Football Power Ratings
Should a player wish to become a football handicapper or start cashing in more NFL bets than
he tears up, he will need to learn a basic rating system, to enable him to rate
the various teams at play. This rating system is a numerical one that rates a
teams' past performance and compares formlines. As a horse punter would
not go to the track without a DRF and the companion Beyer numbers, so a football
handicapper should not even consider betting unless he had his football ranking
system in order. When done correctly, the football power ranking systems
shows past results with fair precision, and will give a punter a distinct
advantage in determining future game outcomes. The rankings allow punters to compare teams where there is no direct line of form, and
also allow them to weight each victory or loss. As with horse racing, football handicapping
cannot be totally accurate - "we are only human" and an NFL team does
have off days, injuries and bad moods, as do racehorses! A good pro football team
will usually lose 1/3 of all of their games played, and also fail to cover
roughly 1/3. With the power rankings though, a punter has the chance of finding the 66% of games that they will cash,
before they are played.
Football power ratings are also the basis for the Vegas point spreads. The
bookies start off their own ranking system, and they will gauge the difference between the two teams' power ratings when they put up the
weekly opening numbers for every game. They will then factor in
:
# Homefield advantage
: i.e. Packers in winter is worth more points than Denver any time of the
season. nbsp;
# Specific matchups on the two clubs
: Bew Jersey big play offence vs. a weak Packers secondary that allows lots of big plays.
# Bookies look at historical trends of how the teams play
against one another and how they play in specific
situations.
# And then, bookies will look at punter support for the
team - do they or don't they support the team? Public money is important, but not with every line.
Dallas matter, but the Saints might
not even be noticed.
And there you have it. That is how the weekly virgin lines are created.
Good punting begins with the power ratings. As a serious football punter, if you
want to make real money betting college football or the NFL you will need your
own power ratings.
A players' first power rankings table should almost be identical
to all the others right now, before the season has begun. Each expert will have
the same statistics having researched the same extant information. However, once the season
has begun, football-handicapping turns from a "hobby" into a
"profession". Adjustments must be made to those ratings based on ones own observations
from and opinions of games. These are usually very personal and subjective. If
a punter is going to have an advantage over the lines, his own research and analysis
is all that can swing it for him. On the other hand, the player may place
his trust in an expert, but the fact is, to get the advantage in NFL betting,
the player (or his trusted expert) must monitor all games - that is each and
every game, and draw a conclusion and opinion on each and every game for the
research to make a difference.
Once the player or punter has that football power rating chart, and is able
to adjust it according to results, injuries, individual performances, and intangible
i.e. motivation levels, locker-room harmony etc, he is then finally able to create
his own NFL betting lines prior to the game, and NOW he has the
advantage! He will begin handicapping games correctly ahead of time and the football spreads won't seem
as if they are pure chance and illogical anymore. The player must also be
able to rank unrelated football games so that he can correctly chance future
picks. Most importantly, the player must not sway his opinion; it is his biggest edge in
over the long-term. This is especially relevant in handicapping college football,
as a result of there being so many extra games every week (thereby making the lines
softer).
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