Looking for sharp football betting this season? Your curated list of tips, analytics and humor, every Saturday at 10am Eastern.
NFL win total – Tanner Buzick runs the NFL analysis at Dr. Bob Sports. On a recent show, he discussed fading the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2025.
Tanner notes the win totals market tends to underestimate the importance of two areas in which the Jaguars will struggle:
- The offensive line is weak due to personnel changes like the retirement of tackle Brandon Scherff.
- Eric Murray and Darnell Savage will compete with Washington for having the worst pair of safeties in the NFL.
Tanner likes Jacksonville under 7.5 wins, +105 available at DraftKings, as he would make the price -115. Check out all of Tanner’s work at Dr. Bob Sports.
Top down NFL bet – An excellent way to find value is to follow sharp bettors. Adam Bjorn creates the software that runs sharp sports books like Prime, so he has access to sharp action.
On the Props and Hops panel I hosted at Bet Bash, Adam noted that 63% of the money is on the Los Angeles Chargers to make the playoffs. However, 100% of the sharp money is on the Chargers to miss the playoffs.
This type of top down analysis can be frustrating as it doesn’t provide any reasons for why to fade the Chargers. However, an episode of the 2025 Preview Series which launches on The Football Analytics Show on Monday will dig into my data driven reasons for fading Justin Herbert and the Chargers.
On FanDuel, you can get Los Angeles Chargers to miss the playoffs at -112.
Jared Goff – The Detroit Lions quarterback threw an unbelievable five interceptions in a game at Houston last year. For the season, Goff had a 2.6% interception rate, worse than the 2.2% NFL average.
Luckily for the Lions, interception rate is not a good predictor of future interception rate. I’ve found that it’s better to look at how often the quarterback throws the football into a dangerous situations. These plays include interceptions and also passes defended, or plays in which the defense gets a hand on the football.
Goff is actually one of the NFL’s best at not throwing the football into dangerous situations. My model predicts a 1.7% interception rate for Goff this season. Many expect the Lions offense to regress due to the absence of OC Ben Johnson, but they will most likely do better with interceptions this year.
Preseason college football polls – Yes, I’m obsessed with the predictive power of the preseason AP poll. But the AP poll during the season should be better because of additional information from games, right?
Nope. Andrew Percival did a study on games in which the preseason vs current poll had different teams in a game ranked higher. Since 2007, the team picked by the preseason poll won 56% of the time in 192 games.
During the season, the typical pollster moves a team down after a loss. This seems to weaken the predictive power of the AP poll after the season starts.
Andrew also found that computer models with data from the current season beat the preseason AP poll. For example, the SP+ model of Bill Connelly won 58% of games.
Football humor – Dave Swerski is back with another season of hilarious Chicago Bears parody songs.
Smarter sports betting in less than 5 minutes
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