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• Pre-read: A look at setting up your strategy
• Are you going passive, moderate, or aggressive?
• Putting each NFL week to its max
• Spreads, Over/Under totals, Parlays and more
• Your entire season betting strategy in one table

• Predictions begin with the rankings
• Football is a game of matchups
• The beauty of a betting table
• Choosing your bets
• Victory never tasted so green

Pre-read: A look at setting up your strategy

If you are not sure what we mean by setting up a sports betting strategy for the NFL season, then Create a betting strategy before the season starts posted on the blog 'A bettor wager' is a must read. Otherwise if you have a good grasp of what it takes to set yourself up for a solid winning season, read on.

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Are you going passive, moderate, or aggressive?

The answer to this question will dictate your overall philosophy for the upcoming NFL season. The size of your bankroll will have some affect on what style you choose; the more comfortable your bankroll is the more aggressive you can be. A sort of unspoken industry standard for choosing your bet size is 2% of your bankroll. So this would be the starting amount you would plan on wagering on any single bet. We call it your Base Bet Percentage, or BBP. Another common term you will hear from us is the Number of Bets or NOB. This is how many bets you will be planning on making each week.

ITN feels that 2% for a BBP is a little on the passive side, but don't let that affect your final decision too much. You should be able to enjoy the betting season without fear of losing the money you are betting. This is a table of how we view the three betting philosophy's:

BBP: Base Bet Percentage | NOB: Number of Bets

The bankroll sizes here are pretty generic, and should not be treated as major guidelines. 'A bettor wager' talks about how your bankroll could be as low as 50 dollars. The key to your bankroll size is what you can afford to wager, not any crazy math formula. What is important is the BBP and NOB. These are guidelines that you can adhere to, especially if you don't have a lot of experience betting. If you have your own ideas or strategy on BBP or NOB that will work too. The important thing is that you have a strategy.

For our example we will keep it nice and simple and choose a 'Moderate' philosophy and keep the bankroll at $1000.

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Putting each NFL week to its max

A beautiful part of stats-based predictions is being able to directly point at certain stats' strengths and weaknesses. We put this knowledge to use in our season betting strategy by rating each NFL week as one of the following: Cold, Cool, Neutral, Warm, or Hot. This allows our members to really take advantage of our statistics when they get hot, and to ease off the gas when they cool down.

If you search around on the net looking for sports betting advice, you will read a lot of articles where handicappers slam the notion that you can accurately predict trends in the NFL and adjust your bets accordingly for max profit. For the most part they have it right. Using a progressive betting strategy over a flat betting strategy can lose you a lot of money in the long run. This is true because most people aren't using accurate stats. Its that simple. If you have accurate stats you should absolutely use a progressive betting strategy, and at ITN we have the stats and definitely put them to use.

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Spreads, over/under totals, parlays and more

Much like being in a casino, there are many ways to make a wager. Vegas has made it as easy as possible for people to gamble on sporting events, creating parlays, teasers and much more. Outside of that, there is always friendly wagering being done between friends, neighbors, office pools or just about anywhere people associate with each other. For our example, we stick to some of the most common wagers you can make with sports books and casinos.

You'll notice that none of the bet types change the overall number of bets you will be making each week. ML, AS, and O/U are the base of our betting strategy, and many of our stats are created with them specifically in mind, so they do not have any change associated with them. Only parlays and teasers have any effect on our betting strategy, dropping the BBP. Parlays drop since they have a much lower probability of being correct, and teasers drop since you are getting lower odds for your bet.

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Your entire season betting strategy in one table

The idea is to take all of the information from above and put into one piece of data that is easy to read and understand, which is what we have done with our season betting table. The table you see below is a typical one members could have used in 2007. Remember we are using a moderate betting strategy in this example, which has a starting BBP of 3%. From there we adjust for how hot or cold we expect each week to be. Our betting strategy starts generic, looking at the overall philosophy first, and becomes more specific as we progress through the strategy, looking at the season, then the week, the pick itself, and finally to the exact bet to make.

2007 NFL season betting table

BBP: Base Bet Percentage | NOB: Number of Bets

There is no more guesswork at the start of each week anymore. Now you will be able to look and know what your starting bet percentage will be and also know the types and number of bets you will be making. Having this all laid out before the season starts allows you to focus on the more fun and very important process of making your picks!

The table is broken down into 4 stages, which you can see by the highlighting. Weeks 1-3 are a stage, followed by 4-9, 10-14, and at last 15-17. The stages mark when you should recalculate your bankroll. Some of you will feel comfortable recalculating your bankroll at the end of each week. For example if you start the season with $1000 and win $100 in week one, you calculate your week 2 BBP off of your new total of $1100. Another strategy people employ is to wait several weeks before adjusting their bankroll to allow the law of averages to take effect. This way if you have an overly poor start to an early week you aren't punishing your strategy and making it tough to recover. For example, say in week 1 you lost $200, leaving your bankroll at $800. If you now use that amount in week 2, even if you have a very successful week it is unlikely you will recover your losses from week 1. So instead of adjusting at the end of each week, your bankroll will be $1000 for weeks 1-3 regardless of how you actually perform from week to week. Then starting in week 4 you would adjust your bankroll amount according to how you performed in the opening 3 weeks. So if you had won $150 in week 1, lost $75 in week 2, and won $35 in week 3, your bankroll for weeks 4-9 would now be $1110.

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Predictions begin with the rankings

Our rankings were designed with one and only one intent in mind: How likely is it that a team will win future games, with the next game being played the most important future game. We didn't try to make the rankings reflect whether or not teams pounced their opponents. We knew that if the rankings focused solely on winning, how easy of a time a team had winning would show up anyway.

With this intent in mind we designed a NFL team ranking system that you simply cannot find anywhere else, even in Vegas. Knowing that one ranking couldn't possibly tell enough of the picture to make accurate NFL picks we created two separate rankings. The first is Win Grade, which focuses on how solid a team's fundamental play is and how well a team transfers those fundamentals into winning. Our second NFL ranking is Real Points, which only cares about the quality of opponents you defeat. The two rankings push and pull off one another keeping the prediction system in a nice balance.

For our example we randomly chose a week from 2007, and week 16 ended up being our lucky winner. Here are the rankings for NFL week 16, 2007.

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Football is a game of matchups

As much as we love Win Grade, Real Points, and their unification into the ITN Combined Ranking, they all have their limits. Each NFL game and NFL team are just too unique to properly analyze using only a ranking system. You have to look at how well the two teams match up against one another. The rankings do a great job getting us started on making accurate picks by not only putting the teams in a reasonable order, but they also add another unique element.

We didn't come up with Inside the Numbers as our company name just because it sounded catchy. It reflected how we view each matchup. The numbers and statistics that create our ranking system were carefully chosen to avoid redundancy and accurately express the capability of a team as a unit. Knowing this we can then look at matchups that were left out of the rankings but still have an important effect on the outcome of games and determine whether or not there is enough of a mismatch to overturn the initial analysis of the rankings.

In a typical matchup analysis we check the 'health' of our ranking systems and can see if a team is overrated or underrated, and also see if a team is over playing its abilities or is under performing for its talent level. We look at numerous combinations of matchups, and can tell if Cleveland's passing attack will create enough of a mismatch at home to defeat Pittsburgh, or if Chicago's capability of creating turnovers and experience from playing a tough schedule will turn the tide for them on the road at the Metrodome.

We make use of any stat that improves the accuracy of our NFL predictions, and classifying each prediction type definitely helps make winning bets. Here is a list of some of our common and not so common prediction types.

Money Line (ML) | Against the Spread (AS)

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The beauty of a betting table

Once the rankings have been compiled, and every matchup in an NFL week analyzed, we can put all of our predictions into one very informative table. We use data from our prediction types to determine exactly how probable and profitable each prediction is likely to be.

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Choosing your bets

The betting table from the previous section is sorted by Expected Value, but be careful in using EV to determine which bets you will actually be making. Often bets with a high EV will have a lower probability of being correct each week, and although they offer higher profits they can also bring some pretty big swings to your bankroll. So if you have a tighter bankroll, use probability as the major factor for choosing which bets to actually go with. Of course, you should always strive to pick games that have a good probability and still have a positive EV.

We want to note here how important it is to have at least 2 different sportsbooks to bet with. No, its not just cause we want to advertise them to you. Look at the top two bets by EV in the betting table above. Each one looks to be a very profitable bet, and you should be taking advantage of them. The only problem is, you can't make both of those bets with the same sportsbook! They won't allow you to bet on the money line and the spread of the same game. So in order to fully take advantage, you are going to need more than one sportsbook. Having more than one sportsbook also allows you to shop around some for better odds, which can be a nice little boost to your profits over the course of the season. If you are looking for quality and reliable sportsbooks to do your sports betting, we recommend Bodog Sportsbook and Bookmaker.com.

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Victory never tasted so green

So how did NFL week 16, 2007 turn out for us? We put are betting strategy to use, looking at the guidelines for week 16 in our season betting table. The table showed 6-8 bets, so we went right in the middle and chose 7 bets to make. We decided to keep things random for our example and chose to flip a coin to decide between using EV or probability to choose our picks. EV won the flip, so in the table below you will see the 7 bets we chose to make based on EV from NFL week 16's betting table. Going back to the season table we had a week BBP of 4% and then adjusted each bet for its prediction type to arrive at our final BBP. For simplicity sake we kept our bankroll at $1000.

Looking at the total amount wagered (bottom right corner of the table above) is a reminder as to why a lot of handicappers recommend a flat bet percentage. We end up wagering $330 this week, which is almost exactly a third of our bankroll. We cannot stress enough that if you do not have accurate stats things can downhill very quickly.

Winnings: $418.36 | Wagered: $330.00 | Profit: $88.36

Despite going only 4-3 for the week, we netted a nice profit of $88.36. If you are not impressed, you should be. If you kept your bankroll amount at $1000 for 17 weeks and matched that rate of profit, you would end up winning $1502.12, which is over 150% profit for just one season.

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