🤠 Is America’s Team No. 1?

We have a LOT of Cowboys fans on staff, but even we can’t get behind the new market enthusiasm for Jerrah’s team…

In today’s Betting Life Newsletter presented by BetMGM:

The Cowboys: Are they REALLY this good?
Anytime TD Prop: Rock out with your Hockenson out!
1.1M People: Sports betting continues to grow.
Week 2 is Overreaction Week: How to avoid the traps.
TNF: The spread moves toward the Vikings.
It’s 9/14. Take it away, Matthew Freedman…

Power. Everyone wants it.

Foucault. Palpatine. Run game coordinators.

Almost all I can think about during the football season is power…power ratings, that is.

💪 Power Ratings vs. Power Rankings

A lot of people conflate power ratings and rankings, but they’re different.

For the NFL, a power rating is a point value assigned to a team in a vacuum, regardless of opponent, location, and other factors.

Example: Entering this season, I had the Chiefs power rated at +6. I considered them six points better than an average team on a neutral field.

Power rankings (to be reductive) are just rankings with the word “power” added on to make them seem fancy. They tend to correlate closely with win-loss records and are often overly focused on recent performance.

Ed Feng has a methodology for converting aggregated preseason power rankings into predictive power ratings, but most power rankings have little worth to sports bettors.

Power ratings, though, are valuable.

💰 The Best Power Ratings in the World

I can’t say definitively that the best power ratings in the world are the Massey-Peabody ratings (housed by our friends at Unabated) — but they might be.

Created by Cade Massey (Professor at Wharton) and Rufus Peabody (future sports betting Hall of Famer, seriously), the Massey-Peabody ratings for years have been a profitable gold standard for sports bettors to use and other power raters to emulate.

Like most power ratings, Massey-Peabody is derived from on-field production data and intended to be actionably predictive of what we’ll see in NFL games and the betting market.

I’d call these “bottom-up ratings.”

📈 Market-Based Power Ratings

There are other power ratings I’d call “top-down ratings.” They’re based on the various lines available in the betting market and are intended to be more descriptive or representative than predictive.

Such rankings basically say, “Regardless of whatever you think about these teams, here’s how the market values all of them right now relative to each other.” And that’s valuable information to have because the market tends toward efficiency and is itself predictive.

Mike Beuoy has been rendering market-extracted power ratings for years at Inpredictable, and Ben Baldwin posts his market-obtained ratings on social media every week.

Here’s what stands out to me most when I look at Beuoy and Baldwin’s current ratings: The Cowboys are No. 1.

🤠 Cowboys at the Top

It’s not just that the Cowboys are No. 1. They’re No. 1 by a lot. They’re in a tier of their own.

Here are Beuoy and Baldwin’s averaged ratings for the top five.

Cowboys: +7.75
49ers: +6.1
Chiefs: +6.0
Bills: +5.5
Eagles: +4.85

While I normally use market ratings as a reality check, the market right now (in my opinion) is way out of touch with reality and also itself when it comes to the Cowboys.

If they were to play the Chiefs this week in Europe, there’s zero chance — ZERO CHANCE — that they’d be favored by 1.5-2 points.

This offseason, sportsbooks posted a line of -0.5 for the Cowboys at home against the Eagles on Sunday Night Football in Week 14. Since then — without major injuries hitting the Eagles — the Cowboys have gone from being barely favored at home to almost three points better on a neutral field?

This is ridiculous, and it’s an overreaction to the Cowboys’ 40-0 smackdown of the Giants in Week 1.

Based on the market’s implied ratings, the Cowboys are massively overvalued right now.

I’m not saying we should all bet the Jets +9.5 this weekend.

But this is a reminder that even efficient markets can be very wrong — and this might be an opportunity for bettors who don’t mind hating themselves.

💎 A Thursday Night Game Ripe with Opportunity

Two of the NFC’s best offenses collide in Week 2...

The Vikings and Eagles square off TONIGHT in what should be a high-scoring, action-packed affair.

With so many points expected, it’s only right that you prioritize getting in on the action and scoring a touchdown of your own with BetMGM.

With BetMGM’s First Bet Offer, you can get up to $1,500 paid back in bonus bets if your first bet does not win.

How? It’s simple:

Sign up for a new BetMGM account
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Thanks to BetMGM, you can bet on the game without worrying about sweating your first bet.

Speaking of first bets, Geoff Ulrich has you covered for tonight.

🏈 Geoff is Betting: T.J. Hockenson Anytime TD (+200)

“This will be the first time the Eagles will see Hockenson with the Vikings, and it will likely be a matchup the Vikings try to exploit — much like the Patriots did — with their athletic TEs.

Hockenson posted a 19% target share in week 1 against Tampa Bay and converted 9 targets into 8 catches.

His low aDOT from Week 1 may be concerning, but considering how loosely the Eagles played the Patriots TEs, he’ll likely have a little more room in the red zone and potential for explosive plays this week.”

PLACE YOUR BET

No one is as awful as they look when they’re running bad, and no one is as brilliant as they look when they’re running good. It works for betting, and it works for actual team performance. Thankfully, the Unabated staff is here to break down how to avoid these Week 1 overreactions and see through the smoke…

It just doesn’t work for Gang Green, who will never have nice things because God clearly hates the Jets. (And even they managed to pull out a win on Monday!)

Week 2 is when the betting public tends to overreact to everything they saw in Week 1. The narratives are forming, and the public is lining up to bet on those narratives.

But here are a couple of words of caution so you don’t fall into the same trap.

📊 Sample Size, Sample Size, Sample Size

Let’s take the case of the Giants, who got absolutely pantsed by the Cowboys on Sunday Night Football. (Maybe it’s the whole Meadowlands that’s cursed, not just the Jets.)

It’s natural to look at that 40-0 beatdown and conclude New York is awful and the Cowboys are a juggernaut. We have a couple of data points (among them, “40” and “0”) that tell an unusual story.

The human brain is wired to instinctively look for patterns formed by that data.

But what is less instinctive is understanding sample size.

Right now, we’ve got a sample size of one week. It’s not enough to build an accurate sense of what’s going on this year. The Monday Night Football overtime coin toss came up heads. You wouldn’t assume from that that every OT toss will land heads just from that. (Especially not when tails never fails.)

✍️ The Two Types of Overreaction

There are two directions that people tend to overreact in these situations, and they both rely on the availability heuristic, which is a type of cognitive bias that uses events that are more easily recalled to form judgments about the likelihood of future events.

In the positive direction, it can look like confirmation bias or hindsight bias: Something expected happened, so it will continue to happen. (“I expected the Cowboys to crush the Giants; therefore, the Giants will continue to get crushed.”)

On the opposite side, it’s when something unexpected happens, so you expect it to continue to happen again. (“I expected the Vikings to roll the Bucs and they lost; therefore, the Vikings are terrible.”)

🦅 Minnesota Vikings at Philadelphia Eagles

Spread: Eagles -6.5 (-110, BetMGM)
Total: 49.0
Moneylines: Vikings +220/Eagles -275

From an injury perspective, there are a few notables worth discussing. Vikings center Garrett Bradbury exited the team’s Week 1 matchup after just seven snaps, and he’s been ruled out vs. the Eagles. Bradbury earned the top Pro Football Focus grade of his career in 2022, ranking as the 10th-best center in football.

Austin Schlottman represents a clear downgrade as his replacement, which wouldn’t be great against Fletcher Cox and Jalen Carter.

On the other side, the Eagles are dealing with a couple of absences in their secondary. James Bradberry and Reid Blankenship have both been ruled out, and missing pieces of your secondary against Justin Jefferson is a recipe for disaster.

Additionally, Kenneth Gainwell has been ruled out after dominating the Eagles’ backfield touches in Week 1, while Cox is questionable but expected to play.

None of these injuries are true game-changers, but the Eagles are in slightly worse shape at the moment.

That helps explain why this number has moved in the Vikings’ favor. The Eagles were favored by a full touchdown at opening, but they’re down to 6.5 on BetMGM.

That number has even gotten to six at other locations, thanks largely to some big bets on Minnesota. They’ve racked up 52% of the spread dollars on just 34% of the bets (via the Action Network), so most of the significant wagers have sided with the underdogs.

Minnesota was a clear regression candidate in 2023 after a fluky 2022 season. They were roughly a .500 team disguised as a 13-win unit, thanks mainly to an unsustainable 11-0 record in one-score games. The Vikings were never going to be able to duplicate that success, so they were going to win fewer games by default.

We saw the regression hit immediately in Week 1 when they lost a game vs. the Buccaneers that they probably should’ve won. They were the better team, outgaining the Bucs by 127 yards, but three turnovers did them in.

The Eagles were never really in trouble against the Patriots – their win probability was above 60% for most of the game – but their offense never really got going. They finished Week 1 24th in total yardage after ranking third in yards in 2022.

The good news is that this is a perfect matchup for their offense to bounce back. They match up well with the Vikings, evidenced by their 24-7 win in this spot last season. They racked up 486 yards of total offense while limiting the Vikings to 264 yards, and they have the cornerbacks to slow down Justin Jefferson.

Thursday Night Football also tends to give the better team the advantage. It’s a short week for both squads, so it’s less about preparation and more about who has the better players.

Favorites have gone 121-99-4 ATS on Thursday night since 2005 when both teams played on the previous Sunday.

The injuries in the secondary are a bit concerning, but with this line creeping down, I think this is a decent opportunity to buy low on one of the best teams in football.

More TNF Bets!