Preseason Tips part I -- "GAP" comparisonsIt's getting close to the 2007 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 2006
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:
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:
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 2 - POOR prior season teams are an amazing 23-7 (77%) as away teams facing GOOD or AVERAGE prior year home teams, and POOR teams are also 31-21 as 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 12-22 record as the superior teams "come to play." Also in 'same versus same' contests, the home side has gone 33-22 (60%) 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 2007 action and we'll be posting a picks page listing all the plays for the "deemed worthy" angles...but this is just phase one of the preseason picks research, with more to come soon!
Also See:
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