How should you bet after a rout in the NFL?

Suppose a team is badly beaten in the NFL, say by 21 or more points. The next week, should you bet on them, or against them, against the spread? I have some data on this, but will hold back on presenting it for a couple days. Here are the kind of comments I tend to overhear about this situation.

"Bet on them, because they will have something to prove."
"Bet on them, because the squares have a short memory, and will bet against them, creating value the other way."
"Bet against them, because of the rout."
"Bet against them, because the team will have lost their confidence."

I guess the first question to address is "Does last week's absolute trouncing affect next week's game against a different team in a different location?". Will the team be embarrassed enough to make up for having slacked off? Did they slack off the first time? What caused the embarrassing rout? Since money is made on the point spread, perhaps one should be asking: will the "sports talk" of What Ever Happened To Those Clods Last Week so depress the odds that there is an opportunity for profit anyway?

Will next week's opponents feel more confidence? Will they feel overconfident?

I'd like to think that its not the tarnish, its the halo. ... So I'd go for betting on the team that wants to remove this stain from its image. Most of the negativity will be hype, they can counter hype with substance. Bet for them to do it.

There is a reason they got trounced. Is the weakness correctable? Some teams just don't have the talent, and will continue to perform poorly. The spread is supposed to equalize things, but will you see a book go +22 on any NFL contest? That's a lot of points to cover. Better for the books to call it, "No Action".

Quote: Wizard

Suppose a team is badly beaten in the NFL, say by 21 or more points. The next week, should you bet on them, or against them, against the spread? I have some data on this, but will hold back on presenting it for a couple days. Here are the kind of comments I tend to overhear about this situation.

"Bet on them, because they will have something to prove."
"Bet on them, because the squares have a short memory, and will bet against them, creating value the other way."
"Bet against them, because of the rout."
"Bet against them, because the team will have lost their confidence."

Since the line is a function not of how the books assess the two teams' abilities, but rather, how they expect the public to assess them, I would expect that line to be skewed against the badly performing team. This would make that team a good bet.

I don't have the data on this, but I would strongly suspect that if a team got blown out on national TV, they would be an excellent bet the next week, particularly late in the week (ploppie looking desperately for someplace to bet his last $100---"aaah, look at the Redskins---they got blown out last week, they stink, I only have to lay 11 points, this looks like a lock...").

I do NOT think that there is an issue of "motivation"---a team might play harder to try to atone for a blowout loss, but conversely, they retain whatever flaws caused them to get blown out in the first place.

I'd look at the reasons why.

The Phins got blown out versus New England by woeful special teams, and this wasn't some deeper lying malaise. The 2008 Lions got blown out regulalryl as they had a porous defence, with god awful tackling, and an inability to move the ball on offence that meant the already bad defence was playing even more minutes of time. I've not looked at why the Broncos got trounced this weekend yet.

Also it's worth looking at who did the trouncing... was it unexpected? Was it a inter-conference or intra-divisional match? In the latter, I'd question the teams drive, specially if the season is past the half way point and the team thrashed is now looking out of the playoff picture.

There was something I read a long time ago called the "Bounce Theory". I can't remember the exact rules but basically it was a "play on" a good team(laying more than a touchdown) that got trounced the week before and "play against" a losing term who was a big underdog and won their game outright.

Probably better suited for the college ranks where a highly ranked team gets upset where they would be expected to "bounce back" to their normal play the next week or the opposite like just mentioned where the big dog wins unexpectedly to play "flat " the next week supposedly riding the high from the week before.

Quote: dogman

There was something I read a long time ago called the "Bounce Theory". I can't remember the exact rules but basically it was a "play on" a good team(laying more than a touchdown) that got trounced the week before and "play against" a losing term who was a big underdog and won their game outright.

Probably better suited for the college ranks where a highly ranked team gets upset where they would be expected to "bounce back" to their normal play the next week or the opposite like just mentioned where the big dog wins unexpectedly to play "flat " the next week supposedly riding the high from the week before.

I would think it might be a weaker correlation in college ball, where teams aren't just satisfied to win, they want to win by massacres to enhance their standings in the polls. So a blowout when Western South Dakota Agricultural Tech plays Monster State may not mean all that much, even to W.S.D.A.T.

I used to bet a "system" in baseball, where you find any team with a winning overall record that got swept in a 3 game series, and then straight bet on their next 3 games in a martingale-type progression then assuming that any decent team would not lose two series in a row. I don't know what the overall data on this is, but I never lost the martingale progression once in two years. You usually have 10-20 opportunities to bet this way per year on winning record teams who got swept.

Your data probably shows a winning record versus the spread I would assume?

What my analysis shows is there is no significant correlation between the points won or lost by, and performance against the spread the next game. After a loss of 21 or more points, there is a 51.66% chance of covering the spread the next game, but I show a 2.28% standard deviation on that. So that is easily within the margin of error.

I made an "ask the wizard" question out of this, which has more detail. A draft can be found in my next column. I welcome all comments.

Whether you bet on or against should have only a little bit to do with guessing how the will respond the next week. Most of your choice should be based on how the market responds to a team that loses big

First look into why they were routed

If they gave up 21 points on questionable calls, funny bounces and special teams TDs, there is a good chance the market will undervalue them since those things are unlikely to be repeated

After that, you should count it as one game in the sample size of evaluating them. If the four games before that the scored were close, but the team was the benefactor of those strange or rare plays, they're probably just a bad team. The market might think the blowout was an aberration when it was really what we should expect