Football Betting Trends – Meaningful or HorseShit?

Are ATS trends worth a look or just a major time-waster?

As the Hall Of Fame Game approaches, all the cockroaches and wanna be experts are crawling out of their respective mom’s basements to preach football betting knowledge. As they rub their squinted eyes, adjusting to the sunlight, wiping the stale Cheetos off of their shirts, they throw on NFL Network and smile. This is going to be their year. It isn’t.

There isn’t enough time before August 7th, when pre-season kicks off, to get into the myriad of reason why “losers gonna lose”, but sometimes it’s “baby steps”. What are we hearing from the Twitter geniuses with “egg” avatars, that only tweet about wins, post exaggerated win totals, and are now analytics experts? We are often told about trends. But trends is just a word that maybe sounds analytical or chart-worthy. Are trends even valuable?

Are trends a valuable tool in a successful bettors belt? The answer is “it depends”. in general team betting trends are not worth the web space they are hosted on. The reason for this is simple. NFL teams change players, coaches, stadiums and even cities. The Denver Broncos of today look nothing like they did 5 years ago. There is however, one important exception. The NFL is such a QB driven league that one might spot useful trends on teams with a legit Franchise QB. If you want to approach trends the proper way for these elite signal callers you should search for the games where that QB was at the helm, not team stats. Throw out the team ATS Stats. There is no edge here. Sometimes we see some interesting things to look at but it’s largely happenstance/coincidence.

Overall NFL trends can be a helpful aide. League-wide trends, while far from foolproof, will keep you in your own home, out of your mother’s basement. If any Twitter “eggs” have taken the time to read this – putting aside valuable celebrity trolling time, suck on this – team trends are horseshit so stop it! We could get into “recency bias” and “sample size”, but you are just gonna have to trust us here. Or don’t- suit yourself! LEAGUE TRENDS CAN BE VALUABLE -TEAM TRENDS SUCK.

I’m not gonna do the work for you ( there are professional handicappers that will for a fee so pay up you cheapskate), but here are a couple interesting overall NFL betting trends that might make you think. You can lead a degenerate to water but you….

Underdogs getting between 10-14 points are 359-300 over last 20 years

Underdogs getting more than 14 points are 59.7% over the last 20 years

I am sure you all have Google. You can likely find more. Many more. Some of the professionals that have been actually winning for years have tools most do not have access to So they can compile data from huge date ranges. Check out the top football cappers in the world if you don’t feel like doing all the thinking!