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.

"Unders" Update

I figure we'll just make it a weekly feature to track the performance of "under" bets through the season. Last week the unders went 8-8, which leaves them 66-63-1 since we noticed how well they were performing six weeks ago. Las Vegas, it turns out, might be fairly good at this.

Closing Out Your Picks Pool

There are only three weeks left in the season, which means (unless your pool goes through the playoffs) there's less than a month to go before scores are final and winners are settled in your office pick pools. I've discussed a couple of times through the year what kind of rules you should be following to maximize the number of points you're scoring. We've now reached the part of the season where you can forget about all of that.

Why? Because the point of the game isn't "getting correct picks". You might think so, but you'd be wrong. The point of the game is getting more correct picks than your competition. And sometimes, the best way to maximize your chances of doing that is to make suboptimal picks.

Let's say you've picked 50% of games correctly so far, while the leader in your pool has picked 54%. There have been 224 games played to this point, which means that would translate to 112 wins for you and 121 for your top opponent, a +9 advantage.

There are only 48 games left to pick, so if your opponent gets 50% right the rest of the way, in order to make up that +9 advantage, you'd need to get a whopping 68.8% of your picks right. In order to pass them entirely, you'd need 70.8%. That's... well, it's not technically impossible, but it's extremely unlikely.

So what can you do? If first place is out of reach and your pool gives cash prizes for second or third, you can focus on trying to finish there, instead. If you're within easy striking range-- say within a win or three-- then it's probably best to keep making fundamentally-sound picks, focusing on selecting teams receiving favorable line movement late in the week, say.

But if that's not an option, rather than trying to pick 70.8% of your games right, it's probably best to recognize that if your opponent picks 50% correct going forward, you simply can't catch up. And then, after recognizing that, operate under the assumption that your opponent will pick worse than 50% and set yourself up to capitalize.

If your opponent picks 40% over the final three weeks and you manage to pick the opposite team in every single game (meaning, by definition, you finish at 60%), that actually translates to a +10 edge for you and a win. And "opponent picks 40%" is a much more realistic possibility than "you pick 70%".

Which illustrates the clearest path to victory. If you're down by a lot, all of your effort should be devoted to figuring out who the leader is picking and going with the opposite in all cases, no matter how you personally feel.

On the other side, if you're up by a lot, this whole logic gets flipped on its head. The only way anyone can catch up to you is if they differentiate their picks from yours, so the easiest path to victory is to ensure that you're making the same picks and just let your early lead coast across the finish line.

Lines I'm Seeing

Revenge Game(s) of the Week

Last week we bet on an entire city getting a small dose of catharsis against an old foe, and the Browns were able to follow through. Somehow I doubt it makes up for the decades of misery, but every little bit helps.

Houston (+3.5) at Tennessee

When Art Modell took the Browns out of Cleveland in 1995, the city spent three years without a professional football team. When Bud Adams took the Oilers out of Houston the next year, the city spent five years without a team. And while Modell was forced to leave the team name and history behind when he moved, Adams was free to spirit it off with him. Houston was left a city loving a shade of blue that no longer exists, left with songs about a team that is a mere figment of the imagination. Sure, the Ravens have won Super Bowl titles that Cleveland fans feel were theirs by right, and the Titans haven't. But every trauma is different, and there's nothing to be gained in comparing. Violence was done to the people of Houston as surely as it was done to those of Cleveland, and I'm picking the city of Houston to exact some small measure of revenge this weekend.

San Francisco (-7) vs. Washington

Some players famously like to stew over all the teams that didn't believe in them, that passed on them in the draft or didn't show an interest in free agency. Amon-Ra St. Brown has memorized the name and college of all sixteen receivers drafted before him. If Brock Purdy is the petty sort, he has plenty to stew over; the 32 NFL franchises passed on him a collective 261 times before San Francisco decided to bestow the nickname "Mr. Irrelevant" on him by taking him with the last pick of the draft. With wins in his first two starts, Purdy is on a mission to show the league just how relevant he is. Give me San Francisco and I'll lay the seven points.

The Rock-It Sock-It Lock-It Pick of the Week

The Random Number Generator knew exactly when to stop tailing Dallas, getting off the Cowboys just in time to take the underdog Jaguars in a game they won outright. Let's see who it likes this week.

Kansas City (-10) vs. Seattle

I hate laying double-digit points, but if I'm going to do it, it helps to have Patrick Mahomes II on my side. The Random Number Generator agrees and wants the Chiefs, laying 10 points or not.