Handicapping Football

Can anyone help with how to handicap football using stats? Do you use TO's,YPP,etc.? Any help much appreciated.

Ryan, A good question. Here is the basic problem....do the stats (rushing, passing, first downs, time of possession, sacks, etc) cause the final score or does the score cause the stats? My gut feel is that in the NFL the score and time remaining in a game causes the stats, and therefore the stats are useless. But I can't prove a negative, so there may be a way to use the game stats. Turnovers are a real factor which causes the score difference, but good luck trying to forecast them. In college, a team wins based on the on field talent, so the stats may mean something. The better teams usually win. In the NFL, every team has some very good players and the talent differences from team to team are less than in college. Some people have had some success in both the NFL and college using power ratings. Use your imagination to come up with a power rating. In general, you come up with a method to forecast the final score and then compare it to the point spread. Some statistical skill is required. Bets can then be made when the difference is large. Betting against the point spread, a win average of 55% is good enough to think about betting. It helps to do everything in a spread sheet or data base on the computer. My experience is that at least three years of data is needed to get a sample size large enough to be meaningful. Here is a source for past game stats https://www.repole.com/sun4cast/samples/csvpage.html#csv2003 Good Luck, Jarhead

Thank you for the link. Lets see if I can put this information to use. I am pretty handy with excel. ||reallyhappy.gif' border=0>