NFL 2013-4 Recap ATS

In the non-profit pool that I swim in naked (of all football knowledge other than Professor Levitt's lessons about gaming market anomalies), I finished 129-129-9 against the spread (ATS) after correctly picking Seattle +1 over Denver in Super Bowl XLVIII.

Underdogs are now 24-22-2 in Super Bowls to date ATS. Professor Leavitt believes that the Super Bowl underdog is the best pick in sports ATS. I would expect underdogs to take 55% of Super Bowls ATS over 1000 matches.

4-7 with my play-off picks combined with my 125-122-9 record for the regular season:

2-3 play-offs and 75-82-5 regular season with road underdog picks;

0-2 play-offs and 44-36-4 regular season home underdogs;

6-4 with my regular season attempts to identify home overdogs with value and 1-2 in the play-offs.

A simple all-homer strategy would be in the top half of most pool parades at 4-6 play-offs and 132-115-9 regular season. An all-underdogs strategy finished 123-124-9 for the regular season and 5-6 in the play-offs. This was only the 5th season out of the last 22 to end up with underdogs as a net loser.

I played in 2 pools and finished tied for 13th out of 62 in one and tied for 16th out of 98 in the other. My pool records are better than my record here on this blog because I take advantage of anomalies in the pool spreads whenever they arise. But, the fact that I did relatively well in both pools even though I was all-even with my base package of picks shows that most pool players tend to ignore pool spread anomalies.

Dearest Godiva toy boy and fiance Archibald points out that the NFC won the inter-conference rivalry against the AFC this year 35-30 straight-up thanks entirely to the NFC West's 14-3 record against the AFC. Against the rest of the NFC, the West went 17-7 in the regular season and 3-0 in the play-offs. Arch would have backed Arizona, 3rd best in the NFC West, against Denver in the Super Bowl (SB) on the grounds that he believes Arizona is the 3rd best team in the entire league. It would be interesting to know whether there is any correlation between which conference wins on Super Sunday and which conference wins regular season bragging rights, as was the case this year.

Arch predicts that next year in 2015 the NFC will extend its SB lead over the AFC to 27-22 straight-up and 6-2 over the last 8 and that the victor will be a team from the NFC West. The streakiness in the SB interconference rivalry is striking. After splitting the first 6 SBs with the NFC, the AFC won 8 of the next 9; the NFC then won 15 of the following 16 SBs including 13 in a row from 1985 through 1997; AFC took 8 of the next 10; and NFC has now won 5 of the past 7.