2016 nfl season betting win totals

How to Bet NFL Regular Season Win Totals

Written by on March 18, 2016

NFL regular season total betting is not an indulgence meant for just anybody. I repeat, betting on NFL regular season totals is not something meant for your average NFL odds aficionados. The silver lining, however, is that if you learn the process, then couple it with extreme patience and grow a pair that will allow you to confidently think ahead of your usual last-minute bettors; you can reap bountifully from the NFL regular season total line the same way pros like me do. Okay, enough with the mindless chest-thumping and this becoming-too-long introduction; let us jump into the section below and consume the NFL betting tips given on how to succeed in placing wagers for NFL regular season totals.

How to Bet NFL Regular Season Win Totals

Good Coach & Good Quarterback… Plus Skilled and Talented Supporting Cast

Whichever way you look at it, the fact will always remain that having a good quarterback and a good coach are two of the most elemental ingredients for winning games in the NFL. You need a befitting example to support that? Look no further than how the coach-quarterback partnership between Bill Belichick and Tom Brady has made the Patriots America’s winningest team over the past decade. No doubt, having a skilled and talented supporting cast, both in the offense and defense, plays a pivotal role (as it did to Peyton Manning in his surprising AFC-best regular season total run, culminated with him claiming Super Bowl 50), but without a good tactician calling the shots from the sidelines and a good signal-caller to institute the calls; you can dream all you want about reaching or surpassing the 10-win mark in the regular season to no avail.

Strength of Schedule

Over the recent years, bettors have gotten accustomed to the likes of Denver, New England and Seattle reaching double-digit wins in the regular season, hence assuming that such trends will always continue every passing year. If you are of that school of thought, then here is a classy lesson for you; trends can change any given day. And more often than not, winning in the regular season has got more to do with the strength of the schedule rather than the perceived strength of a team. Having a good coach or good squad goes a long way to help in winning, but the bottom line is that a brutal schedule can make a talented/good team look very average just in the same way a soft schedule can make a decent (read that bad) NFL team look great. So although it is important to consider the talent in a team, as was explained earlier, be sure to equally take into consideration a team’s strength of schedule when projecting its wins and losses for the end of the regular season.

Injuries to Key Players, Suspensions and Depth of Team

The worst part about injuries in the NFL is that they have a knack for coming at the most inopportune times of the season. And as if that isn’t bad enough, they are virtually unpredictable. That makes it difficult to project season totals in a right way, right? WRONG!!! You can actually know how far a team can go, even if the worst of injuries occur to them, going by the depth of the team. The 2015-16 Broncos, for instance, didn’t have Manning for quite a while, but that never proved to be a big difference-maker as we already knew (okay, maybe I am exaggerating) that Brock Osweiler was able to step up to the task. As a flipside, though, some injuries are totally unexpected and it’s hard to figure out what will happen if the main players get injured. Case-and-point, look at how the injury of QB Andrew Luck took the Indianapolis (and the rest of the NFL world) by storm, leading to a dismal single-digit win regular season when most preseason predictions pegged Indy as a double-digit regular-season winning team. In short, there are two sides to this coin, as is the case with suspensions; you can choose to be optimistic and just hope that the injuries don’t ruin you win total predictions, or consult the footballing gods and factor in whatever they tell you in regards to who will get injured/suspended and how that will affect the team you are predicting. Either way works for me just fine…!

Spot the Value in the NFL Odds and Lines

Even if we wait until the end of the preseason games, we rarely get to have a full picture of what a team will look like and how it will perform in the regular season. And in the off-chance that we do know the full team composition, issues such as injuries and suspensions (as mentioned above) can always mess up our predictions. So is there a safe way to find good value for early NFL regular season total bets? Yes and No, I’ll say. By yes, I am referring to that gut-feeling that irrespective of how bad is, the team in question will get to 8 wins… and just when you think that, the Oddsmakers peg them for 7.5 wins. In such an instance, you could be rightfully inclined to go with 8 and OVER in the regular season totals, especially if supporting evidence from things like drafts and free agent signings support the same notion. If, however, your perceived season total doesn’t coincide with the predictions on the ground, then maybe you need to take a chill pill and wait for things to clear out because you may be jumping onto a sinking ship.

Concluding Remarks

All being said, regular season totals are often wild guesses, just like the person who introduced them into the NFL betting lines. And no matter what science is out there, I can tell you for free that there is never any sure way of telling what will happen at the end of the season. If you, however, follow the guidelines and tips above, I have a feeling that you will be one step closer to making spot-on predictions like me which, for the record, sometimes involve using rock paper scissors when I have two final calculated picks on my NFL betting board to choose from.
 

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