The Advantage of the Over Under Bet

Before I created my NFL Predictive Model for forecasting the outcomes of NFL games, I always thought betting the Over/Under was just not all that interesting. What really matters is who is going to win the game, right? Coming off NFL week six where my over/under bet units were 5/5 (and my line bet units were only 3/6) I thought it might be a good time to sing the praises of the over-under bet.

The over bet is one bet that can be put in the bag before the game is over. In fact, during the Saints vs Giants game I’d already won one of my best bets before half-time! The under can start looking pretty sure by midway through the fourth quarter. Recently examples include under in the Bills vs Browns and under in the Chiefs vs Redskins (both games in which our model best bet the under).

By contrast, the soonest you can count your un-hatched chickens in a spread bet is at the end of regulation when you’ve taken a huge underdog (we notched the Bills vs Jets as a victory at the begging of overtime because we had 9.5 points).

On a more philosophical note, the OU is also more a reflection of the character of the game. We were glad our model took the over in the NO vs NYG game because we thought the game pitted great offenses against decent defenses and that it would be a shootout. As far as who would win, who knew? The model has NO by 2.7 points but with zero confidence.

On a more practical note, adding the Over Under to our offerings has increased our bet-worthy events from 3-5 per week to 6 – 10 per week. The increase in bet-worthy events narrows the probability distribution of our expectation values, increasing our odds of a winning week. Note that even though our individual weeks range from 63% - 70% odds of winning, YTD we have a 76.5% chance of winning (and each event is only 55% - 60%). The more events we can add, the faster we narrow the distribution around our 110% expectation value – making winning a more certain long-term outcome.