Sports Betting

These days, sports bettors have a billion statistics available for study. You can read about Total QBR, Projected Points Added, and Yards Lost on sacks until you have a splitting migraine, but with so much statistical data available, all you’ll learn is a drop in the bucket .

Modern sports bettors aren’t just addicted to numbers – they’re addicted to numerical innovation. People are always looking for the magic statistic that will give them the edge against the house. New statistics (or new analysis models) are appreciated, because of the impression that bookmakers have not yet used them.

What if I told you that you could use two incredibly simple statistics to improve your success against the book? And what if you found out that these two numbers are old-fashioned and freely available to anyone, all over the world, all the time?

Xgtiger Casino strongly believes that you can save a lot of research time by paying more attention to two old-school facts – the team’s performance against the spread and the position of the teams in the various top 25 that rank.

Against the Spread (ATS) Trends

I can hear some of you laughing at the screen – I know, ATS is a dirt-simple number that any sports fan worth their salt can turn over in their sleep. It seems too obvious to be true, but you can be successful in sports betting if you understand historical and recent trends in ATS performance.

I became interested in ATS because of Nick Saban’s terrible ATS record. The Alabama coach has a 91-17 record and his team is always a threat for the national championship. How can he have a less-than-mediocre ATS percentage of just 51%? My research into this fact opened up a whole new world of possibilities in my sports betting – Saban has a terrible ATS record because his team faces inflated spreads every week. The Crimson Tide carries a ton of bets, and the sportsbook has to increase the spreads just to balance their books well.

Also consider the ATS performance of Jimbo Fisher, the Florida State coach, with his 58-11 record, and his reputation that brought new life to the storied program? His ATS performance is a dismal 46%. What is to explain the Seminoles coach’s failures against the one point spread? Let’s call it a chronic case of Jameis Winston deficiency. In the season that Fisher could rely on his superstar, he went 11-3 ATS, among the top ratings in the league. In every season aside from Winston’s miraculous national championship run, Fisher has struggled against a strangely increasing point spread. Maybe the pollsters remember last year’s ‘Noles, and not the team that looked like a JuCo squad against Oregon last year?

I can give examples of how real world performance and ATS performance do not match. Kansas State’s Bill Snyder has one of the best ATS numbers in the business, covering 66% of the time over the course of his career. During that time, he also lost 100 games, and saw K-State become one of four D1 programs to lose at least 600 games. He is the perfect example of a guy whose coverage numbers are WAY better than his performance.

The trick here is to look just one layer below what the pollsters are telling you when considering your ATS bet. In 2014, Louisiana Tech had the second best ATS performance, but couldn’t even win a conference game. But even though they lost the title game, they covered the spread by one point.

Please look familiar when looking for a sports betting strategy.

Position in the Top-25 Rankings

I got the idea to look long and hard at a specific part of the top 25 rankings from a book I read about sharp bets. One line in that book really intrigued me – it suggested that if the betting public knew how easy it is to beat the book by betting on certain teams based on their Top 25 rankings, everyone would bet on NCAA football. I put the book down – what could it be?

If you’re like me, you believe that all the ranking methods used for college football are useless. The talking heads push these manufactured figures and stats to the public, and they fall out of line. We must trust the expertise of a small group of anonymous figureheads and computer programs more than our own objective analysis. So how can we turn this situation on its head and use these false rankings to our advantage?

Here’s what I discovered – teams ranked between 15th and 25th nationally present the best opportunity for out-smarting the ranking authorities, and (by association) the public in betting and the sportsbook. Right there at the bottom of the latest AP poll are ten teams that even the experts only vaguely understand. It’s common to see unranked big-market teams favored against lesser-known (but low-ranked) opponents, favored by oddsmakers, who are often in the money. That was a chance if ever I saw one.

Money depends on betting against teams ranked 15th to 25th. Bettors are overrating teams based on having a small number next to their name on a betting sheet.

Statistically speaking, betting against ANY team group will not yield a profit. Since the start of the 2007 season, a player who has bet against every team has a record of 923-897. True, there is some positive bias here – not enough for profit, thanks to the juice.

If on the other hand you only bet on teams ranked between number 15 and number 25, you’d have a record of 430-371 since 2007. That’s good enough for a 5% return on your investment. Believe it or not, this can be a successful betting strategy. This is where I started freaking out.

The basic premise behind this strategy is to appease the public, but only do so in situations where it has been shown to be profitable. As long as the rankings hyped by everyone from ESPN to Nate Silver aren’t more accurate, you can make a decent return betting against teams at the bottom end of the AP or Sports Illustrated poll.

Conclusion

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