Betting NFL Totals
While totals bets are played with some frequency in many sports, nowhere is the over/under bet more popular than in the NFL. Bettors are attracted to the idea of predicting the tempo and style of a football game, which can give plenty of insight into how many points will be scored in an upcoming game.
Do both teams play spread offenses that pass the ball well? In that case, you can expect a high scoring game. Does one team rely on their running attack and strong defense to keep the number of possessions relatively low? You can count on that to keep the number of points down. Every matchup is unique, but it’s usually fairly easy to get a ballpark estimate of how many points can be expected in an NFL game.
Of course, if you want to win over/under bets, you’re going to have to do better than that. Here are a few tips on betting NFL totals that could help you win more often.
NFL Totals Betting Strategy
The most prominent strategy when it comes to betting on NFL totals is to fade the public. This works for one very good reason: the sportsbooks set their lines with the public in mind, and this is perhaps even more common on totals than it is on the point spread. The reason why is simple; as we mentioned above, it’s not hard to get a general idea of the kind of game that’s going to be played between any two given teams. On the other hand, the general public isn’t so good at figuring out exactly what this means in terms of the number of points that will be scored.
In other words, if two high scoring teams are playing each other, your average gambler is likely to take the over – no matter how high the total is set! Similarly, in a game that looks like it’ll be a defensive struggle, you can count on the public money to fly to the under, regardless of what the over/under is.
Given this, one very simple strategy is just to figure out where the public money is likely to be and bet the opposite way. If a game looks likely to be a shootout, and the game has the high total to match, take the under. Do the opposite for a game that shouldn’t see many points but has an extremely low total. In both cases, chances are that the over/under number has been pushed too far to the extremes, and taking the side that goes against expectations is the winning play.
This bias in the total tends to be a little bit stronger when the total is high, since in general, fans enjoy rooting for points to be scored, and these fans tend to make up the base of casual gamblers who do a lot to set the lines in popular sports like the NFL. In addition, this effect – either towards a high or low total – is strongest in nationally televised games, where many more people are likely to watch and simply make a bet or two just to add some extra excitement to the game.
