Best Season Long Player Props to Bet
We’re slowly getting into the swing of things here with NFL season approaching. Sportsbooks are incrementally starting to drop passing, receiving and rushing totals for players for next season and there’s good opportunities to take advantage of early on.
Historically betting unders on players have been extremely profitable due to the high injury risk and underperformance we see every year from each team. Naturally projections for these players are going to lean towards the overs each year, but we know how unpredictable the season can be with so many moving parts and situations.
After these sportsbooks over the past couple years have consistently been too bullish on the projections of these players and we’ve seen under hit at a very high rate. In 2022 we saw some of these books adjust and move these lines down even further, but still the unders hit at a very profitable rate.
Knowing this, sportsbooks have adjusted even more this year to the point where considering overs might be a viable strategy in certain spots.
Overall, running backs are generally the best bets for unders because of the heightened injury risk and situation dependent they can be if their team underperforms. If there are overs to take QBs tend to be the most stable because of limited injury risk on their part.
Why are unders such great bets?
Even the best players in the entire league struggle sometimes year to year with consistency. In football there’s a limited sample of 17 games and crazy things happen! Nobody could’ve predicted Russell Wilson would fall flat on his face or that the Falcons would regress to one of the lowest volume passing offenses in the last 25 years.
When situations like this happen it affects everybody in that offense and the entire offense individually is in jeopardy of their unders hitting.
Injuries are obviously the easy out here. You could’ve been extremely bullish on Javonte Williams or Breece Hall last year, but even if you were correct early on in the year all it took was one play and now the under hits.
And sometimes you’ll be right about a player all year and they will just miss a game or two and now suddenly their under hits despite them pacing for the over all year.
It’s human nature to want to be optimistic on every player and think of best case scenarios for them all. Trust me I fall victim to this as well (hello Kyle Pitts), but when betting these lines our first reaction should ALWAYS be on the under. For reference last year I placed 14 official UNDER bets in Stealing Lines for season long props last year and went 14-0. I’ll get to the records for overs in a second (it’s not good).
A player in a potential committee backfield, in a new offense, with a young or potentially bad quarterback should give off warning signs that things could go wrong.
And when betting unders you really need one or two things to go worse than expected and suddenly you’re cashing without a sweat.
It’s generally a lot easier for things to wrong than they do go right and that’s the premise here.
Are books getting smarter on these props?
We’re seeing some lower lines than we ever have on these books due to the majority of players going under on their props.
For example we are seeing DJ Moore have a line of 750.5 receiving yards on DraftKings despite going over this number in all five years he has played. Chris Godwin is another example of a 775.5 line that he’s smashed over in each of the past five seasons despite playing a full season only one time.
There’s obviously context to why these lines are lower due to uncertainty in new offenses with new quarterbacks, but at some point these lines borderline might be disrespectful to the talent each of these players have.
And still these over might not even be the best bets because what if the Bears offense continues on their historically run heavy path? Or Baker Mayfield continues to be a bad quarterback holding back the Bucs offense? These are real concerns for both DJ Moore and Chris Godwin and why their overs aren’t an immediate bet.
Should we be considering more overs this year?
When betting overs we want a lot of wiggle room to work with. Similar to when we bet unders we want a couple ways or scenarios in which a bet can hit, we want similar assurance when betting overs that things could still go wrong and the bet cashes.
Due to the overadjustment by books this year, we are in a unique spot in which more overs are likely to hit than any other year. It’s still very very likely that more unders than overs hit, but the overall market might be evening out just a little bit this year.
We still want to be very careful and cautious when picking overs. Last year officially in Stealing Lines I went 1-4 when choosing straight overs. Being bullish for the likes of Trey Lance, Kyle Pitts and Elijah Moore proved to be the undoing in this part and are great examples of how things can go wrong! Overall on straight props I went 15-4 with the unders absolutely crushing.
Still, I think there’s good spots to choose overs. I made a Twitter thread last year before Ben and I created Stealing Lines that shows some other overs and unders I played to get a general idea for how they all went.
Going all in on the Bengals ended up being a solid move as both Burrow and Higgins hit their overs, but Chase got hurt early on and was unable to eclipse hit over of 1200.5 receiving yards. We got bailed out by the sportsbooks as they decided to void those Chase bets because of the cancelled Bills/Bengals game in Week 17.
Our overall portfolio when betting season long totals should be at least 70-75% unders with only a few very specific overs to hit that are bad lines.
If feel like we’ve identified a few overs we like this year right now.
We’ve now placed a total of 16 season long prop bets in our Discord, but unfortunately most of those lines have moved to unplayable lines. If you’re a paid subscriber to Stealing Lines and aren’t in our Discord, check the link sent to you in your original "Welcome to Stealing Lines” email.
Best Season Long Bets
Tee Higgins over 950.5 receiving yards -120 (DraftKings)
Higgins left 3 games early last season, had a game less played because of the Hamlin scare and still finished with 1029 yards. He really only played 13 games and had 77 yards per game in those!
We know unders are generally a very sharp play but it’s extremely hard to see really many scenarios in which Higgins doesn’t hit this over being healthy.
Even in 2021 he only played 14 games and had 1091 yards. In reality we could see Higgins hit this in 12 or 13 games this year which gives us extra room to work with an over.
Tee Higgins is a true star in a pass heavy offense alongside superstar wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase. Higgins truly gets some of the best matchups of any wide receiver in the NFL on a consistent basis.
In fact Higgins has been so good that if we take away the games in which he left due to injury in the first quarter here are the only WRs in the NFL with more receiving yards per game than him over the last two seasons:
Cooper Kupp - 106.1
Justin Jefferson - 100.7
Davante Adams - 93.0
Tyreek Hill - 86.7
Ja’Marr Chase - 86.2
Stefon Diggs - 80.4
AJ Brown - 78.8
Tee Higgins - 77.5
There might be concern about Higgins’ inability to play a full season each of the last two years, but again that’s already baked into this line! We’ve seen him hit his over the last two years while missing games due to injury.
Higgins has a true ceiling of a player capable of putting up a 1,400 yard season and unless he has a season ending injury or this offense completely falters, it feels possible Higgins is going to have his best season yet.
Ben and I were very close to releasing it at 1,000 yards on Caesars.
Risk 1.2 units to win 1 unit
Play to 975.5