The three handicapping techniques of football, explained

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Most football handicapping comes down to three techniques. Statistical handicapping uses numbers such as power ratings to make your own line. Situational handicapping adjusts that line for things like rest, travel, injuries and weather, and market-based handicapping compares your number with the betting market to decide whether a bet is worth making.

Each one covers gaps in the others, so they work best together.

Statistical handicapping and power ratings

A power rating is a single number for each team, showing how many points better or worse it is than an average team on a neutral field. Once every team has one, you can turn any matchup into a point spread.

Say Team A is rated +4.0 and Team B is rated -1.5, and A is at home. If you give home field 1.5 points, your line is 4.0 minus -1.5, plus 1.5, which works out to A by 7. If the book has A -5.5, your number likes A. If the book has A -8.5, your number likes B.

Ratings can be built from points scored and allowed, adjusted for the strength of each opponent, or from per-play numbers such as yards per play. Per-play stats are popular because a final score can swing on a couple of turnovers or one long return. Whatever you use, update the ratings each week without overreacting to a single game.

Home field needs a current value. For years handicappers used a flat 3 points, but an Open Source Football analysis found it had been shrinking since 2017. Our road team betting guide covers this in more detail.

Pay attention to 3 and 7, the most common final margins in the NFL. A gap between your number and the book’s that crosses 3 or 7 is worth more than the same gap between, say, 4.5 and 5.5.

Situational handicapping

Power ratings describe a team on an average week. Situational handicapping adjusts for what’s different about this particular game. The usual factors include:

  • Injuries, above all at quarterback. Our guide to injuries and the NFL point spread covers how to adjust.
  • Rest, such as a short week after a Monday game or extra time off after a bye.
  • Travel, especially long trips and trips east across time zones.
  • Weather, mainly strong wind and extreme cold. See NFL betting and weather conditions.
  • Schedule spots, such as a team that may be looking ahead to a big game next week. These are hard to measure, so keep adjustments for them small.

Situational edges tend to be small, and the market already prices most of them. A study of NFL games from 1981 to 2004 found that visiting teams traveling west to east across a time zone did worse, and that betting markets didn’t fully account for it. When the model was tested on games outside its data, though, it didn’t produce a profitable strategy, and the author concluded that any bias was likely too small to exploit.

So keep situational adjustments to a point or so, and make them only for reasons you can explain, such as a starter ruled out or a team playing on a short week.

Market-based handicapping

The betting market is a forecast built from the money and opinions of everyone betting, including some very well-informed bettors. Market-based handicapping treats the line itself as evidence and asks how far you’re willing to disagree with it.

Moneylines show you the market’s view as a probability. Say the favorite is -140 and the underdog is +120. The favorite’s implied probability is 140 ÷ 240 = 58.33%, and the underdog’s is 100 ÷ 220 = 45.45%. Those add up to 103.79%, and the extra 3.79% is the book’s margin.

Divide each figure by 1.0379 to remove the margin, and the market is saying roughly 56.2% for the favorite and 43.8% for the underdog. If your ratings say the favorite wins 62% of the time, you’re disagreeing with the market by about six percentage points, and you should have a good reason.

Line movement is market information too. When a spread moves, check whether news explains it, such as an injury or a change in the forecast. If it moves with no news, bettors the book respects may have bet it. Our guide to anticipating line shifts covers how to read those moves and how the closing line helps you judge your own numbers.

The danger is following moves after they happen. By the time you notice a line has moved, you’re usually getting a worse number than the people who moved it.

Where team trends fit

Some handicappers count team trends, such as a team’s record against the spread as a home favorite, as a method of their own. Most of these records cover too few games to mean much.

Say a team is 9-2 against the spread as a home favorite over the past three seasons. A fair coin lands heads 9 or more times in 11 flips about 3% of the time. Look through 30 unrelated trends of that size and there’s about a 63% chance at least one of them looks this good by luck alone.

Rosters and coaches also change from season to season, so a team’s record from three years ago may say little about this year’s team. Treat a trend as a prompt to look for a real football reason. If you find one, it belongs in your situational adjustments.

Putting the three together

Back to the earlier example. Your ratings make Team A a 7-point favorite. A played on Monday night and has a short week, while B is coming off a bye, so you take a point off and land on A -6.

Now check the market. If the book has A -5.5 at -110, you’re only half a point better, and that half point doesn’t cross 3 or 7. That’s usually a pass. If the book has A -4.5, you’re getting 1.5 points, and the bet is worth a closer look.

At -110 you risk $110 to win $100, so you need to win 110 ÷ 210 = 52.38% of your bets to break even. Even a small, real edge above that takes many bets to show up in your results.

Keep a record of every bet, with the line you got, the line at kickoff and the main reason you made it. Over a season, that record tells you if you’re beating the closing line and which reasons hold up.

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Bovada’s NFL page lists spreads, totals and moneylines for each game, so you can compare its numbers with the line your ratings produce. If you live in a state with legal online sportsbooks, a state-licensed book gives you more protection, because it answers to a state regulator if something goes wrong.

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