Will Dogs Keep Barking?
By Bruce Marshall
Often times, we recall the old "war room" in Los Angeles. Each week during the football season in those days, the handicapping crew would convene to discuss the upcoming college and pro football slates.
Inevitably, several times each season, one of the handicappers would cite an emerging angle or pointspread trend that had recorded a particularly strong, or perhaps not so strong, record in recent weeks. And whenever the handicapper would get a little too confident about his opinion based upon those recent results, Mort Olshan was always quick to pass along a reminder, learned from his decades of work in the industry.
"Remember," Mort would often caution, "these trends aren't etched in granite."
Mort had seen too many systems and trends through the years to get terribly excited about any of them, and realized their fortunes could turn just as quickly as they appeared. He even wrote about the subject in his definitive study of the business, the classic Winning Theories of Sports Handicapping, first published in 1975. "Usually the ‘system’ encompasses a peculiar set of circumstances that materializes for a brief period," Mort wrote. "Then, as with so many unscientific formulas, the law of averages takes over. Lo and behold –no more system. It has been rebuffed by that old axiom: Statistics can be used to support anything–mostly statisticians."
That’s not to say, however, that Mort didn’t acknowledge that pointspread patterns could sometimes endure without much rhyme or reason, and he was always quick to advise us to keep an eye on whatever trends might be developing during the season. And if Mort were still with us today, we’re sure he would be reminding us about all of the above after the first month of the current NFL season, one in which the underdog sides had been dominating the action while recording an eye-opening 46-28 spread mark through the first five weeks of the campaign.
Mort’s words continue to echo, as we are certain he would advise us to respect that dog pattern as long as it continued, but also caution to watch for a quick reversal of that dominant underdog form. Not that we haven’t learned ourselves throughout the decades. Indeed, it was only a year ago at this time that we were talking about the lack of parity in the NFL, and devoted one of our feature stories to what at the time was a widening gap between the haves and have-nots of the league. But that chalk-oriented pattern began to wane after midseason a year ago, when pointspreads began to adjust and the bigger underdogs finally began to provide some value. Until late October a year ago, the big NFL favorites laying 10 points or more were covering games at a 75% clip, but they cooled considerably down the stretch and actually ended up the season slightly less than .500 (28-29).
Perhaps the most interested observers in the recent underdog prowess are the many Las Vegas sports books that have benefited greatly from the favorites stumbling in early 2010 action.
Keep in mind that at this time a year ago, most of the books were posting losses due to the vagaries of the 2009 campaign, as veteran Las Vegas oddsmaker Keith Glantz reminded us in a discussion before last week’s games.
"Remember, books don’t always win if the underdogs come in big every week," said the highly-respected Glantz. "It’s how the ‘public’ favorites are doing that often dictates how much the books win and lose.”
"The greatest exposure the books will have is with the popular favorites all doing well at the same time. By popular or public teams, I mean Dallas, Pittsburgh, Green Bay, Indy, Minnesota, New England, New Orleans. Even San Francisco became a public team early this season. Last year, in some of those early weeks of the season, you combined a lot of those public teams playing against the bad teams, who just weren’t competitive. Teams like the Rams, Lions, Browns, and Raiders. This created a lot of one-way action on the parlay cards, which are the biggest money makers for the sports books. But not last year.
"The books were getting blasted on a lot of huge payouts on the parlay cards a year ago. But it is a completely different story this season, with the public teams mostly struggling. So far, the books are winning big on the parlay cards. Real big."
That the parlay cards are such a profit center for the sports books might come as surprise to some, but their revenue-generating capacity cannot be underestimated. "The normal hold for the books on the parlay cards is around 30%, which is huge," said Glantz, who added that most of the books had done much better than that with their parlay cards in the early portion of this season.
It’s no wonder that some of the sports book managers around Las Vegas have been looking like the cat that ate the canary. Mike Colbert, who manages the plush sports book at the M Hotel and hosts our weekly Friday radio appearance with Brian Blessing on 1100 AM in Las Vegas (which airs between 2-3 PM, if you happen to be in town), has been preoccupied with a number of new products and promotions at his property in recent weeks, but even he acknowledged that most early-season Sundays have been pretty good thus far for the books, including his own. "I’d say we’ve done okay," said Colbert, which is about as far any sports book manager will ever want to go admit publicly, as Glantz reminded us. "When the sports books are doing well, they’re never going to be rubbing it into their audience," says Glantz.
Glantz, much like Mort would surely have done in the old days, offers a few warnings of his own about the early NFL developments featuring the underdogs. "In most years that I recall, the underdogs collectively seem to do better in the later portion of the season," says Glantz. "This year has been totally different. My advice is to be on the lookout for the favorites to rally in the second half of the season. Teams like Dallas, Minnesota, Indy, and New Orleans would figure to start covering numbers soon." And the chalk did rebound slightly last week, posting a 6-5-2 mark entering Monday's Titans-Jaguars clash.
Until then, the dogs could continue barking in the NFL, but keeping on the lookout for a turnaround in that pattern is a good idea. As always, stay tuned.