Dr. Ed Feng

Podcast: Hitman on NFL betting, Super Bowl LVII

Hitman, a professional NFL bettor, joins the show for a wide ranging conversation. Highlights include:

His evolution as a professional bettor (8:50)
Getting bets down, then and now (12:12)
His process for betting NFL spreads and totals (19:50)
Super Bowl spread bet (27:57)
His process for betting NFL player props (33:16)
Two Super Bowl props he likes (36:30)
More thoughts on the Super Bowl game script (41:34)
Why he sells picks (46:07)

Here is the Washington Post article on sports betting that we discussed.

Hitman also gives his real name for the first time on a podcast during the first few minutes of the show. To listen here, click on the right pointing triangle.

This episode of The Football Analytics Show is also available on:

Support the podcast on Patreon.

Members: Super Bowl game and prop analysis

By Dr. Ed Feng Leave a Comment

This content is for members only

7-Nugget Saturday, January 28, 2023

By Dr. Ed Feng Leave a Comment

Your weekly dose of sports betting tips, analytics and humor, every Saturday at 10am Eastern.

Super Bowl look ahead spread – Based on my current member numbers, I’d make Cincinnati a pick or -0.5 against either Philadelphia or San Francisco.

Assuming a full strength Patrick Mahomes, I’d make Kansas City -2 on a neutral site against Philadelphia or San Francisco. It really makes things easy when the two finalists from the NFC have about the same rating.

Patrick Mahomes passing yards prop – The market has concerns about Mahomes’s ankle injury, but it may have over adjusted a few numbers. For example, the passing yards prop is typically in the 310 range, but DraftKings has 285.5 for the game against Cincinnati.

On the latest Props & Hops podcast, pro bettor Hitman said that his information leads him to believe Mahomes will be healthier that the market anticipates. Hitman also thinks that if Mahomes has limited mobility, it might turn a few scrambles into pass attempts, which helps the over.

Hitman likes Mahomes over 285.5 passing yards against Cincinnati.

Brock Purdy – Despite the stellar play of the rookie, I was determined to find something wrong with him. He had only thrown four interceptions this year, but there is huge amount of randomness in picks.

Back in 2020, my COVID project was a better way to predict interceptions. I found that it’s more predictive to look at interceptions and pass defended, or any play in which a defender gets a hand on a pass or jars the ball loose with a hit on a receiver. In essence, this expands the set of plays in which the QB put the ball in a dangerous position.

The key to predicting interceptions is bad ball rate, or interceptions and pass defended per pass attempt (my research found this to be as predictive as completion percentage). The verdict on Purdy? His bad ball rate of 11.7%, better than NFL average of 12.3% this season.

Based on a market value of 31.5 pass attempts, Purdy has a 50.2% chance to not throw a pick, or to go under 0.5 interceptions.

San Francisco at Philadelphia – Pro bettor Rob Pizzola likes many aspects of Philadelphia’s match up with San Francisco.

First, Philadelphia is capable of exploiting San Francisco’s weakness in the secondary. While CB Charvarius Ward is solid, this leaves Deommodore Lenoir to cover either A.J. Brown on Devonta Smith on the outside.

Second, Philadelphia has strength along the offensive line to match up with the strength of San Francisco’s defensive line. This will help slow down the Niners pass rush. If the pass protection breaks down, QB Jalen Hurts can then scramble against a defense ranked 26th in success rate against QB scrambles.

Rob likes Philadelphia -2.5 at home. Check out all the good work Rob and colleagues do over at The Hammer.

Injuries – This information is curated from the ESPN NFL injuries page unless otherwise noted.

Kansas City QB Patrick Mahomes is dealing with an ankle sprain, but coach Andy Reid says he will start. Mahomes hasn’t been on the injury list the past two days, but his mobility remains a question.
Kansas City WRs Mecole Hardman and Justin Watson are questionable with a pelvis injury and illness respectively.
Philadelphia OT Lane Johnson and CB Avonte Maddox both practiced on Friday and will play against San Francisco.
San Francisco RB Elijah Mitchell is questionable with a groin injury. Key weapons RB Christian McCaffrey and WR Deebo Samuel were on the injury report earlier this week but are no longer there.

Get ready for a wild NCAA tournament – My college basketball team rankings take margin of victory and adjust for schedule with my proprietary algorithm. Let’s look at the rank of the four teams that have contested the last two championship games:

Kansas – 18th
North Carolina – 21st
Baylor – 25th
Gonzaga – 19th

This season, Purdue tops these rankings, and they are predicted to beat an average Division 1 team by 16.6 points. At this point last season, five teams had a higher rating than 16.6.

Early season returns suggest that there are no dominant teams in college basketball. There might be more surprise Elite Eight and Final Four teams in the 2023 NCAA tournament than usual.

Humor – Greg sent professional poker player Melissa an unwanted picture of his genitalia. Melissa posted a cleaned up version still not suitable to show here and said “thanks i hate it.”

Greg was not pleased, and asked to get in touch with her boss. Melissa sent him to another poker player, who informed Greg that HR said that this matter needed to go to the police. Greg didn’t get the joke and was not pleased. You can’t make this up.

This Barstool article makes it easy to follow the thread.

Data driven betting information

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Cincinnati at Kansas City, AFC Conference Championship Game

By Dr. Ed Feng Leave a Comment

Let’s rewind 17 months. Heading into the 2021 season, my metrics had Cincinnati 28th out of 32 NFL teams.

Second year QB Joe Burrow was recovering from a knee injury, and the pundits had all kinds of questions about his offensive line. There wasn’t much faith in the defense either if Cincinnati landed in the bottom five of the league.

In contrast to expectations, Cincinnati had a remarkable season and made it to the Super Bowl. However, that didn’t answer all of the questions about this team. Based on data from the 2021 season, all adjusted for strength of schedule by my algorithms, Cincinnati ranked 9th in the NFL.

The Bengals were a solid team in 2021, one with hopes of breaking out of the fat middle of the NFL. However, they should not have made it to the Super Bowl past Kansas City.

In the current 2022 season, Cincinnati got off to a slow 2-3 start. They didn’t look like Super Bowl contenders in week 8 when they got stomped by Cleveland 32-13 on Monday Night Football.

However, the numbers told a different story about Cincinnati. Based on the adjusted metrics from the current season, Cincinnati ranks 4th, in the range of Super Bowl contenders. The quants went running towards the Bengals like the New York Jets to the Senior Bowl QB practice.

The Cincinnati pass offense has made a significant jump. Let’s look at their passing success rate adjusted for opponent the past two seasons:

2021 – 11th
2022 – 2nd

A part of this improvement comes from negative plays. Burrow has been sacked 45 times this season compared to 70 last season. While some might attribute this to off season additions to the offensive line, sacks tend to be a QB statistic.

Against Buffalo, Cincinnati didn’t have three starters on the offensive line, and C Ted Karras played through a knee injury. Burrow got sacked once, and the Bengals had a sparkling 58.3% passing success rate (42.8% NFL average) in a complete domination.

For the AFC Championship Game, the markets opened with Kansas City as the favorite over Cincinnati. However, the spread moved towards Cincinnati, as some books had the road Bengals -2.5 on Tuesday.

This might show support for Cincinnati because of their performance at Buffalo. However, the market also might have inside information on the ankle injury to Kansas City QB Patrick Mahomes. He missed a series against Jacksonville but came back into the game with limited mobility.

Over the past few days, the market has shifted again to Kansas City as the favorite. Maybe some sharps had the time to process that Cincinnati was fortunate to beat Baltimore during Wild Card weekend.

Baltimore had 364 yards with backup QB Tyler Huntley compared to 234 for Cincinnati. The difference in the game was a long fumble return by Cincinnati.

My member predictions like Kansas City by 3.8 points over Cincinnati. Despite the improvement of the Bengals, my predictive analytics rates Kansas City as the better team.

My numbers assume Mahomes will be 100%, which he won’t be. However, if you believe Mahomes’s first practice Thursday went better than expected, then I’d lean towards Kansas City -1.

How to bet interception props

Picks are random. When a defender gets a hand on a pass, sometimes it falls harmlessly to the ground. Other times, it ends up in the hands of the defense.

In a 20 minute audio episode, I describe a better way to predict picks than a QB’s interception rate. It is helpful to count an expanded set of events.

This new metric is used to evaluate rookie San Francisco QB Brock Purdy and identify a prop bet for the NFL Conference Championship games.

There are multiple ways to get this audio content.