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With the NFL season starting, how much money would I have won or lost by betting $110 on every favorite in every NFL game last year? In other words, if I took the chalk in every game.
[Editor's Note: This answer was graciously supplied by Steve Sharp, a 20-year professional sports bettor and the author of our upcoming book, tentatively titled How To Win at Sports Betting.]
Surprise!
You actually would have made money on a system of betting the chalk in every game of the 2017 NFL regular season. Your record would have been 132 wins and 110 losses. I didn’t count pick ’em games (no favorite) and those that landed exactly on the number. Wagering $110 per game would have netted a handsome profit of $1,115.
Unfortunately, all good things eventually come to an end and if you continued this system throughout the post-season, you would have given back practically all the profits you earned during the regular season. Favorites went a dreadful 1-10 in the playoffs, which would have left you a measly $115 for your season-long efforts.
But hey, the system did make money last year, so why not give it a go again?
Well, 267 games is a rather small sample size, so to get a more accurate assessment of how this system will perform, it’s necessary to look at a larger selection of games. Let’s go back 15 years and see how you would have fared. Since 2003, the chalk had a disappointing 1925-1963 record. Betting $110 on all the favorites would have lost more than $6,000! Doing the math, you can expect this system to lose, on average, approximately $400 each season.
You're not alone in your obsession with betting favorites. Generally speaking, the public loves betting favorites. When Vegas sports books complain of having a bad NFL week, you can be sure that a lot of favorites covered the point spread. When favorites cover, the public wins. When underdogs cover, the sports books win.
In case you're wondering where the information comes from, I buy data every year where I can pull up numbers such as the 2017 chalk. It costs me $150 per NFL season. I did my research for 2017 on this database and it took me about 10 minutes to compile the results.
Then I thought I'd go back further, but to do this in the database, it would've taken about an hour.
Instead, I looked online to see if anyone had already done it. I googled something along the lines of "NFL favorites covering year by year" and got a hit for the site teamrankings.com. They have a database and after clicking through a few drop-down menus, I found exactly what I was looking for.
I'm confident the data is accurate; it was precisely what I expected to find -- underdogs slightly outperforming favorites due to the public bias of betting up favorites and inflating the lines just a smidgen. If the public is left unchecked, they'll inflate lines by more than just a smidgen, but wiseguys would then enter the fray and keep things in check by taking the underdogs. So sharps and sports books more times than not are on the same side.