Originally Posted by
steelreserve
The main thing that helps against the spread is identifying which are the truly awful teams versus the merely bad teams.
A few years ago, I looked at every game for the past 20 years of any team that went 4-12 or worse. They only won against the spread about 30% of the time. Even if the spread was 20 points or more. It turns out the oddsmakers don't give enough points to the really bad teams, because they want people to bet evenly on both sides, and the amount of points that scares people away from betting is less than the amount of points that is the actual difference between the teams.
It turned out this did not even change much from the first half of the season to the second half (when you would expect people have figured out who the bad teams are and adjusted the point spreads accordingly - no being caught by surprise like in the first few games.) It was still something like 68% of the time that the favored team beat the spread. And most of them were huge spreads, like 10-15 points, sometimes even more.
So basically, the earlier you can determine the three or four worst teams, the more bets you can get out there against them. The catch is that the formula falls apart above the 4-12 mark. So if you are betting against a team that you think is one of the worst teams, but actually it turns out they were just a 5-11 team or a 6-10 team, then that's how you get into trouble. And the other catch is that it doesn't work when two 4-12 teams play each other, you just can't bet that game (like MIA-WAS this week).
I think it's beyond a doubt that Miami is in the 4-12 category, and Washington is a near lock as well. There are probably one or two more among Denver, Cincinnati, and the Jets ... NYJ and the Bungles seem like the ones that just do not have their shit together at all and are going mental, but I am not 100% sure about Denver. Not quite sold on Atlanta being one either.
This could be a really good year for it if there end up being 5 or 6 teams who suck that bad - the problem being that most of them are in one conference, so they'll play each other a lot too.
By the way, this is by no means foolproof for making big bets on any one game - just if you get the most medium-sized bets out on a large number of games over time, you should win more than you lose.