The Patriots and Cowboys Are Huge Favorites. Bettors Are Taking Them Anyway.
If you want to bet on New England or Dallas, they have to win by more than three touchdowns for you to get paid.
Gamblers and football fans who peruse the betting lines for this weekend’s games will undoubtedly see two big numbers jump out. At most bookmakers, the Cowboys were 21½-point favorites over the Dolphins on Wednesday afternoon. And the Patriots were 23-point favorites over the Jets.
Yes, if you bet on New England or Dallas, the team is not only going to have to win, but win by more than three touchdowns for you to get paid. And yet, just about everyone who likes to gamble is betting on those favorites, bookmakers say.
At many gambling sites you can also bet on the winner of the game without a point spread. But for these games, that will cost you. If you bet on New England or Dallas simply to win, you will get odds of about 1-40. That is, you can bet a dollar, and if you’re right, get back a profit of two and a half cents.
Although big lines are frequently seen on college games, like the 39 points that Ohio State is favored over Miami of Ohio this week, three-touchdown lines are a rarity in the N.F.L. There hasn’t been a 20-point favorite in any N.F.L. game in six years. It has only happened 11 times since 1985, and only once have there been two 20-point or more favorites in the same week, the online wagering site Sportsbetting.ag reports. But that was in 1987 during a strike, when the teams that played were ragtag collections of castoffs.
The Cowboys are 2-0, playing at home, and playing well. But make no mistake, the enormous line on their game is primarily because of the Dolphins. After a 7-9 year, the Dolphins had a curious summer, dropping good players like tackle Laremy Tunsil and receiver Kenny Stills and entrusting the team to quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick. “The Dolphins are basically throwing the season in tank already,” said John Sheeran, director in trading of FanDuel, which takes sports bets in several states where legal, including New Jersey.
Inpredictable, a site that ranks teams based on their betting lines, rates Miami an astonishing 10 points worse than the second worst team in the league, the Giants. And that 21½-point line doesn’t seem so huge when you consider the margins in the first two weeks, when the Dolphins lost by 49 and 43.
The talent gap is almost as wide in the Patriots-Jets game. Last July, when books began offering odds on the Week 3 games, the Patriots were a mere 10-point favorite over the Jets. By early this week, after the Jets’ bad start, the line was up to 17.
Then came the news that the Jets’ second string-turned-first-string quarterback, Trevor Siemian, was out for the season with an ankle injury. (The Jets’ opening-day starter, Sam Darnold, is out for a few more weeks with mono.)
Luke Falk, a Titans pick in the 2018 draft who the Jets picked up off waivers in May, played reasonably well subbing for Siemian, but no one is expecting him to pull a Kurt Warner and go from scrub to star. The line quickly jumped up about 5 more points on the news.
It makes no small difference that the Patriots have 30- and 43-point wins on their ledger and haven’t given up a touchdown.
Yet bettors don’t seem scared of either big line. FanDuel said 96 percent of its bets so far have come in on the Patriots and 92 percent on the Cowboys. Sportsbetting.ag said their figures were about 80 percent and 70 percent.
The general public seems to love these two big favorites. But Adam Burns, the sports book manager for Sportsbetting.ag, said: “Our smarter bettors, they’re not really touching it. When the line gets get past 14 or 17, a lot of good players lay off. You never know if there’s going to be a lucky touchdown late.”
Some cagier gamblers might wait until closer to game time to bet the underdogs. “We will see some sharp money against those teams,” Sheeran said. “I don’t expect it to move the line, because of the sheer weight of public money.”
The flow of money on both favorites has been helped by the Cowboys and Patriots being perhaps the two most popular teams in the N.F.L., bringing in even more bets from casual fans.
So which way should you bet this week? It turns out that the 11 favorites of 20 or more points since 1985 were only 2-9 against the spread, Sportsbetting.ag said. Sounds like an underdog bet may be the smart play.
But before you start thinking about the Dolphins or Jets shocking the world and actually winning outright, consider: While most of those big favorites did not cover the spread, every one of them won the game on the field.
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