NFL Wild Card Spread Picks

Quick NFL Picks:
Seattle -3.5

Last week the statistical predictions only included one game and one winner! KC came back in the 4th quarter to tie it and lose the game but to cover the spread of 6 against the Jets.

This week, of the 4 NFL wild card games, only 1 seems like a good bet and I personally like it because the spread has moved 1.5 points in the other direction. The game is Washington @ Seattle which bettors favor Seattle by 3.5 but originally it was a 5 point spread. The model has a solid 61% success rate of games with the spread between 2-4 for the home team and the estimate being within 2 points of the Vegas spread. Seattle if predicted to win by 5.

Journalists are favoring Washington because they have "momentum", something that has been scientifically proven to be a fallacy. It is just random that a basketball player makes 50 free throws in a row or a team wins 4 games in a row. The relevant statistic is that the player is a 90% free throw shooter or a team has a 60% winning percentage not how you got there. For example, a coin has 50-50 chance of showing up heads-tails. If you flip a coin and get 10 heads in a row, is it more likely that your next toss will be a head? No.

I have included bets for all the other games, but none of the other 3 seem significantly good, meaning the estimate is as good as flipping a coin. But the Seattle pick is significant and although it is as good as throwing a coin with 61% probability heads and 39% tails, following this strategy through 7 years, would be a very profitable strategy for bettors.

Wild Card Picks against the Vegas spread

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