How Much Would I Have Won/Lost by Betting the NFL Favorites in 2017?

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.

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Comments

Dan McGlasson Sep-08-2018

Great research and article

I am a math geek, so I enjoy data related research.  Mr. Sharp, thank you for the in depth research and for finding the results for several year's back.  I also enjoyed your analysis of the bias to the favorites.  Looking forward to your book!

Kevin Lewis Sep-08-2018

Therefore...

So does that take into account the vig, as in assuming that you would have had to lay -110 on every bet? For a sample of almost 3900 bets (of $110 each), the loss if you had been .500 in your picks would have been a little more than $19,000 (you would have lost $10 for every two bets you placed). That's almost three times what you calculated, and that was based on favorites having a sub-.500 record ATS. So the loss should have been more like $20,000. What am I missing here?

Roy Furukawa Sep-08-2018

Winners

@kevin, winning bets get the bet returned, so betting $110 to win $100 gets a return of $210 if it wins, $0 when it’s a losing bet.

Logan Fields Sep-08-2018

correction

Nice catch, Kevin Lewis! 

While the chalk system is a long-term loser, it is, in fact, a bigger loser than what was reported earlier. Let's do some basic math and we should be able to find our answer. 

Over the last 15 years the chalk system won 1925 games! That gives us winnings of $192,500! Unfortunately we took it on the chin 1963 times, and when multiplied by 110, we would have $215,930 worth of torn up sports book tickets. This leaves us with a loss of $23,430. Divided by 15 years, our average loss per season would be $1562.

So while we did have differences in our calculations, what we can all agree on is the chalk system historically has been a huge bust. Time to get back to the drawing board and come up with something else!

[email protected] Sep-08-2018

Interestingly

You not only would have lost over $1,500 a season betting favorites, you also would have lost over $1,000 a season betting underdogs!  Shows the power of the vig - heads the book wins, tails the bettor loses!

Question of the Day - 08 September 2018

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