Live Betting Lines: NFL 3rd Quarter Analysis

Live Betting Lines: NFL 3rd Quarter Analysis

The Broncos lead the Ravens 21-17. Peyton Manning faces a key third down when the referee blows his whistle and it’s time for another TV timeout. It’s the end of the third quarter and if you are watching your Live Odds page, you will start to see numbers pop up all over the screen. While the spreads and juice of the live betting lines will vary at different sportsbooks, you ask yourself: Is there value in betting the Ravens to win the game outright?

The obvious first step is to look at past games that fit this scenario. But with only a couple of minutes, you don’t have time to do all that research. Luckily for you, we did it already. Digging through our archives, we found that visiting teams down 4 at the end of the third quarter went 59-150 for a 28.2% winning percentage. That puts the break-even moneyline at +254.

Below is a table that shows visitors at each scenario from tied to down 14 points and how they have performed:

Here is the exact same table for home teams:

When comparing the two tables, a couple of trends immediately stand out.  The first is that home-field advantage is once again proven to exist with home teams having a substantially lower break-even point for almost every scenario.  The second is that there are some clear outliers in the data.  For example, home teams down 9 won 14.0% of games but when they were down 10, that percentage increased to 22.1%.

Obviously we would expect teams down 9 to win more games than teams down 10.  We sometimes get unexpected results due to the small sample size of the NFL compared to other sports, so we normalize the data to get a better idea of what to expect.  Below is a chart that shows how away teams have actually performed (blue line) compared with how we would expect them to perform (red line) using polynomial normalization.

Reading the chart you can see that teams performed better than their expected output when down by 9 and 6 points and underperformed when down 8 or 5 points.  Using this new polynomial function (red line), we can come up with expected break-even moneylines rather than basing them off of past results.  First for visitors:

And also for home teams:

Obviously there are other factors such as field position, who has the ball, and public perception that can influence these in-game lines, but these tables are a good starting point to look at if you want to bet on some exciting fourth quarter comebacks this weekend.