Photo: USA Today Sports

Gambling on the NFL is big business, especially after a 2018 Supreme Court decision striking down a federal ban on sports betting. Recent estimates suggest that as many as 46.6 million people will place a bet on the NFL this year, representing nearly one out of every five Americans of legal gambling age. As a result, there's been an explosion in sports betting content, most of which promises to make you a more profitable bettor. Given that backdrop, it can be hard to know who to trust.

Fortunately, you can trust me when I promise that I'm not going to make you a more profitable sports bettor. And neither will any of those other columns. It's essentially impossible for any written column to do so, for a number of reasons I detailed here. (I'm not saying it's impossible to be profitable betting on the NFL, just that it's impossible to get there thanks to a weekly picks column.)

This column's animating philosophy is not to make betting more profitable but to make betting more entertaining. And maybe along the way, we can make it a bit less unprofitable in the process, discussing how to find bets where the house's edge is smaller, how to manage your bankroll, and how to dramatically increase your return on investment in any family or office pick pools (because Dave in HR and Sarah in accounting are much softer marks than Caesar's and MGM).

If that sounds interesting to you, feel free to join me as we discuss the weekly Odds and Ends.

Let's Talk About the Unders

It's an open secret in the betting world that in games with a total, unders tend to do slightly better than overs. (Remember: a total is a bet on the total amount of points from both teams in a game, with the "under" bet winning if the teams combine for fewer points and the "over" bet winning if they combine for more, regardless of which team scores those points.)

"But wait," the fictional foil I just invented exclaims, "I thought Vegas was efficient; surely it can't be that easy to beat, can it?"

That's a very good question, person I totally made up just to advance the conversation, and thanks for asking it. Unders do tend to outperform overs, but not enough to make them profitable as-is. Remember our discussions of the vigorish or "vig" earlier this year, which is the way that Vegas tilts odds slightly in its favor to help ensure profitability. In a standard bet where the over and under both have odds of -110 (which means you have to bet $110 to win $100), your bets need to win more than 52% of the time in order to turn a profit. With a steeper vig, you need to win at a higher rate.

So why do unders do better than overs? Because people love betting overs. Scoring is exciting and rooting for more scoring is more fun than rooting for less scoring. Plus, with an "over" bet you're usually still alive until very late in the game. You might have bet "over 44.5" and the game might only have 31 points late in the fourth quarter, but teams could always just score touchdowns on the next two drives, and there's usually at least a remote possibility of overtime to juice the total. Meanwhile, since points never come off the board again, "under" bets can be lost in the first half, leaving nothing to root for in the second.

So given that Vegas exists to maximize its profit, it makes sense that it'd shade things a hair so that the more popular bet loses slightly more often. Not quite enough for the "sharp money" to come in and take advantage, but enough to skim a bit of extra profit off of recreational bettors.

This year, however, unders have been smashing way past that 52-53% mark.

Unders are 57-36-1 (60.6%) through six weeks after another low scoring Week 6.

My thoughts on why we're seeing such a bad start for many offenses in the intro of Stat-Pack today. pic.twitter.com/HdJD4PeYRA

— Graham Barfield (@GrahamBarfield) October 18, 2022

This is a really weird year so far. Scoring is down significantly after a long upward trend and games are finishing closer than at any point since 1932. As a result, unders and underdogs have both been killing it so far.

Does that mean that we should be betting more unders? No. The problem, of course, is that if we've noticed this, so has Vegas (with "Vegas" here being a metonym for "the collective insight of people who wager on NFL games who set the betting lines through adversarial action"). As someone who runs a weekly kicker model that is heavily influenced by Vegas over/unders, I've noticed the over/under bets trending strongly downward over the last few weeks. This season started out scoring below expectations, but expectations have a funny habit of updating to new information.

Does that mean that we shouldn't be betting more unders? Again, no. Remember, unders have a long-term structural advantage. Not enough to win you money in expectation, but enough to help you lose less money. And "helping you lose less money" is the best this column can aim for, so yeah, smashing the unders is an official Odds-and-Ends approved betting strategy. It might not help much, but it probably won't hurt, either.

Unless you think betting unders is boring. Gambling is best approached as an entertainment product with your losses as the cost, so there's no sense in "buying" bets you don't enjoy just because they "cost" slightly less.

Lines I'm Seeing