Betting on American Football

American Football (NFL) has to be one of the most backer-friendly sports in the world.

In its favour, it has a short 16-match season, so every game is of paramount importance. There is no ‘taking it easy’ in the NFL. Every inch in every game is carefully tabulated, so we can see exactly what happened in every match. Only one prize in the sport to aim for - the Super Bowl – so no teams playing weakened lineups.

In soccer, the smart thing to do is often to pass the ball sideways or even to pass it backwards, sometimes over and over again. But in American Football there’s only one way to go – straight up the field.

And because every one of those forward plays is measured and logged, investigative backers like us can weigh up every player, every game, and every team with clinical accuracy – and in the end back more winners.

The NFL season runs from early September to February.

The NFL has 32 teams divided into two 16-team conferences, the American Football Conference and the National Football Conference. Each of these conferences is subdivided into four 4team divisions.

At the end of the ‘regular’ 16-game season, each conference plays a series of playoff games to produce a conference winner. The winners of each conference then meet in the Super Bowl, to decide the best team in the NFL.

The Bets

As well as bets for teams to win the Super Bowl, their conference or their division, there are many strong bets available on individual games.

By far the most popular of these bets is the ‘match handicap’ bet, where one team receives a head start from their opponent – or gives up a start.

This is really straightforward, it’s as simple as ‘Indianapolis plus 3 points to beat Tennessee,’ and in this case all we have to do is to add 3 points to Indianapolis’s match score. If that figure is bigger than Tennessee’s match score, then Indianapolis are the winner of the ‘match handicap.’

We will also sometimes be betting on the total number of points in a game.

In this bet the bookmaker asks us to bet whether the Total Points in a match will be under or over his estimate. If we bet ‘under’ his estimate and are right – we win, if we bet under his estimate and the total points are ‘over,’ then we lose.

The bookmakers put up plenty of markets for the NFL, most of them self explanatory, such as how many touchdowns there may be in a match, but we will be betting most often in the match handicaps or on the total match points markets.

See the Betting Terms Explained section on the website for more on how these types of bets work.