NFL Alternate Win Totals
Sports betting markets are very efficient, but they are not always accurate. To be fair, projecting out the entire season for all 32 NFL teams is not an easy task. Since the current division format was installed back in 2002, a team has gone worst to first in at least one division in every season except for three. Last year was actually one of them.
Football is a remarkably violent sport and injuries happen. Some of them even derail a full season, given how important the quarterback is. In other team sports, it is easier to replace somebody. In the NFL, the drop-off between a starting quarterback and a backup QB is often quite significant, sometimes upwards of a touchdown or more to the point spread, which dramatically impacts a team’s win probability.
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Think about it. If a team would be -7 with their starting QB and suddenly they’re a pick ‘em, their implied win probability drops more than 20%. You’d be hard-pressed to find another sport or another position where one player can alter the win probability that much by being absent.
Injuries aside, sometimes the odds are just wrong. Sometimes the betting market is just wrong. But, the degree to which the betting market is wrong is the important part. That is why I’m here to tell you about alternate NFL win totals and why you may want to take a stronger position on what you believe to be true or what you believe will happen.
NFL Season Win Total Tracking
Season win totals are a pretty simple concept to understand. Will a team win more games than the line or fewer games than the line? Vig is then attached and is often the part that moves, as the number of wins itself usually takes a pretty heavy amount of exposure or some major piece of news to move.
With the help of Sports Odds History (SportsOddsHistory.com), I looked at season win total results from the last three seasons. To me, this is a good sample size, as it removes COVID from the equation and also illustrates the current landscape, both of the league with the 17-game schedule and of the sports betting sector, as well as player personnel.
I’ve separated the teams into three groups: +/- 1.5 Wins; +/- 2.5 Wins; +/- 3.5 wins using the closing win total numbers from Westgate Sportsbook, since that’s what SOH had in their database.
2024 (25/32)
| +/- 1.5 Wins (6) | +/- 2.5 Wins (6) | +/- 3.5 Wins (13) |
| Falcons | Bills | Bears |
| Ravens | Cowboys | Browns |
| Bengals | Raiders | Broncos |
| Chargers | Saints | Lions |
| Dolphins | Seahawks | Jaguars |
| Steelers | Buccaneers | Chiefs |
| Vikings | ||
| Giants | ||
| Jets | ||
| Eagles | ||
| 49ers | ||
| Titans | ||
| Commanders |
2023 (21/32)
| +/- 1.5 Wins (10) | +/- 2.5 Wins (6) | +/- 3.5 Wins (5) |
| Falcons | Ravens | Panthers |
| Bengals | Lions | Texans |
| Browns | Colts | Chargers |
| Cowboys | Jets | Rams |
| Packers | Buccaneers | Patriots |
| Raiders | Commanders | |
| Dolphins | ||
| Vikings | ||
| Giants | ||
| Titans |
2022 (24/32)
| +/- 1.5 Wins (7) | +/- 2.5 Wins (9) | +/- 3.5 Wins (8) |
| Cowboys | Falcons | Cardinals |
| Texans | Bears | Broncos |
| Saints | Bengals | Colts |
| Giants | Lions | Chiefs |
| Jets | Packers | Rams |
| Steelers | Jaguars | Vikings |
| Titans | Raiders | Eagles |
| 49ers | Seahawks | |
| Buccaneers | ||
- – Note, 2022 Bengals only played 16 games, so bets would have been voided, but had 9 wins with a win total line of 12
There are a few ways to look at this. First, maybe it’s unfair to include +/- 1.5 Wins as a metric, since that’s still pretty accurate for a 17-game sample size. Nevertheless, with alt win total markets out there that you can bet into with this knowledge, I wanted to leave it in there.
Second, even excluding +/- 1.5 wins, we’re still talking about 21 teams out of 96 that were +/- 2.5 Wins in the sample size and another 26 that were +/- 3.5 Wins in the sample size, so 47/96 (49%). So nearly half of the league’s teams over a three-year span were mispriced fairly significantly or exceeded/fell well short of expectations for one reason or another.
Third, it does feel like bettors have the opportunity to attack this. Accurately predicting injuries, especially a significant one, is pretty impossible, but using context clues around how detrimental they might be is a viable betting angle. A team with no depth at important positions, especially QB, is going to be in trouble if injuries do happen. Teams likely to fire a coach or maybe tank late in the season could be candidates as well. Certainly, schedule analysis plays a part also.
I think the most notable ones are the teams that overachieved greatly. If you can isolate those teams, not only can you take an alt win total, but likely get some good futures prices for Yes/No Playoffs or Division odds. There are also some alternative props you could wager on, such as Exact Division Finish or maybe projecting out an entire division.
At the end of the day, though, this is simply validation for looking at alternate season win total odds in hopes of finding teams that you are very right about and how the juice can absolutely be worth the squeeze to swing for some bigger prices because this is a challenging market for sportsbooks to pin down and seemingly a lot of bettors as well.
