While NFL pre-season games are totally meaningless as far as making playoffs, and (except for “dress rehearsal” week 3) not worth watching IMO, I believe there is money to be made betting NFL-X, especially weeks 2 and 3, for a number of reasons, such as:
Different teams have different motivation levels more often in NFL-X than in the regular season (and certainly more than in playoffs), mostly due to the emphasis (or lack thereof) that their head coach places upon winning those games. For example, it was with a “heavy heart” that I witnessed Tony Dungy retiring as head coach of the Indy Colts, followed two years later by his “disciple” Jim Caldwell, both of whom put so little emphasis on winning pre-season games that Colts were an almost automatic “play against” team on my NFL-X card each week, until the books got tired of getting the snot beaten out of them every August whenever Indy took the field, and began posting lines which over-compensated for that strong tendency. On the other end of the spectrum, former Detroit head coach Jim Schwartz made Lions an almost automatic “play on” team on my NFL-X card each week, due to his heavy emphasis on winning pre-season games and ATS “cover” percentage of > 60%
There are other strong trends, such as first year coaches wanting to getting off to a good start, even in the pre-season, to instill a winning attitude in a team that is likely coming off of a few bad seasons (or else there probably would not have been a coaching change) and getting the team’s fan base excited again in order to help boost season ticket sales – for a recent example of that, look no further than LY’s Minny Vikings, who were 4-0 SU and ATS in the pre-season, with an average MOV (winning margin) of 10 points in coach Zimmer’s first exhibition season. It will be interesting to see how well they do TY in the pre-season, starting tonite, with the pressure off of Zimmer, after a better than expected first year LY for him.
As far as betting pre-season totals, most of the games in the first week or two of the pre-season tend to be low scoring Unders, as it takes the offenses longer to get “in gear” than the defenses, especially with coaches trying out numerous new players and offensive combinations in the offensive “skill positions.” And while the totals lines for the first two weeks of NFL-X, including the opening Hall of Fame Game, are usually quite low (usually between 34 and 36), it’s usually not low enough to prevent the majority of those early pre-season games from staying Under