UNDERSTANDING NFL FOOTBALL BETTING LINES

In order to successfully bet on NFL football it’s important to start with the fundamentals.  And we’re not talking about the ‘X’s and O’s’ of professional football game planning—we’re talking about the fundamentals of understanding the wagering side of the equation.  There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what NFL pointspreads mean and how they are setting.  A firm grasp of the essential bookmaking concept of setting NFL lines is a prerequisite for any hopes of sports betting success.

The general public has a tendency to oversimplify the meaning of an NFL pointspread. The conventional wisdom is that it is simply a prediction of which team will win and by how much.  There is a component of that in the NFL bookmaking equation, but there’s a lot more to it.  In theory, a sportsbook’s primary goal is to equally divide the action they take on an individual game.  If they do their job right, the outcome of the game is irrelevant to the bookmaker.  You’ll frequently hear clueless sportscasters make inane comments following a big upset like ‘Boy, the sportsbooks in Las Vegas must have lost their shirts on that one’ or ‘whoever set the line got this one wrong’.  That’s something that simply cannot be determined from the outcome of the game alone.

Since a bookmaker’s primary goal in setting NFL betting lines is to equally divide action, they have to make each side of a wagering proposition attractive to a prospective player.  For that reason, its more accurate to say that NFL lines are more of a reflection of the betting public’s perception of which team will win a game and by how much than anything else.  Some NFL teams are considered “public” teams due to their popularity and/or perceived qualitative skill.  A bookmaker may ‘shade’ the NFL lines involving teams like the Dallas Cowboys or New England Patriots to make their opponent a more enticing betting option.  So if the numbers in a hypothetical game between Dallas and Cincinnati indicate that the Cowboys should be a -6 favorite a book may open the game at -7 or -7’.  For that reason going against ‘public’ teams is almost always a strong wagering strategy.

In early season wagering there are a few additional factors at play.  A bookmaker may consider a team’s NFL preseason record for the simple reason that the NFL betting public gives it undue attention.  ‘Sharp’ players know that there is little correlation between a team’s preseason success (or lack thereof) and their regular season performance.  Another consideration is a team’s performance in the previous season or, in some cases, their historical performance.  A team with a ‘winning tradition’ like New England or Carolina may be priced higher than the ‘true odds’ indicate as a result.

Furthermore, it’s important to understand why NFL lines are moved after the opening numbers are posted.  While it may occasionally be due to external factors such as injury or weather, more often than not it’s a direct result of the money a book is drawing on one side of the proposition or another.  If in our hypothetical example above, Dallas opens -7’ and not long after the line is moved to -7 that is an indication that the book has received the majority of their bets on the Bengals.  The idea is that by moving the line it makes wagers on the side a book wishes to attract money on more attractive.  Indeed, many sharp players base their NFL football bets exclusively on line movements.

NFL football betting is a very complex discipline, and many neophytes make the mistake of focusing exclusively on the nuances of the game itself.  To successfully bet on NFL football, however, it is important to spend as much time understanding the intricacies of the sports gambling ‘marketplace’—and in this regard nothing is more fundamentally important than understanding how NFL pointspreads are made and why they are moved.