Originally Posted by
guy Fawkes
I respect your thinking and applaud you for trying to do something a little different, but I don't think you've really thought this through. Firstly, you are claiming 80% success - and I have no doubt you are correct and possibly even underestimating it. You are also claiming a 4000 to win 700 parlay. If you are claiming that 80% of parlays will hit, you're losing an average of 240 every parlay or if you're claiming 80% of individual plays will hit you are losing every other parlay with a 1 in 5 exception.
Okay, so let's say that's an underestimation. Given the 4000 to win 700 on 4 ML parlay, you're assuming about -2500 each...you could give just about any stat on any number of teams around this number and they will all support a strong winning correlation. What I mean by that is you could say anything in this range "Any team that has/does ___________ rating playing against a team that has/does ___________ rating that is being offered at -2500 or higher will win at an 80% rate". In reality, you could probably claim this same statement with a (anything lower than 96%) winning rate and you'd still probably be right.
For your particular statistic, you are also taking numbers that the books will be strongly biased towards or are skewed for various reasons. Using your figure and trying to come up with a 100 rating-point difference (where a team is favored on both offense and defense), you arrive at teams that look like this:
Team A: Offense 10th Defense 10th - Team B: Offense 60th Defense 60th
Team A: Offense 10th Defense 90th - Team B: Offense 109th Defense 91st
Team A: Offense 90th Defense 10th - Team B: Offense 91st Defense 109th
No matter how you slice it you are taking a team with either a huge advantage on one-side of the ball or greatly better on both sides of the ball. Any line offered on any of the three above teams would be a very large favorite, unless the line is skewed due to division, FCS opponents, etc. If you are meaning to indicate that teams with skewed statistics are where your value lies, I'd say you are working backwards.
Again, I applaud you for thinking outside of the box on this one. Unfortunately, I think you may need to fine tune your numbers or clarify exactly how this proves profitable.
Edit: If on the other hand, you could find a correlation between your statistic and something else that provides +EV on plays (for instance a 60-40 record on -110 games) then you would have a very valuable tool.