Los Angeles Rams -7 vs Minnesota Vikings: Easy money? The math says different

27 September 2018

To the everyday fan – not to mention the overreacting hype machine of mainstream sports media churning out those “narratives” – betting on week 4’s Thursday Night Football game should be easy, right?

You've got the Los Angeles Rams, as good as advertised and looking all the world like an 0-16 team, at home. Coming to the West Coast are the Minnesota Vikings, chasing a gut-wrenching huge-ass loss to the 31st-"best" team in football and entering this game an underachieving 1-1-1 SU early. This is an easy one, reckons John Q. Sportsbar!

Except when the seasoned gambler looks this game a little more closely, he/she finds … this Thursday Night Football game should be easy.

Aside from their generally unstoppable awesomeness, the Rams also have the following going for them in terms of betting the spread…

• A 3-0 SU record comprised of nothing but double-digit wins, along with a 3-0 ATS record in 2018.

• A home game in L.A., where they’re on a 5-1 SU/ATS run in meaningful games dating back to last season, where “meaningful games” does not include last year’s week 17 game for which basically all Rams starters sat.

• Not only is this a West Coast game, it’s a primetime game. West Coast teams in primetime between 2012 and ’17 won ATS over 70% of the time.

• Favorites on Thursday night are up to 21-10-1 ATS for a .672 winning percentage going back to opening week 2016, way up from the usual .550 mark by favorites on Sundays and Mondays.

And yet, all this suggests that the smart money is on the Minnesota Vikings +7 at Los Angeles. Why? Simple mathematics…

Gregg Easterbrook’s Theorem at the Sportsbook

Gregg Easterbrook, the longtime columnist of the oft-traveled Tuesday Morning Quarterback column, released a very simple formula for predicting SU winners for the weekly office pool. The theorem went like so: Team with better record wins, if records equal, home team wins. This formula allows one to pick the winners without knowing anything about the teams playing at just over a 60% clip.

But check this out: If we just slap in the “ATS” after “better rcord” and “wins” in Easterbrook’s theorem, the reverse ends up true. This year “better record ATS/home team wins ATS” is, through three weeks 24-23-1. “Home team wins ATS”, meanwhile is 28-19-1. Obviously this is a) a small sample size and b) a pretty extreme one at that, but the trends bear out going back through 2016, when “better record/home team wins ATS” is just as barely over .500 at 283-275-18.

Further, considering that home dogs win ATS at about 55%, a sizable percentage of those winners ATS were comprised of home teams in equal-record games to the point where plain ol’ “team with better record ATS wins ATS” works as infrequently as 45% of the time.

As to why this seemingly counterintuitive math works, think about the nature of the point spread. Whereas in a given NFL season, you’ll likely have one team at 14 wins; between 8 and 11 teams of 10 wins or more; between one-third to one-half of the teams with records between 9-7 and 7-9; and one team with two wins or fewer. However, when considering win-loss records ATS, the opposite happens because the goal of the sportsbooks is to apply an evening effect. Only in the extremest of extreme cases does the house win almost all the money; likewise, the players.

Going back to 2014, just one team has finished better than 12-4 (the 2017 New England Patriots, wouldn’tcha know?) and no team has finished worse than 4-12 – to think what Cleveland Browns fans might have done to reach the lofty heights of 4-12 SU at some point in those years…

The tl;dr version and NFLbets' recommendation

The “tl;dr” version: Regression to the mean, the numbers gotta balance out, and this is one hell of an imbalanced matchup statistically. And if you need to justify betting Vikings +7, just remember that L.A.’s stud CBs Marcus Peters and Aqib Talib will be playing hurt at best on a short week. Of course, the question as to whether Kirk Cousins can take advantage of this handicap in the literal face of a ridiculous pass rush remains.

But it’s also a Thursday night game, and NFLbets hates betting TNF games. Plus, these Rams look real good. Like, sportsbook-breaking good. We’d recommend that NFL bettors stary away from this one.