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NFL Key Numbers

Written by Jimmy Boyd

Anyone who does any NFL betting has heard of key number for point spreads before. The general public knows that winning by a field goal is the most common result of an NFL game, largely due to it being a tie game as the clock winds down with the kicker being given the chance to seal the deal. If a game goes into overtime then the team is a lot more likely to just get it between the hashes and trust a field goal over going for a touchdown. The key though is just how often the key numbers occur. We have taken a look at the last 4,000 games, spanning a 16 year span to come up with the exact numbers. 15.1% of the games where decided by exactly three points. That’s more than twice as common as the next number on the list. 7% of the games were won by exactly a touchdown and an extra point, or 7 points. The top ten most frequently occurring numbers account for more than 60% of the final scores, let’s take a look at the list: Margin of victory: 3 points: 15.1% 7 points: 7.1% 6 points: 6.0% 10 points: 5.9% 4 points 5.8% 14 points: 4.9% 1 point: 4.4% 2 points: 4.0% 17 points: 3.8% 11 points: 3.7% This information on football key numbers is surely interesting, but if you want to use it for NFL handicapping then you are going to have to expand on it a little bit. You are going to need to know how often favorites win by those margins and when they did, how often was the spread within a half point of the key numbers? Let’s take a look at the three point margin of victory, happening 15.1% of the time. we need to know how often the winner was a favorite, and how often the team was favored by 2.5 or 3.5 points. NFL handicappers are looking to find the games that present the best chances of beating the NFL odds. We have broken down for you how weather affects our handicapping, and the different motivations factoring into football betting, but there are even more things to look at as well before we put out our NFL picks that have the best chance of covering the number and winning money for our clients. At the top of our list is always to recommend to clients to open up accounts at different NFL sportsbooks so we can shop around for the best line. If you look back to your history with wagering, how many times did you lose a game by a half a point. Then there were the times when you barely covered by that half point or point and breathed a sigh of relief. Whether you are betting in Las Vegas or online, you will be able to see the lines be off by a point or more at the different sportsbooks. Even if you only decide to go with one option, you can buy an extra half point at a lot of places for an extra 10% of juice. Instead of wagering $110 to win $100 at a team at -4 you can place $120 to win $100 to get them at -3.5. What we want to know is when should you do so? For every game we ask how often the favorite won by either a half point more or a half point less than the posted number. If you bought off the +3 to get to +3.5 but your team lost by 7 points anyway, then it didn’t do you any good, so you really just need to know when buying the half point would have saved you money, and is it worth the extra $10 per $100 wager to do so. So, for our pool of games there were 145 games that were a half point off of the spread and another 90 games that ended up as a push. That accounts for 5.6% of all the games during the 19 seasons, but which numbers mattered? You saved money if you played the underdog and bought up, that is added another half point to the number of points you were getting on the following: 2.5 to 3, 3 to 3.5 and 9.5 to 10. You saved money if you played the favorite and bought down, that is subtracted a half point from the points you were laying on the following: -2.5 to -2, -3 to -2.5, -3.5 to -3 and -10.5 to 10. The kicker is that a lot of Vegas sportsbooks do not allow you to buy onto or off of the number three, since everyone knows just how important this number is for both favorites and underdogs. Buying onto or off of the 6 or 7 doesn’t make sense either way, so stay away from that. We hope this helps clear up some more football betting info for you, good luck this season! Win more with the NFL football picks on our site!

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