 (and 2 ties). Out of 194 games played in the 2021 NFL season, overs have hit at just 42.7%. Unders are sitting at 56.2% and the other 1.1% is because of the two games that ended exactly on the number. A flat bet on unders for every game is by far the most profitable of the trends we are tracking here on the season. At standard juice of -110, this strategy would be up over 16 units on the season or about 1.25 units per week on average.
