Vegas Watch

Last week, when I posted Sportsbook's win totals for the upcoming NFL seasons, a few people (including myself) wondered how we should factor in the juice. For example, New England's total was 12, but the over was -130, and the under was EV, so we'd expect them to go over more often than they went under. With the help of RMMB statistics guru Adam, I figured out how to account for this.

First, I want to note some changes- exactly half of the lines have moved since I posted them. This should be self explanatory, except for the last column. Red means people have been taking the under; blue, the over.The Buffalo line has really moved a ton- they must've read my comment that the Buffalo under might be a good play. Also interesting to note that people have been taking the overs on the two highest totals on the board, New England (12) and Indianapolis (11).

Below are the expected wins for each team, after factoring in the juice. I also adjusted for the fact that after doing this, the average is 8.05 wins. These average to 8. The next column is simply their expected winning percentage. The final column is how often they'd be expected to win 10 or more games. This was initially intended to create very rough playoff odds for each team, but they only add up to 8.77. Oh well.

With this, we can also take another look at the strength of each division:

The West and South really hold the NFC down- the conference's overall average is 7.86, while the AFC's is (predictably) 8.14.

Finally, the odds that the top five teams in the league to 16-0:

Some site should really offer odds on these, or at least on the Pats going undefeated. My guess on the listed odds of that would be 15:1. I'm sure that would get a good deal of action.

These are from Sportsbook. They are the first to post them, I believe.

8.5 for the defending Super Bowl champs. Nice.

Some crazy juice on these, since the season is 1/10 as long as baseball and there's not much room to move them around. Ignoring the juice for now, average wins for each division:

The NFC average is 7.72, while the AFC is 8.03 (the overall average is less than 8; it looks like you have to pay more juice for most of the overs, though). The only NFC team over 8.5 is the Cowboys, at 10.5.

Money Line had a post a few weeks back listing various helpful stats from last year. The correlation between last year's wins and this year's O/Us is .887; the correlation between last year's Pythag record and this year's O/Us is .900.

Here are the biggest difference between '07 Pythag and '08 O/U:

The three teams with the biggest discrepancies between '07 wins and '07 Pythag were the Patriots (16, 13.8), Bills (7, 4.9), and Dolphins (1, 3.8). So, in theory, that would make the NE U, BUF U, and MIA O attractive, although there are obviously many other factors to consider.