Statsational NFL 2022 NFL Win Totals With EV (Updated Aug 2)

We are 2 days away from the first pre-season game. The news on Desean Watson has come out and we now know it is a 6 game suspension. Many of these lines have moved since I first posted. Below is where we are at as of August 2.

How it works

First, I input the entire NFL schedule into the model. This may seem obvious, but many of you will look at a win total and never look at the team's schedule. The NFL tries to create parody in the league. Achieving this is tough to do in a league where the best QBs will make the playoffs more often than not. The teams that finished first will play all the other first place teams in their conference. The second place team plays all the second place teams and so on. This is why you will see teams that may have gotten lucky in the previous season with the ball bouncing their way, then face a demanding schedule and perform poorly.

The second thing I do is make adjustments to last year's power rankings based on personnel changes. The heavy focus is on the QB position. I try and estimate the value the player joining the team adds or subtracts from what that team had the year before. This will affect not only the team in question but also the projected win totals of teams they face.

I then run the model and play out each game. I tally up the projected points scored and given up for each team. A simple pythag calculation of those points will give us the projected wins for that team. Subtracting that from 17, we get the losses.

The last piece of the puzzle is to figure out the expected value. To do this, we must determine the probability of the team wins going over or under the posted win total. I use a normal distribution to determine this. I will figure out the probability of each team winning 0,1,2,3...17 games and then sum all of the probabilities below, above, or at the posted number. I calculate the EV based on those probabilities assuming $100 bet on each.

As is always the case, the unders offer a far better EV on the whole than do the overs. This is typical because the average sports bettor tends to bet overs. They are much more fun to root for. Unders can be a loser rather quickly. The public likes to have something to root for. We should look to take advantage of this and bet more unders.

Have a look at the projections for this season.

As of August 2

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