In toy boy fiance Archibald's fun pool for the National Football League (NFL) regular season, I finished 53.7% against the spread (ATS) at 133-114-9: 54-45-5 home dogs, 1-3 home faves, 4-1 road faves and 74-65-4 road dogs.
I follow a strategy based on the persuasive case that NFL bettors would do better if they realized that underdogs consistently best overdogs from Professor Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/magazine/dissecting-the-line.htmlTwo consecutive years now, I have finished the 2020 and 2021 regular seasons at 53.7% and 2nd in Arch's pool (3-way tie for 2nd out of 60 players in 2021).
In 2021, a simple all-underdog strategy recorded a 23rd winning regular season ATS over the past 29 since 1992.
Just for fun, my ex-toy boy Reginald and I engage in a playoff smack-off based on alternating draft-style picks each week. In Super Bowl LV, I picked home underdog TBAY +3 over kc. Professor Leavitt argued that the Super Bowl underdog is the best bet in sports. In another 945 years, we will know whether he was right from a statistically significant point of view.
I finished 7-6 with my play-off picks: 5-3 road underdogs, 1-2 home underdogs and 1-1 home overdogs.
My working proposition is that most playoff matches are no different than regular season matches so that out of every 6,000 playoff matches, about 2,000 underdogs would win outright and about 1,000 underdogs would win on points.
The exception might be the 1/4 final matches when No. 1 seeds have an additional advantage with an extra week of rest, which may not be fully factored into the point spread. Teams with the bye week have won about 3/4 of all matches in the divisional round. If that high winning % holds up in future, my hunch is that we would not see 1/3 of those winning top-seeded favourites lose on points. But, it's just a hunch and we will not know how this story turns out in a statistically significant sense for another 900 years or so.
