Written by Drew Borland of Sport Source Analytics
In sports, trends and streaks are part and parcel to any good storyline. Whether it’s seeing if Alabama can be dethroned or Tom Brady has another Super Bowl run in him, streaks increase engagement. It is ingrained into our psyche. We are frequently biased towards wanting (or not wanting) to see if any given streak or trend continues. We also know that streaks are real across all sports. We’ve seen players and teams frequently create a dynamic that causes them to win (or lose) consistently.
Place all your football bets this season at Fanduel.com/BetTheBoard and start with a FREE $1,000
Wagering Streaks: Fact or Fiction
When it comes to betting sports we want to believe that streaks are real. After all, it is irrefutable that streaks exist in sports. Sports gambling content sites lead you to believe that streaks matter. Virtually every website you go to lists the proverbial “Team X is 8-0-1 in their last 9 games ATS” to help give the bettor confidence (real or imagined) that a trend is their friend.
We decided to run the numbers starting simple. Based on a team’s ATS record for the year, do they tend to cover the spread more or less given their recent history? If the recent ATS history of a team has value, it will surely show up if we measure what happens in subsequent games.
Subscribe to Bet The Board Podcast 🎙
Apple Podcasts: apple.co/3mdGgbz
SoundCloud:
Google Podcasts:
Data Mining
For our research, we calculated all college football teams from 2010 to present and their game-by-game cumulative season record against the spread. We then totaled up how they did in the “next game” after accumulating that ATS record.
Follow Bet The Board on Twitter 🐥
@BetTheBoardPod – twitter.com/BetTheBoardPod
Follow the hosts
@ToddFuhrman – twitter.com/ToddFuhrman
@Payneinsider – twitter.com/PayneInsider
Here are the results (pushes omitted for brevity).
For example, “a team that was 4-0 ATS for the season (YTD) went 38-37 (50.7%) ATS in their following game”.
Sports Betting News 🌎
Gambling Shirts & Hats 🎰 🎲
Nothing is still something
So what did all of this record tallying tell us? Well…nothing. HOWEVER nothing is actually something. A team’s recent or season record ATS showed virtually no indication of having predictive value in the “next game”. Sure, there are a few cases with short sample sizes that you could construe as some sort of signal. However, even some of the decent sample sizes, even when combined (like 4-0, 5-0, and 6-0), show that teams starting out the year with a “win streak” against the spread, have coin-flip odds to repeat continue the “streak”.
Always Keep Digging
The research didn’t stop there. We wanted to test out various matchups. What happens when teams with a recent history of covering the spread play teams that have a recent history of not covering spread? The classic “good” versus “bad” example. We tallied up the “last 5 games” of each CFB team for every week since 2010. We then calculated the ATS win/loss (pushes omitted) record of each team in the next game.
The results? More of the same. Recently good teams (5-0 and 4-1) having very little consistent ATS success even against recently bad teams (0-5 and 1-4).
We also tried this with the “last 10 games”. More of the same.
Sample Sizes
The conclusion here is simple. Recent history against the spread provides no predictive value of a future result. Teams seemingly streaking are generally counterbalanced and neutralized by really good oddsmakers in a fluid market. Unfortunately, the bulk of the media/information outlets surrounding sports betting are serving up lots of useless information to justify game to game analysis with no common thread. One of our goals as bettors is continuously trying to find signal in all of the noise. While signal is rare, sometimes it is easier to help eliminate the noise. The key to making high-value picks week-to-week is to avoid being influenced by low-value information.
