NFL Preseason Picks from TwoMinuteWarning.com NFL 2005

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Making informed NFL Preseason Picks

Wagering on preseason games may be seen as risky by many, and indeed we generally counsel waiting for the real games to start. However, what if teams with lousy previous year performance are more interested in posting some wins in pre-season than teams coming off strong seasons?

Also see Preseason Picks, part II where we look at preseason W-L comparisons.

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Preseason Tips part I -- "GAP" comparisons

It's getting close to the 2005 NFL pre-season games kick off, and thus it's a good time to be rolling out some research on how one might try to tackle betting on these games where, to paraphrase Charles Dickens, "There was everything at stake, there was nothing at stake."

The obvious place to begin is by simply looking at how teams have fared at various spread ranges.

Preseason Games from 1997 to 2004

Category Won-Lost (ATS) Win%

Home Teams 231-247 48.3%

Home Favorites 178-211 45.8%

Home Favorites of -1 to -2.5 38-43 46.9%

Home Favorites of -3 42-49 46.2%

Home Favorites of -3.5 to -6.5 86-101 46.0%

Home Favorites of -7 or more 12-18 40.0%

Home Underdogs 53-36 59.6%

Home Underdogs of +0 to +2.5 28-18 60.9%

Home Underdogs of +3 11-7 61.1%

Home Underdogs of +3.5 or more 14-11 56.0%

So the quick glance take is simply to play the underdogs, although home dogs have been more successful overall.

Fair enough, but what also came to mind when we thought about this thorny issue -- since our approaches for the regular season, heavily dependent on statistical analysis, don't seem likely to do the job for the scrimmages -- is grouping team's by their prior season records. The theory here is that teams with lousy previous year performance might be more interested in posting some W's in pre-season, whereas the teams coming off strong seasons could really care less about the outcome of the exhibitions.

Pulling our quantifying motivation table structure out of the subscriber area, we elected to categorize teams as follows:

Good -- teams with a 10 or more wins in the prior regular season
Average -- teams with 7 to 9 wins
Poor -- teams with less than 7 wins

Running these guidelines through all the pre-season match-ups for the period of 1997-2004 (eg a seven year span) produced the following results:

All Games w/Home Favorite w/Home Underdog

Home Team Away Team Won-Lost
(vs Spr) Home
W% Won-Lost
(vs Spr) Home
W% Won-Lost
(vs Spr) Home
W%

Good Good 24-24 50% 20-21 48% 4-3 57%

Good Average 25-24 51% 23-23 50% 2-1 66%

Good Poor 28-31 47% 25-30 45% 3-1 75%

Average Good 27-28 49% 17-22 43% 10-6 62%

Average Average 37-24 60% 33-23 58% 4-1 80%

Average Poor 14-30 31% 14-29 32% 0-1 0%

Poor Good 21-25 45% 6-13 31% 15-12 55%

Poor Average 25-31 44% 17-23 42% 8-8 50%

Poor Poor 30-30 50% 23-27 46% 7-3 70%

Clearly we are not working with a ton of games where we split it up in so many ways. Some findings of note in include:

A battle of average prior year teams has favored the home squad

Average home teams have struggled against poor away teams...although not so much the last couple of years

Home teams as favorites against better prior year teams are just 40-58 (41%)...and this drops to 24-43 (36%) when the team is laying a field goal or more

Home underdogs versus an opponent of the same or worse prior year win class are 22-10 (69%)

The next step is to break it out by the specific weeks (conventionally labeled week "zero" to week four). The drawback to this is our already small sample size gets even smaller, but we went ahead and ran it anyway and rather than give you the full tables, we'll summarize the outliers:

Week 1 -

Week 2 - POOR prior season teams are an amazing 31-11 (74%) versus the line against GOOD or AVERAGE and especially strong as road warriors, where they are 17-3 versus good/average home teams.

Week 3 - In what some people consider the most serious week of play, there are several notable trends. POOR teams have struggled at home against AVERAGE/GOOD teams, mustering a 6-18 record as the superior teams "come to play." Also in 'same versus same' contests, the home side has gone 27-17 (61%) so maybe the home field edge is not being suitably considered when teams put out their strongest preseason effort.

Week 4 - nothing stands out as too strong in a week where some teams simply decide not to show up and avoid injury above anything else. Frankly the NFL could cut this fourth week of exhibition action and no one would mind.

We believe some of the GAP data conclusions are worth looking for in the 2004 action and we'll be posting a picks page listing all the plays in 2005 for the "deemed worthy" angles...but this is just phase one of the preseason picks research, with more to come soon!

Also See:
Preseason Picks part II: WIN comparisons

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