Misleading Final Scores
One of the common phrases relating to sports is that the better team doesn't always win. This is especially evident in football, where the better team doesn't always win. And if they do win, many times it's by a margin that is much smaller or much larger than it should have been.The most famous example of the wrong team winning a game was the Kansas City at Pittsburgh game that took place on Dec. 21, 1986. The Pittsburgh Steelers outgained the Chiefs 515 to 171, but managed to lose the game outright, as Kansas City scored three special teams touchdowns and forced the Steelers into kicking four field goals.
As bettors, we're left wondering what to do in this situation. Are the Chiefs the better team or are the Steelers?
Logic would say that the Steelers are the better team, but sports betting and logic don't always go together. If they did, everybody would be hitting 75 percent of their wagers.
Looking at How Games Were Played
Bettors today have one definite advantage over bettors 10 or 15 years ago and that's the availability of stats and boxscores via the Internet. Boxscores that show the basics, such as yards gained, turnovers and how each score was made are plentiful on the Internet. It can be time consuming to poor over each one, but for serious bettors, it's time that is usually well spent.As a general rule, teams should score one point for every 16 yards gained, so a team that out-gains its opponent by 160 yards should win by 10 points. When a team out-gains its opponent by 35 yards and still wins by 17 points, something isn't quite right.
Usually the point differential will be caused by turnovers or incredibly good or bad special teams, with penalties the occasional culprit.
Bettors with more time on their hands should not only look at the boxscores, but look at the play by play breakdown of the game, which will show an even truer indication of exactly what happened on the field. Where turnovers occurred is a critical factor that shouldn't be overlooked.
Misleading Basketball Finals
While we've primarily touched on football, basketball isn't exempt from the wrong team winning or the final score not being very indicative of what transpired on the court. A team could have had an exceptionally abnormal shooting night, either good or bad, saw its two best players get in uncharacteristic early foul trouble or turned a four-point deficit into an 11-point loss in the last 45 seconds by fouling and missing several 3-pointers in an attempt to get back in the game.Again, this is where the play-by-play will come in handy, especially in college basketball, as all sorts of strange things can happen down the stretch. It's also good to see what happened during "garbage time" in the NBA, where a team could be leading by 20 points for most of the game and end up winning by 8.
Misleading Finals and Power Ratings
Now that we have an idea of what we're looking for, the key question is how do we use it?As we mentioned in the previous article, Updating Power Ratings, some subjectivity comes into play and this is one of those areas.
As a general rule, if the final score is misleading from the way the game was played, I won't adjust the ratings for both teams as much as I would just using final scores.
As an example, if a college basketball is expected to lose by 10 points in the power ratings, but wins the game by five, they should have their power rating increased by two points, while the losing team should see a 2-point decrease in their ratings.
But on a closer look, if the team that won typically shoots 30-percent from the 3-point line, but ended up going 12 for 17 from long range, I may use a 1-point adjustment, or more likely, not use any adjustment. Not only would I expect that team to not duplicate its 3-point shooting the next game, but to borrow a horse racing term, I wouldn't be surprised to see them to "bounce" and have an abnormally bad shooting night from behind the arc.
While I likely would not increase the winning team's power rating, I still may decrease the loser's rating, especially if 3-point defense was a weak spot to begin with. While it may be just a one-point decrease, it could be the full two points if allowing a high percentage of 3-pointers was becoming a trend.
Likewise, I'd do a similar analysis of football games and make adjustments accordingly. Using the above example of the Kansas City Chiefs and Pittsburgh, I would only increase Kansas City's rating or decrease Pittsburgh's if scoring or allowing special teams touchdowns was something that both did on a consistent basis.
I'm not going to say this will be easy, as a lot of time is involved, but by using a bit of judgment, you will have more accurate ratings than anybody who just uses final scores as the basis for adjusting power ratings.
