Blake Butterfield

Have you ever wondered what those numbers beside the NFL football or college football teams listed in the paper mean? Ever wondered why and how they change sometimes as the game draws near? Ever want to bet on a game but were too embarrassed to bring it up because you didn’t know how to read the lines properly? I know I can answer ‘Yes’ to all these questions. If you can answer ‘Yes’ to any one of them then you should enjoy learning about those numbers in the pages to follow- I’ll use very little math.

I used to know nothing about betting on NFL or college football, or any sport for that matter, except the odd $5 bet with a friend. When it came to reading the lines for the games in the paper, the only thing I could get out of those was who was playing. Even learning that the game was being held in the city of the bottom team, the home team, took me a while. Those plus and minus signs and those numbers in the hundreds in the second column might as well have been Greek to me.

After a while, I knew that the team with the minus sign was the team that was the favorite to win the game and the number in front of that sign indicated by how much they were favored: The higher the number, the more the team was favored to win the game. Conversely, the team with the positive sign in front of that number, which is always the same for both teams, was the team that was not expected to win the game. That team I learned to call the underdog or simply the dog. I also learned to call that indication of favoritism the point spread but I still did not really understand what it represented.

As time went on and I began working in this industry, I got to know some linemakers and was fortunate enough to have them allow me to watch as they did their magic and made up those numbers you see on the games. Watching these people make the odds, or the lines, was a revelation to me. At this point I had thought I knew a bit about why they made some teams favored over another team. I mean it only made sense on the surface that the linemakers were setting the lines indicate what they thought would be the difference in the final score of the game. I still had a lot to learn!

By watching and reading up on the subject, I found out that linemakers are divided into two groups. Those who simply make up lines to sell to newspapers or other forms of media are called oddsmakers while those who take action on the lines they make are called bookmakers. Bookmakers (BMs) may make all their own lines or they might also factor in lines set by oddsmakers before settling on the line they are going to put out for the betting public to wager on. Once bookmakers put their lines out, they start accepting bets on them. If too many people are picking one team, they say the game is offside and the BM has to then move the lines in order to try to achieve balance on the game.

OK, now I know there are some new terms here for some of you but trust me when I say that this will be all very clear shortly. Keep reading…

Back in the old days, for NFL football at the very least, things must have been much easier on the BMs. Before free agency began moving 100 or more players around each offseason; before the expansion of the league to 32 teams and before the expansion of the draft. Players used to stick with one team much longer. There was less movement amongst the coaching staffs as well, not to mention that there were far fewer teams to deal with. All of these things combined to make things much easier for linemakers when setting initial lines. This is especially true for the first few games of the season when some teams seem to be completely overhauled from the previous season but no one knows yet how the new players and/or coaches will come together as a team.

The bookmakers do not have an easy job. There are so many variables in so many sports that they need to be aware of. Don’t feel too bad for the BMs though. Players like you have to deal with the sweeping changes each season as well and that means that taking advantage of the lines, or gaining an edge, is not necessarily any easier for you to do. Where you as a player do have an edge, though, is that you get to pick and chose what games you feel strongly about and test your ability to pick winners only on those games you like enough. The BM has to take plays on all the games. When you find lines you like; lines you feel are weaker than what you would have given; you have what handicappers call an overlay or getting value and this is where you can gain that all-important edge over the house and win yourself something!

So what exactly is it then that the BMs are trying to do when they are setting these point spreads? Like I said earlier, it seemed obvious to me that they are trying to predict the difference in the score between the two teams playing the game. Yet with all they know, sometimes the score is in no way reflective of what the line was.

When I first started in the sportsbook industry I was in customer service, answering calls from clients such as you who had questions about a game or about how to place a bet or why a bet was settled the way it was settled. I don’t know how many times people asked me how the BMs could have been so wrong with the spread they put out. People would be mad, saying they had trusted the BMs when placing their bets and felt led astray with how wrong the spread was. This happened especially when the line had moved from a large number like ten to an even higher number as the game neared and then, when the game was played, it had actually been close. Sometimes the dog even had won. They would tell me that the BMs should have known how close it was going to be and should have moved the line in the opposite direction. How could the BMs be so wrong? It must have been fixed.

First, off, these people are confusing BMs with handicappers. Handicappers attempt to pick winners based on a system they have devised to take advantage of the lines made by bookmakers and offered for wagering by a book.

What I told these people who called in was this, “The NFL football line has absolutely nothing to do with the game being played or with the score of the game itself.”

They, of course, think they have heard me wrong. Usually I would then hear a phone being tapped on a table and then an incredulous, “What’s that, son?”

“Mutually exclusive,” I tell them, “The two are unrelated, lines or spreads and the game.”

I would always pause again here for effect. They, and you, need to remember what I just said. It will be the anchor for understanding the football point spread and what it means.

In the next section, we will discuss what a point spread is, why the BMs set the football point spread at a particular number and how it works in conjunction with the game and all those numbers you see in the paper.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 at 5:40 am and is filed under Football, Football Betting, Football Handicapping, Football Point Spreads, NFL, NFL Point Spreads, Point Spreads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.