Jeff Haney crunches the numbers to find good over/under bets

Monday, May 8, 2006 | 7:26 a.m.

A couple of Las Vegas casinos have released NFL team regular-season win totals for 2006, with others likely to follow soon.

In his newsletter, "The Pinnacle Pulse," offshore oddsmaker Simon Noble recently outlined a method to analyze this popular wager, in which gamblers bet whether NFL teams will finish with "over" or "under'' a set number of victories.

The method involves using the sports analyst's version of the Pythagorean theorem, popularized years ago by baseball author Bill James and since fine-tuned and expanded to basketball and football.

In pro football, the idea is to take the number of points scored and allowed by a particular team, and plug them into a formula to determine whether that team was "lucky" or "unlucky'' in terms of how many games it won.

The formula for football is points scored squared divided by the sum of points scored squared and points allowed squared. That figure is then multiplied by 16, the number of games in the NFL's regular season, to yield what Noble calls a "baseline" number.

Noble suggests making another modification to account for the fact that historically NFL teams tend to revert to the mean of eight victories. If the baseline number is between 5 1/2 and 10 1/2 wins, adjust it a half-game toward eight; if it's outside those parameters, adjust it one full game toward eight.

Only then would you consider roster changes - mostly those involving veteran players, according to Noble. The NFL draft, for all the publicity it generates, is the least important factor in analyzing this wagering proposition, Noble says, as young, inexperienced players generally do not contribute much right away.

For example, last season the Denver Broncos scored 395 points and allowed 258, finishing with a record of 13-3. Plugging those numbers into the Pythagorean formula yields a baseline of 11.2 wins, suggesting the Broncos caught some lucky breaks and were fortunate to win 13 games. After adjusting for reversion to the mean, we get an over/under of 10.2 wins for the Broncos for the 2006 NFL season.

Lo and behold, when the Las Vegas Hilton sports book posted its season-win over/unders last week, the Broncos' total was set at 10 victories.

I ran the Pythagorean numbers for each NFL team to determine if the formula suggested any good bets. (For this article, I chose to ignore three teams involved with extraordinary circumstances that played havoc with betting lines - the Dallas Cowboys and Philadelphia Eagles, because of the bizarre Terrell Owens situation, and the New Orleans Saints, left homeless after Hurricane Katrina.)

Following are some of the notable discrepancies: