Posted by | Alikat | in Sports Betting Tips & Strategies, Sports Betting 101

What in the world happens every Friday afternoon or evening when many sports betting fans have made their picks for the Sunday games? Everybody goes to sleep that night after a bunch of Happy Hour beers thinking that they will go 5-0, 4-2, or 10-4 that Sunday and win a bunch of Money! Then comes Monday morning and most of us are all hung over from way too many Beers or Shots the day before asking ourselves, “What in the Hell happened?”.

The NFL is Frickin’ Crazy! Last weekend was a testament to how nutty this league can be and how devastating it can be on our pocketbooks. From the Lions scoring an NFL record 34 points in the 4th quarter to that insane circus run by Tony Romo and everything in between, last week was just ridiculous. A screenwriter would get escorted off the Lot at Warner Bros. for pitching these stories and yet they happen most every week in the NFL. It is a major reason why we all love the game so much and also why we Wager on the Game so much. Why take the time and money to go to Vegas when you can have more thrills on a Sunday afternoon from the comfort of your own house.

I mention all of this to get us thinking about How we Pick our games. There really is no conventional way to think about the NFL, especially in terms of bettting. One week a team is looking great on offense and their defense is suffocating. The next week that team can’t stop a junior high squad and they fumble twice inside the 20 yard line. The public jumps on some team’s bandwagon and the spread gets a little rich and sure enough the other team, thought to be terrible, plays them tough and ruins many bettors day.

Take for instance this past weekend. You had the Raiders +4 at Miami. Many people were tooting the horn that the Raiders were just trying to get through a couple more months until their Number 1 Draft Pick, Jamarcus Russell, came to the rescue. They had failed to cover in the 1st game of the season at -3 vs the Lions and had lost a heartbreaker 2 weeks before against the Broncos. Miami was at home, looking for it’s first Win of the season and seemed to be getting on track with a strong showing in the 2nd half against the Jets the week before.

What happened was the Raiders went out and blew the Dolphins off the line of scrimmage and Won going away. A quick glance at their ATS record and you find the Raiders, despite being completely written off at the beginning of the season, are 2-2 ATS. That is the same ATS record as the defending Super Bowl Champions, the Colts! The Cleveland Browns were talked about as a glorified High School team after Week 1 and the San Diego Chargers were going back to the AFC Title game at the beginning of Training Camp yet they have completely opposite ATS Records. The Browns are 3-1 ATS and the Chargers are a disappointing 1-3 ATS.

In my opinion this kind of lunacy calls for a similar kind of lunacy in your picks. We all start with some handicapping basics like: Good Quarterback, good Coach, good Defense, historically a winning organization, etc. When you get all of this boiled down you are left with mostly the status quo of who should win and lose. What I think gets left out much too often in the handicapping process are things like: How many frickin’ points can you get, does the Team Need a Win to Salvage their Season, Is the Favorite probably thinking they can cruise a little bit in the upcoming match-up, and finally, Does it Just Sound Crazy Enough to Take this Underdog and the points because, well, the NFL is Crazy.

There is not much argument that the sports betting public wagers more money on the Favorites than they do on the Underdogs. This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a bettor and one I myself still battle with on certain Sundays, last week being a prime example. Now I usually bet the underdogs twice as much as I do favorites, but last week I bet on 4 favorites compared with 2 underdogs. I went 2-4 ATS in one of my worst weeks I’ve had in the past 2 years. The only Favorite that covered was of course the Patriots! The other Win came on the Raiders +4. One of the underdogs I lost on is what you would call a ‘Crazy Pick’. I took the Rams +14 precisely because that’s just too many points in most NFL games these days and everything was going too smoothly for the Cowboys up to that point. If it wasn’t for that Nutty play by Tony Romo, on 3rd and long, right before the half, I really believe the Rams go into half time tied 7-7 and they have enough heart to stick around for another quarter and keep that game close enough to pull off a cover. Instead they were demoralized by that play, went into halftime down 7-14 and never recovered losing 7-35. Despite losing that game last week I would bet a lot of money that if played another 10 times I would cover that +14 points at least 6-7 times.

The one thing that seems to be a given in the NFL is that if you play the Underdogs consistently you will Win anywhere from 55-60% of the time. Of course this, as with everything else in sports betting, is no sure thing, but last year the underdogs Won roughly 58% of the games. By my account, if you had been playing nothing but underdogs the past 3 weeks in the NFL you would have a record of 26-15 with 5 pushes. That’s a winning percentage of roughly 64%!

I know it’s Crazy to take the Browns, Cardinals, Bucs, Chiefs, and Texans but so far they are a combined 14-3-2 ATS. Now I’m not saying they will keep that up. The Vegas Boys will be catching up to their ‘Perceived Underdog Value’ with regards to their lines and you probably won’t be getting quite the points you once did, at least on these specific teams, but the point just keeps ringing true…

TAKE THE FRICKIN’ POINTS AND GET CRAZY WITH THE DAWGS!