Suicide pools are the easiest form of popular sports betting to win. It’s not that they are easy. It’s just that most people don’t approach them logically. More than any other form of football-related betting activity someone who approaches suicide pools intelligently can have a big edge. When you are setting (more…)

A NFL parlay or accumulator is a single bet that links together two or more individual wagers and is dependent on all of those wagers winning together. Many experienced bettors will joke and say the parlay is French for “loser”. Many professional sports bettors will stay away from parlays due to (more…)

The NFL Draft is, as I write this, a month away. There is also a pesky lockout going on, so outside of annoying labor talk and posturing the football league is very short on news to get excited about. I can’t think about the NFL right now – especially because free (more…)

When you really think about it the NFL Combine is a bizarre spectacle – hundreds of older men judge the manliness of half-dressed younger men while millions of other men watch on TV. Regardless, though, the Combine has turned into a very big deal – complete with 30 hours of TV (more…)

NFL Betting is the most popular form of sports wagering in the United States. NFL gambling is in part popular because most of the games happen on one day. This gives the gambler an action filled day by being able to place and collect on all the bets within a span (more…)

Sometimes a football team gets off to a horrifyingly bad start to the NFL season. They may have been expected to be a playoff team – or at least a serious playoff contender – heading into the season, but they have looked like a high school team – a bad one (more…)

Week 17 in the NFL can be a very tough week to bet. There are several different types of games that can be played, and each one is very different. The most exciting, and the easiest to decode from a motivation perspective, is when two teams are playing to determine their (more…)

ESPN hates the NFL quarterback rating. They always have. After years of complaining and mocking the statistic every chance they got, they have finally decided to do something about it. Their solution is a bold one – they have created a whole new statistic. Their Total Quarterback Rating, which they have (more…)

The football stadium is barely empty after the Super Bowl by the time that the Super Bowl futures are posted for the next NFL season. These ridiculously early numbers are entertaining and often informative. On very rare occasions they could even be worth betting a couple of bucks on. Most times, though, (more…)

Thanksgiving may be the best day of the year. Just think about it  a whole day built around eating and drinking too much then passing out on a couch to watch NFL football. Plus, it’s a weekday that you don’t have to work on. Sure, you have to put up with (more…)

For most NFL bettors football training camp just seems like something you have to patiently endure before the NFL season finally starts. For astute sports bettors, though, the training camp is a time to pick up all sorts of information and insights that can help you find a big edge with your (more…)

It’s hard to know how good or how prepared an NFL team is going to be until the regular football season starts. It’s really hard to judge from the preseason what is going to happen – sometimes good teams look great and other times they look lousy, while bad teams can dominate (more…)

One of the great things about the NFL is that it always has the ability to surprise. Just when you think you have things totally figured out a result comes around that is precisely and totally the opposite of what you thought would happen. Of course, that’s also what can make (more…)

Playing quarterback in the NFL is a dangerous profession. Other than Brett Favre it is all but certain that a football QB is going to be hurt during his career, and chances are pretty good that he’ll miss a significant amount of time at some point. For sports bettors this can present (more…)

There are few things more frustrating for football handicappers than an uncertain QB status. When a quarterback is hurt or banged up but could conceivably still play then you can never be sure what is going to happen. Teams are rarely open or honest about these situations, either, so you spend (more…)

Typically in the NFL there is a rough transition when a new coach joins a football team. That new head man has so much to deal with – getting to know the players he has, addressing weaknesses, implementing new systems, changing the philosophy, hiring coordinators, and so on – that it almost (more…)

In the last week or two of the regular season in the NFL it is not at all uncommon to see playoff teams rest their starters. It can be very frustrating for football fans and bettors, but for the teams it is often the logical approach. If the team can’t improve their (more…)

Every year in the NFL there are a few rookie quarterbacks who are pressed into action at the start of the football season, and a few more who have to play early on. If you have been a fan of the NFL for any time at all then you know that a (more…)

The NFL season is long, and for football bettors it can be grueling. By the time the Super Bowl is over most sports bettors are ready for a break. They’ll forget about football for a while and look elsewhere – catching up on all the basketball they have ignored, betting on some (more…)

Every year in the NFL there seems to be a couple of football teams that make dramatic statistical gains in an area in which they really struggled. It could be, for example, that they were really terrible against the pass one year, yet after a couple of games in the new season (more…)

Several times a year – especially later in the football season – we’ll see a situation in which an NFL starting quarterback is unable to practice during the week but is still possible or probable to play in their game. That situation can be a major headache for sports bettors. It’s all (more…)

As a general rule I hate everything about the NFL preseason. You never know who is going to play, how long they will play, how hard they will try, or how much of their playbook they will use. Betting on preseason football games can be a very frustrating experience. From time to time, (more…)

The preseason is the time during which oddsmakers and NFL football gamblers need to look closely at teams to determine what they might be capable of when the season starts. What a NFL team does in the preseason isn’t necessarily a good indicator of what will happen in the regular season, but (more…)

There is no sport in North America that comes even remotely close in popularity to the NFL. Not even close. That means that there is far more relatively uninformed betting money bet on the NFL than in any other sport. The more public action there is on a football game, the more (more…)

There are teams in the NFL that the public loves more than the rest. They may have a lot of history, considerable success, or star players that draw the attention and capture the imagination of the public. Those are called public teams, and the public will blindly support them at pretty (more…)

During every NFL season we see several starting quarterbacks get hurt and miss games. Sometimes those players only miss a game or two, but it isn’t at all uncommon for a NFL starter to go down and miss the rest of the season – especially in the second half of the (more…)

Sportsbooks love the first week of the NFL season. Football bettors have been waiting for months and months for gridiron action, and they have full bankrolls to play with. That doesn’t lead them to making the best decisions – and sportsbooks love it when bettors make bad decisions. Because NFL bettors (more…)

By the middle of the summer most NFL bettors are impatient – desperate for some football action to satisfy the cravings. It can seem like it takes forever for the games to get here. You can drive yourself crazy with the waiting, or you can use the time to get ready (more…)

There is nothing that can drive an NFL football gambler crazy faster than a wildly inconsistent offense. One week they come out an pile up a pile of yards and score points almost at will. Next time out they seem to have forgotten everything they knew about football, and they are (more…)

At any time in the NFL there are just a small handful of quarterbacks who are megastars – guys who are consistently excellent and who attract a whole lot of attention from the betting public every time they hit the football field. These are the four to six players in the league (more…)

As the NFL season winds down every year there are always a few coaches that are all but certain to get fired once the football season ends. The media knows it, the fans know it, and the players definitely know it. These lame duck coaches have presided over a NFL season that (more…)

Sometimes good teams – teams expected to make it into the NFL playoffs – play truly awful opening games. Not only do they lose, but they lose badly, and they look really lousy doing it. When a team starts out that badly people can easily panic. If they had high hopes (more…)

Every year around October or November in the NFL we start to see football teams making quarterback changes. Sometimes they are forced to because of injuries. Sometimes they planned the change sooner or later because they drafted a young quarterback they were taking their time with. Sometimes they are forced into the (more…)

It can be very hard to judge how effectively a new NFL coach is going to be able to get his football team on track and playing like they are capable of – especially if the guy has never been a head coach before. Some football coaches are able to look like veterans (more…)

Every year in the NFL there are several football teams who, frustrated with their quarterbacking the year before, go a whole new way at quarterback. Whether they start a free agent, a young quarterback who has previously been warming their bench, or a rookie that they drafted they are starting over with (more…)

There are few things in the NFL that will get the football betting public more fired up than a long winning streak. In virtually every case, though, the winning streak has to eventually end. When that happens, NFL bettors face a challenge – to determine what happens next. Some teams will rebound (more…)

The top two football teams to qualify for the NFL playoffs in each conference don’t have to play in the wild card round. The question for NFL handicappers, then, is whether that bye week is a good thing for them or not. Some teams benefit greatly from the rest. They are able (more…)

Winning games in the NFL is hard. Winning a lot of football games in a row is really hard. It often doesn’t take long – just three or four games at the start of the season each year – until there are just a very small handful of unbeaten professional football teams remaining (more…)

In the 2011 NFL season, the San Francisco 49ers, in their first year under head coach Jim Harbaugh, were brilliant before Thanksgiving. They were 9-1 and had won eight football games in a row. The rest of the NFC West was beyond terrible. Seattle was next best at just 4-6, and Arizona (more…)

The week between the last preseason football game and the first regular season game of the NFL season is an exciting but challenging time for sports bettors. There is an overwhelming sense of excitement and anticipation as the season nears, and it can seem like it takes for ever for the first (more…)

It’s hard enough to handicap an NFL team that has made a big turnaround in their performance from one season to the next. That’s a breeze, though, compared to trying to handicap whether a football team that makes a big turnaround in the middle of the season is for real. I’m talking (more…)

It wasn’t that long ago that NFL season win totals were a relatively rare thing to see and bet on. They have become more and more popular with every passing year, though – both to the betting public and to astute bettors looking for long term value. As a result, some (more…)

It doesn’t necessarily happen every weekend in the NFL, but many times a year we’ll see a football team get out to a big halftime lead of at least two touchdowns and then collapse and throw it away in the second half. It’s almost as if they feel they have done their (more…)