Betting Home Underdogs in the NFL

In sportsbetting, there aren’t many rules of thumb that actually work out in your favor. Anyone who tells you to always bet based on one or two factors without taking everything into account probably isn’t going to help you win at sportsbetting. At best, these rules should only be used to point out bets that might be promising; at worst, they might be misguided and wrong, only leading you to lose money.

But there might be a few exceptions out there. For instance, many people who bet on sports insist that betting on home underdogs in the NFL is a winning play. The logic behind such a position is pretty sound: home teams tend to be more likely to play over their heads in front of a big home crowd, making upsets (or close calls) more common for teams that should normally have little chance against their opponents. If a team is getting points at home, these close games (not to mention the upsets they sometimes pull off) are wins for you.

Of course, there’s an obvious counterargument to this sports betting strategy. If everyone knows this, don’t the sports books know it too? They must adjust their lines to counteract this effect, making the strategy futile.

But studies seem to show that even the bookmakers don’t adjust football odds quite enough to make up for home field advantage, at least when it comes to home dogs. A study of NFL games from 1983-2007 by Michael Shackleford (known as The Wizard of Odds) found that underdogs did significantly better against the spread than favorites – and home underdogs even more so. In fact, home underdogs won against the spread 52.48% of the time over that time period, enough to turn a profit if you had bet every single NFL game during that period! Against a -105 line, home dogs would have shown a 2.38% profit, and against a -110 line, players would have squeaked out a 0.18% edge.

Now, a tiny edge like that is nothing to get excited about, of course. With skilled handicapping, you should be able to do way better than that, so nobody is suggesting that you give up all your hard work and just start taking every home underdog you can find. Instead, you should use this information to your advantage by realizing that even highly sophisticated sports books may have some small biases in their lines. In this example, we know that sports books would never give bettors a long run edge, even one this small, on purpose. It appears that what’s actually going on, at least according to Steven Levitt (best known for co-authoring Freakonomics), is that the public tends to bet against home underdogs enough that it makes it worthwhile for the bookmakers to move lines slightly too much in their favor. Even though home dogs might be getting slightly too many points on average, the bookies come out ahead.

What’s the best way to take advantage of this? By doing nothing out of the ordinary at all! The public and the sports books have already done the work for you by setting inefficient lines. If you do your homework – properly handicapping the games based on all the tools and methods you use – you should find yourself betting a lot of home dogs who have significant value and avoiding those that aren’t worth your time. You don’t need to pick every single home underdog to take advantage of this effect, and in fact, that would be a mistake. Yes, you might come out slightly ahead if you did that, but if you use a more complete sports betting strategy, you’ll do even better. The best sports gamblers don’t use rules of thumb to win: they take advantage of the root causes behind those rules to gain an even bigger edge.