Welcome to Week 1! I can’t tell you how excited I am for this football season to get started. Vegas set the lines for these games almost a month ago, before preseason even began, and there’s been a bit of movement in a few games since then, but most lines have stayed pretty much the same. I think many people put a lot of stock in the changes that teams make from season to season (draft picks, free agent signings, coaching and system changes) but in truth the players and philosophy that make up the team’s core rarely change all that much during the offseason. Vegas tends to use this misconception to set a few traps. The computer’s historical performance in Week 1 doesn’t deviate much from its overall performance; the Weighted Win Percentage (WWP) is 54.3% compared to a lifetime WWP of 55.6%. Hedge bets during the first week tend to perform poorly, but this is balanced by the flip bets, which do quite well. There’s only one team that the computer is 90% confident about this week, and that’s the Atlanta Falcons. But the largest bet of the week is actually Philadelphia, where over 1/3 of the models call for a bet on the Eagles with 85% confidence. The other big bets are hedges on Denver, Detroit, and Oakland. It’s important to remember that the lines you see here are from when I placed my bets, and don’t necessarily reflect the final lines on each game. It’s also important that you listen to the computer, not me. The computer is better at this than I am. (more…)