During this past football season (2010 sesason), I was part of a football pickem pool with a group of friends of mine. If your even a small of NFL fan you know it’s pretty tough to pick the winners of games. First because free agency makes the teams farily even, secondly because of free agency a team is not the same from year to year and heck week to week because of injuries, and there are a ton of other reasons. Since I decided trying to guess the winners wasn’t an option, and making an educated pick was going to take a lot of work and time I didn’t have I decided to use vegas odds to pick my winners. Another reason I chose to use vegas odds was to see how accurate Vegas was in picking NFL football games, and maybe if I’m lucky they’ll help me win a little money along the way.
Here were my rules for using vegas odds:
- I would always make my picks on Wednesday from the Vegas.com website.
- If the point spread was less then 1 pt I would always pick the home team.
- I would use the vegas totals for guessing the total score for Monday night games.
- And no changing picks (this cost me when the Metrodome decided to go domeless).
And now for the final results (the numbers will represent the weeks):
- 9/16 (0.562)
- 9/16 (0.562)
- 8/16 (0.500)
- 8/14 (0.571)
- 6/14 (0.429)
- 11/14 (0.786)
- 8/14 (0.571)
- 9/13 (0.692)
- 9/13 (0.692)
- 8/14 (0.571)
- 12/16 (0.750)
- 11/16 (0.688)
- 12/16 (0.750)
- 13/16 (0.812)
- 12/16 (0.750)
- 9/16 (0.562)
- 12/16 (0.750)
Some things I noticed as the season went along was that vegas was getting better at picking the winner, this didn’t surprise me to much. I also noticed they always seemed to be fairly accurate, never quite accurate enough to let me but they would get you pretty close especially in the 2nd half of the season. From week 1-8 vegas total was 68/117 which was 58.1% accurate, their stats for week 9-17 were 98/139 which was 70.5% accurate. From the stats it definately becomes visible that vegas is pretty good at picking NFL games after the halfway mark the season and pretty average the first half of the season. My take away from this is to use vegas as an assistance tool the first half of the season and a guiding tool for the 2nd half of the season when looking for game winners. Only thing I’d want to add is that even though vegas was picking at a 70% rate in the 2nd half of the season, they were never good enough to actually let me win a week (we got paid for weekly winners).
My season total then was 166/256 for a 64.8% accuracy rate, which was good enough for 2nd in my pickem league and meant a pay day for me ;).
Granted this was only 1 years stats, but I’d say vegas does a pretty good job of picking the winners of NFL football games during the 2nd half of the NFL season. I want to check the stats again next year and see how accurate vegas is at picking NFL games in the long run and make sure this is not a fluke. The other big issue I see with using vegas as your only tool for picking NLF games is if other people are doing the same thing , then you’ll never win and thats no fun :).
Happy picking everyone!