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| | Author: MasterBets
| Football Power Ratings
If you want to become a football handicapper or even cash more NFL bets than you tear up, you need a basic system that initially helps you to rate the various teams. If you went to the track you wouldn't be caught dead (hopefully) without a DRF and the accompanying Beyer numbers. This is a numerical system that rates past performances, comparing formlines. At their best, football power ranking systems depict past results with some degree of accuracy, and give us an edge in determining future outcomes. They allow us to compare teams where there is no direct line of form, and enable us to attach a weight to each victory or loss. As is the case with the ponies, football handicapping must deal with the fact that these numbers ultimately represent flesh and blood and cannot be 100% accurate - an NFL team has its off days, its undisclosed injuries and bad moods, just as racehorses do. A good football team will still lose 1/3 of all their games, and probably fail to cover the same number. But, with power rankings you have a chance of finding the 66% of games that they will cash before they are played.
Football power ratings are the basis for Vegas pointspreads. The oddsmakers start with their own ranking system and measure the difference between the two teams' power ratings when they put up the opening numbers for every game each week. Then they factor in a number of other things. Homefield advantage: Green Bay in the winter is worth more points than Arizona at any time of the season, for example. Specific matchups on the two clubs: the Chiefs big play offense vs. a weak Cleveland secondary that allows lots of big plays. Oddsmakers look at the trends - historical data as to how the teams play one another and how they tend to play games in each specific type of situation. Finally, they look at how the bettors support or don?t support the two teams. Public money matters, but not with every line. The Cowboys matter, but a team like the Saints might fly under the radar. Basically, that is how the virgin lines are created each week. Again, it all starts with the power ratings, and if you're going to make money betting college football or handicapping the NFL then you need your own.
Your initial power rankings table should look a lot like all the others right now (before the season has started). Every expert is on the same page right now, having analyzed the same extant information. BUT, once the season starts football handicapping turns from a "science" into an "art". You have to make adjustments to those ratings based on your own observations of games. This can be very personal, and should be subjective. If you're going to have an edge over the lines it must come from your own research and analysis (or, alternatively, just trust our subjective opinion - the bottom line is someone needs to keep track of every game and develop conclusions after watching those games).
Once you have a football power rating chart, and can tweak that chart based on results, injuries, individual performances, and intangible qualities such as level of motivation or level of locker-room harmony, you are in a position to create your own NFL betting lines ahead of time. Now you have the advantage. Those football spreads won't seem random and arbitrary anymore, and you'll start to handicap games correctly ahead of time. You need to be able to rank disparate performances in football in order to have any chance of getting future picks right. And always stay true to your opinion. It is your biggest edge in the long-run, especially in handicapping college football, where the lines tend to be softer as a function of so many additional games per week.
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| Last Updated
Tuesday, April 22, 2008 | | |
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