This is old, sports betting lure. Fade the biggest public darling on the board and you should do ok. I think in the NFL it does have some merit, but only NFL.
The last three years I have been developing a communal handicapping system. I finally got tired and disappointed with trying to research run defenses and pass offenses, injury reports, game trends, what have you. Where I grew up, sports betting was a rite of passage. Everybody was playing pools/parlay cards in high school and you couldn't throw a stone without hitting a bookie on the head. I got in over my head with a bookie for the first time at 16. I'm 39 now.
I finally got fed up and said to myself, I know at least ten guys who never win betting sports. What I am going to do is poll these degenerates, and bet against the team who has the highest frequency in the data. Sure enough I started winning, and winning regularly. Any team that was selected by three or more of these losers in a given week went 17 - 4 ATS the spread that year.
Over the last two years I have expanded my focus group of bettors to 50 people and added in handicappers of all abilities. I spent the last two years combing all the data I collected and look for other profitable patterns other than just fading the worst of the worst. What happens when the distribution of a game is split not lopsided, but the higher end of the split is the underdog in the game. I started looking for these varying situations among the intellect of an array of handicappers.
Last year I found four or five other patterns that performed very well (meaning in 10 or more occurrences only three losses).
I've also developed the way I extract the information from the focus group. Everyone must pick 4 games and rank them (essentially giving each team a strength rating), I then look at each game on the board and find the scores for Frequency, Distribution, and Strength Rating. I developed a scale for each variable that when looked at all together provide a paradigm of 18 different patterns that a game can fall into. I track these patterns as to when it pops up who win the game? Higher distribution or Lower, Higher Strength Rating or lower.
I can tell you that I found a combination of 6 patterns and sub-sets of patterns (I break down patterns further by categorizing by spread and team situation, i.e. Home Dog, Road Fave, etc.
This combination went 62 - 12 ATS. No, I didn't have it because I didn't discover until after season was over, there were a lot of data to collect and variables to track, but you better be dam sure I will be on it this year.
I will also be posting it here on Pregame if anyone else wishes to track it. I've only tested NFL thus far, I tried a test run of my NFL group for NBA games and a horrible result. The Focus group having somewhat of an informed opinion about the sport is key. If people are just guessing then I will get false positives.
I've waited a long time for the NFL to get here this year. GL everyone.