No one is as awful as they look when they’re running bad and no one is as brilliant as they look when they’re running good. It works for actual team performance, and it works for sports betting.
(It just doesn’t work for Gang Green, who will never have nice things because God clearly hates the Jets.)
Week 2 is when the betting public tends to overreact to everything they saw in Week 1. The narratives are forming and the public is lining up to bet those narratives. But here’s a couple of words of caution so you don’t fall in the same trap.
Sample Size, Sample Size, Sample Size
Let’s take the case of the Colts. The Ravens dominated Indianapolis on the opening Sunday of the season.
It’s natural to look at that beatdown and conclude Indianapolis is awful and the Ravens are a juggernaut. We have a couple of data points (among them, “3," as in the number of touchdowns Derrick Henry had) that tell a story.
The human brain instinctively looks for patterns based on that data. But what's less instinctive is understanding sample size.
Right now we’ve got a sample size of one week. It’s not enough to build an accurate sense of what’s going on this year. The Lions-Saints overtime coin toss came up heads. You wouldn’t assume from that that every OT toss will land heads just from that. (Especially not when tails never fails.)
The Two Types of Overreaction
There are two directions that people tend to overreact in these situations. They both rely on the “availability heuristic.” Which is a type of cognitive bias that uses events that are more easily recalled to form judgements about the likelihood of future events.
In the positive direction it can look like confirmation bias or hindsight bias: something expected happened, therefore it will continue to happen. (“I expected the Ravens to crush the Colts, therefore other teams will continue to crush the Colts.”)
On the opposite side, it’s when something unexpected happens, so you expect it to continue to happen again. (“I expected the Rams to roll the Niners and they lost, therefore the Rams are terrible.”)
Trust An Efficient Market
The “efficient market hypothesis” is the theory that over time, all available information will be incorporated to shape the true price of an item. It’s true for sports betting, too. Especially in extremely liquid markets like the NFL.
Sports betting markets are shaped by respected action from sharp bettors. If a known sharp player makes a big bet on the Cardinals, sportsbooks would reasonably be expected to move the line Arizona’s way.
In our example with the Colts, we can see that a sharp sportsbook opened the Giants at +6, and today they’re at +6.5. Sharp action widened the spread.
If your theory after Sunday was that the Colts were awful, you have evidence here that the market agrees with you.
This is part and parcel of what’s called top-down betting, and it means if you didn't act on your theory at first, you may be too late. The market may have already priced in your idea. That means there’s no edge on it for you to bet.
It’s the same idea that says if you knew Patrick Mahomes wasn’t going to play on Sunday, you would have a huge edge on betting Indianapolis +6.5. But if everyone found out that Mahomes was unavailable, the number would quickly move and any edge on the Colts would dry up.
The key is knowing what the line should be. There are different ways to go about it but one of the most common is to use power ratings. Unabated has several projection sets and power ratings available, including the Massey-Peabody ratings developed in part by pro bettor and Unabated co-founder Rufus Peabody.
This way you can be prepared for when lines move and a juicy opportunity opens up. You won’t be caught up in narratives when everyone else is. It’s incidental, but sometimes the narrative lines up the market.
For more football betting strategies, check out Unabated’s educational articles including 10 Ways to Win with Unabated, and 10 More Ways to Win with Unabated.