Sports gambling posting boards are generally good for a few laughs but rarely for worthwhile information. The most comical case of wasting bandwidth is the futility of the "just pick the team that wins outright" cliché.
Now a sport betting website pays tens of thousands of dollars to have FoxSports.com carry their infomercial videos and the guy starts out telling you how amazed he is that "the team that wins outright covers 85 percent of the time."
No offense but these would be handicappers don't know what they are talking about and we can only hope they can get enough clients to subsidize the bookmakers.
"When an underdog wins they cover 100 percent of the time," reminds Max Hartman of Lines-Maker.com. The favorite cannot cover unless they win outright. It's impossible. The only scenario in which a team can win and not cover against the Vegas odds is when the favorite wins but by a smaller margin than the spread.
Not shockingly the numb nuts who perpetuate unscientific preposterousness almost always quote stats relevant to the NBA or NFL betting. In college sports there are more mismatches and hence larger spreads where the margin is larger for a favorite to win and not cover.
If a team is a 3.5 point favorite the only way the team that wins will not cover is for the favorite to win by one, two or three points. Any other result will have the team that wins covering. At what percentage do these half-wits think a team should win and not cover?
Obviously the stupidity of this widely circulated inductive blather can be refuted from now until eternity. Or at least until an underdog wins but fails to cover, whichever comes last. But to those who subscribe to it as if there is any logic, thanks for keeping the books in business for the rest of us.
Since the prevailing premise behind this urban myth is "it's so much easier to pick the SU winner than the spread winner" why don't these fancied geniuses just pick dog winner after dog winner on the moneyline?
There are plenty of underdogs that win outright, many huge dogs in fact. If one wants to postulate how much easier it is to pick the SU winner, why waste such foreknowledge on collecting $100 for every $110 risked? Just keep picking those 250 dogs and get your money's worth.
I don't want to ruin this fool's gold with such a logical question, but like I keep saying, I guess those pipe dreamers are needed to keep the sportsbooks in business for the rest of us.
No oddsmaker will go broke underestimating the intelligence of the betting public. Wow, we just discovered that the team that scores the most points wins more than 99 percent of the time. Let me purchase valuable webcasting time on Fox Sports to impress you with my discovery.
The author Joe Duffy is CEO of OffshoreInsiders.com, the single most respected sports handicapping site on the World Wide Web.
