All odds and percentages as of Tuesday at 3:30 p.m. ET
While perusing over/unders and betting-market percentages earlier today, I noticed something odd. Generally speaking, most folks love points and understandably love taking overs.
There are 3,840 NFL regular-season games in our database. Here's how the betting market has looked:
- Overs getting 70+%: 1350 times (35.2%)
- Overs getting 60+%: 2596 times (67.6%)
- Overs getting 51+%: 3289 times (85.7%)
- Unders getting 51+%: 443 times (11.5%)
- Unders getting 60+%: 128 times (3.3%)
- Unders getting 70+%: 30 times (0.8%)
Overs get the majority of the bets nearly 86% of the time. So in a normal week, you'd expect to see two or three games in which the over does not have the majority of bets. Meanwhile, popular unders are a rare occasion, especially those getting 60%-70% or more of bets.
That's why I was pretty darned surprised to see this week's betting percentages, which are pretty mature considering how long they've been out.
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TEN games are currently receiving the majority of bets on the under and ZERO overs are getting more than 55%. Quite an oddity.
And we're not just talking a bunch of unders getting 52% of bets or something like that. There are seven unders getting more than 60% of bets, and four of them are exceeding 70%.
Mind-boggling to say the least.
This is especially interesting considering the plethora of high-scoring games this preseason due to the new helmet rule. For more on the impact that will have on over/unders, check out P.J. Walsh's breakdown with former NFL lineman Geoff Schwartz.
As he notes, unders have fared well in Week 1 historically, but not to such an extreme extent that result in crazy percentages such as this.
I do expect the percentages to drop a bit as we push toward Sunday, but we'll definitely end up with more public unders than expected.
