Cash money, hos.

With football season upon us, this seems like a good time to spend more time with the fam gamble away life savings on some convoluted pyramid scheme of a system.  And boy do I does Tuesday Morning Quarterback have one for you!  The only thing that matters about systems is that you say they are guaranteed to make you very rich and you say this very loudly.  So here goes – THIS SYSTEM IS FLAWLESS!  IT CANNOT FAIL!  IT WILL MAKE YOU RICH ENOUGH TO BUY A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY!  ALL CAPS!

Sold?  How could you not be.  Gregg Easterbrook, known affectionately as TMQ, is the best columnist on the interwebs, in my humble opinion.  He is bright, funny, and often contrarian, but never for the sole purpose of being a dick (not that we know anyone who does that).  Plus until this year, his picture on espn.com was black and white.  Anyone who is too good for colory pictures is all right in my book.

TMQ has espoused for years that fooseball analysts and experts typically have no idea what they are talking about and over-complicate things to make themselves seem more experty than anyone else, and football can be boiled down to a very simple axiom: better teams typically win more.  The next part of the theory is this (brace yourselves) – over time, better teams have better records than teams that aren’t as good.  The third part is – home teams have a slight advantage, ceteris paribus.  You like how I mixed in some Latin to make myself seem smarter?  I’m a natural born analyst and expert. It means “all things being equal”.  Don’t ask me to pronounce it.  See?  That was another self-aggrandizing joke because Latin is mo’ deader than Moose Knuckle.  Let’s move on.  The last part is that Week 17 is a crapshoot.  That’s it.

So here is how you pick the games. 

1. Pick the team with the better record. 
2. If the teams have the same record, pick the home team. 
3. Don’t pick on Week 17. 

According to TMQ and his geeky readers who crunch numbers, this system is wildly more successful than the experts.  Of course, I proved empirically that my baby is just as good as the basketball folks.  That post was actually published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and by “New England Journal of Medicine”, I mean “this blog”.  Back to football - picking winners is different than making money, and what hasn’t been discussed is whether it is a successful system for gambling purposes. Teams with better records are typically favored anyway, which makes them safer choices but lower values from a gambling perspective, so the system encourages risking less to mitigate potential losses while having a small but certain profit.  Or so I think.  The real money is to be made by picking live ‘dogs, but since it is impossible to know which dogs are Best in Show and which are curs, it seems safer to use TMQ’s loss-mitigation strategy.  Here is a long thing on risk aversion and the Von Neumann-Morgenstern Theory if you are an enormous flaming dork interested.

The system intuitively does seem to play it safe, but here is the potential downside: early in the season, bad teams may have an inflated record because they face bad competition, and good teams may lose a few close games to other good teams.  So a mediocre team that starts 4-2 might finish 6-10 (like the Lions a few years ago), but you’d still have to bet on them until their record gets worse than the teams they are facing.  If you use judgement in deviating from the system, you might as well not be using the system at all.  My sense is the first quarter of the season will lose money because of variables like chance, scheduling, and small body of work.  If I remembered my stats classes I’d do a better job at describing this stuff.  The first week should be the worst of the season.  The second quarter might break even as teams start to perform at their true potential but the aggregate record won’t yet set apart the good teams from the mediocre ones.  The third and the fourth quarters should be profitable as things tend to work themselves out.   

The system is so easy, it can be used by Dudes Who Don’t Live in Their Parents’ Basement and Don’t Read Good. In fact, it will be.  I’ll keep a scorecard by using TMQ’s system and the Vegas line on Thursdays for each game.  I’ll bet $100 fake dollars on each game and see what my fake profit/loss is each week.  I’ll write a brief paragraph about how the system is doing, probably in the Thursday smear.  If you have a system of your own, or are arrogant enough to think you can beat the house, or are demented enough to track someone else’s system, feel free to play along. The important thing is to get the gambling lines at a consistent time before the weeks’ games start.  AND GET SO RICH YOU’LL BE CRAPPING BENJAMINS!