Evaluating the Efficiency of the National Football League Betting Market by Testing the Profitability of Suggested Gambling Rules

Abstract

Gambling on professional sports is becoming more popular across the country as states legalize the practice, causing more participants to seek out profitable betting strategies. A number of academic papers over the past 40 years have found profitable gambling rules on National Football League games. We show that six of these supposedly profitable strategies identified previously in the literature fail to hold up over other time frames. The betting market in football is not inefficient with respect to the situations covered by these six strategies and the rules are not long-run profitable.