Week 15 went as poorly as imaginable as game scripts went completely out of whack with our bets last week and got shredded for -9.58 units. It’s officially my 2nd worst week I’ve ever had on record.
Nothing seemed to go right last week and really like we’ve mentioned in the past nothing has really gone right this year. I also mentioned that I felt like a lot of this was just extremely unlucky and that I was decently confident in my process and was going to continue to chug along with it.
Well, I found a flaw in my process in recent weeks.
I did some digging and comparing some things about my process last year and this year.
I found one very interesting and shocking stat.
Last season I placed 175 player prop bets on unders and my record on those were 111-64 for a 63.7% win rate.
I talked a lot last year and in the offseason about why unders hit so often and are key to betting weekly player props. I try to bet as many as I can in the portfolio since they’re generally strong and my most reliable bets week in and week out.
What I’ve seen this year has been brutal at least in recent weeks. Dating back to Week 7 I’ve placed 36 bets on unders and I’m a whopping 12-24 on these bets (33.3%). After looking back on a lot of these bets I’ve placed I still stand very strongly behind these plays!
But where my flaw in my process is this year is how I’ve reacted to this bad variance.
After consistently being used to unders hitting at very high rates week in and week out, when they simply have been losing its caused me to slowly and slowly drift away from betting more unders.
Because of all of this my lack of volume of bets has naturally gone down. Last year I was betting around 25 units a week, now I’m around 15 which creates a lot more variance in of itself week-to-week.
My process was simple:
Be selective in bets but still fire confidently
Make a concerted effort to have at least more than half of my bets be unders every week (and try to be around 65%)
I’ve placed 86 bets since Week 7 and 50 (58%) of those have been overs, not exactly the ratio I had hoped.
Early on in the year I placed 63 unders from weeks 1-6 and went 35-28 (55.6%) on these. Not exactly up to par from last year but still solid. And even though they were going okay in my mind it still wasn’t what I was used to.
So after a brutal Week 7 in which my unders went 1-6, I started to slightly focus on overs. Going back and looking at how I was losing these unders and really was frustrated on the year as a whole with them (I was still 36-34 on the year at this time) the thought crossed my mind “If unders aren’t hitting as often as they should, then maybe the overs have more merit”.
While I think the thought wasn’t terrible as I talked about sportsbooks adjusting to this, the principal stays the same. Games are going to generally suck and not meet expectations more often than they will live up to the hype. And same goes with players.
We bet unders too because football is a violent sport and players can get injured any given play. While we are obviously never rooting for this to happen it is a possibility with every bet and there has been our fair share of unders we have won because of this.
That aspect of it simply hasn’t been there this year.
And while I’m in the midst of some insanely bad variance, I overreacted to this by not continuing to hammer even more unders in the weekly portfolio. And that’s where I’ve been wrong.
I use this Substack sometimes as a venting session during the reviews to look back at how things went so here we go for Week 15.
I touched on last week how heading into Week 15 it was one of the more confident weeks I had been heading into all season. Couldn’t have been more wrong with the results.
But looking back it makes me even more frustrated because it felt like everything went perfectly wrong.
A common theme with why we’ve been losing a lot of unders recently has been that we’ve just been on the wrong side of blowouts in most cases. Like betting a running back under and then his team is suddenly up by two or three touchdowns and game script happens.
This is pretty normal and generally how these unders lose and this is exactly what happened again last week.
I was very confident in the Rams passing attack being a matchup advantage last week vs the Commanders. And to an extent I was right as Matthew Stafford was efficient.
But the Commanders were so bad that the Rams got up by three touchdowns and seemingly stopped throwing the ball which not only lost our Stafford overs, but our Kyren Williams rushing attempt under.
Similar thing in the Baltimore and Jacksonville game last week. We had both Lawrence passing yard under (my favorite bet of last week) and Gus Edwards attempts under.
The Ravens were in complete control of this game and even though Edwards has 3 attempts at halftime and Lawrence was under 100 passing yards at half, the game script had the Ravens running the ball a ton and Lawrence throwing a ton.
Even then it was crazy because Keaton Mitchell tore his ACL mid game and Edwards got all the work after that. I’m not saying that Edwards under would’ve hit had that not happened, but it was certainly a factor.
With Lawrence he hit Jamal Agnew for a 65 yard TD that essentially gave him enough yards to go to his over in the end. And despite him being inefficient on the day he still went over.
One of the more frustrating ones of the week was the Raheem Mostert and De’Von Achane overs against the Jets.
I loved the matchup and I couldn’t decide which play I like better so I took both. The thesis was simple: A prime matchup where the Dolphins should run the ball a ton against the run funnel defense in a game where the Dolphins should have control. Without knowing how much Achane would play I was confident at least one of them (if not both) would have a big day so we played some alts as well.
And while on its face it seemed like I nailed the thesis as the Dolphins dominated the Jets and ran the ball more times than they passed it, both Mostert AND Achane had their most inefficient days rushing the ball on the entire year.
And to cap it off we almost sucked out at the end when Achane ran for a 17 yard run to wind the clock down, but a holding call took it back and they immediately replaced him with Jeff Wilson.
The one play last week where I felt might have been a little reckless was the Taysom Hill rushing over. Without Olave things looked like they were lining up for a bigger Taysom Hill day, but he only saw one carry for one yard.
Oh, and maybe the funniest (or not funny) play of last week was betting on Bijan Robinson’s overs in his best matchup all year in a game where the weather was one of the worst we saw all season and received 7 carries. Shoutout Arthur Smith.
Feels like I’ve said this every week but it’s just not been a good year.
Underdog Pick ‘Em of the Week
This is centered around Rachaad White as my favorite play of the week and game scripts we could see play out in this environment.
I think throwing a Lawrence under is fine as well potentially in this type of model but I went with Etienne personally.
Best Bets
Rachaad White under 71.5 rushing yards -115 (MGM)
(written from Discord on 12/21)
I’m so fucking sick and tired of losing unders to inefficient RBs in tough matchups. One of my favorite plays of the year and we’re getting such a high line on White because of what he has done his last four games. And yes he has been better recently, but this has mainly been volume dependent. Using 74.5 as the barometer White went under this number in every game leading up the past four games.
So what changed? Well, White has had some pretty easy matchups the last four games. Three of his four easiest matchups if the year according to Rush D DVOA have come in these past four weeks and he has capitalized! This includes three of the bottom 10 teams in rush D DVOA. The Jaguars are currently ranked 6th in Rush D DVOA and are also a pass funnel defense.
He’s faced four other defense in the top eight of pass funnels and here were his average rushing stats per game: 9.75 attempts for 33.25 yards.
It should be noted that these were really good teams he played against like the 49ers, Lions, Eagles and Bills in which they lost by an average of 11.8 points and naturally were playing in negative game script. We know this game should be close with a 2.5 spread in this game but White has some interesting splits in games the Bucs have won vs lost as he only has 12.4 attempts in games they’ve lost and 19.3 attempts in games they’ve won.
What I’m saying is that in a scenario where the Bucs lose are in negative game script this bet is extremely likely to hit and even in a game where they win it’s still decently likely he’s going to be inefficient and would need big volume to overcome this. Line is at least 5 yards too high.
Risk 1.725 units to win 1.5 units
Play to 68.5