Andy the oddsmaker

Just to see if I've gotten any good at this predicting business (and 11 games above .500, I'm doing something right), I went through this week's 14 NFL matchups to see how well I could predict the line for each game. I'm not bad, but there's room for improvement.

Aggregate for the 14 games, I was off by 27.5 points, averaging to just under two points off per game on my estimate. This is pretty good - I think with practice I could get close to a point per. I got two exact and three others within a half-point (including the Browns at +9.5 instead of the actual 9). My biggest mistake was Houston-Miami; I guessed the Texans +3 and they're actually -3. Take that away, and I'm closer to 1.6 ppg away from the correct Vegas lines.

Once thing I noticed is that I consistently gave the road team more points than the pros did. Of my 27.5 points of error, 22 (80 percent) were by giving the road team too much credit, including my 6-point swing on Miami-Houston. Even tossing that outlier away, 75 percent of my error was in the road team's favor. The lesson is not to underestimate home teams. Either that or bet a bunch of road dogs this weekend.