NFL Betting: How To Win in the Preseason
by Sam Martin
Handicapping NFL Preseason games is much different than the Regular Season or even College Football, as a number of statistical factors and motivational factors don't come into play. With wins being meaningless in the standings and backup players seeing significant game time, we need to use other handicapping tools to predict the outcomes of these early games.
One of the most important factors in our NFL Preseason handicapping is identifying teams that have new head coaches. These new sideline generals typically take over for teams coming off a losing season (except in the case of a head coach retiring), and these new coaches tend to put an emphasis on winning - especially early.
The theory is that these new head coaches want to instill a new winning attitude from day one, so they tend to open up the playbook a bit more on offense and blitz more on defense. This is a great starting point when looking at the lines in the first two weeks of the NFL Preseason.
This year, there were six clubs with new head coaches: Carolina (Ron Rivera), Cleveland (Pat Shurmur), Denver (John Fox), Oakland (Hue Jackson), San Francisco (Jim Harbaugh), and Tennessee (Mike Munchak). We played on these teams five times already during our 8-1 ATS start to the 2011 NFL Preseason, as this also serves as our starting point in our weekly football handicapping.
Playing on all of these teams for the first two weeks returned a winning 6-4 ATS mark (assuming staying away from the Oakland vs. San Francisco matchup in Week 2), with every team covering the spread at least once with the exception of Oakland. Two teams, both Denver and Tennessee, covered both of their games so far.
While we don't recommend "blindly" backing every team each week just because they have a new head coach, combined with other roster factors and motivational situations you can pick your spot and cash in! That's what we have done, and we're off to a fantastic 8-1 ATS start heading into Week Three!
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