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Our contrarian betting strategy had a slow Week 4, finishing 1-2 against the spread (ATS), dropping our overall season record to 9-7 ATS. However, including the bad week, we still sit at a profitable 56.3 percent ATS through four weeks, keeping us ahead of the 52.4 percent break-even point for spread betting.
As a whole, contrarian betting is off to a very solid start this season, with underdogs covering at a rate of 54.2 percent. Furthermore, NFL teams receiving 40 percent less of spread bets are 24-16 (60 percent) ATS, for a profit of more than six units.
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Looking ahead to Week 5's slate of games, not much jumped out at me in terms of classic contrarian betting strategies. Existing systems already created inside Bet Labs are showing only a handful of matches for this week, while testing new theories and systems hasn't pointed to new angles, either. In these scenarios, it's important to not force plays just for "action."
Remember, our goal is to employ contrarian betting strategies in order to identify teams or plays offering value. If value doesn't appear to be available, we'll simply take what we can get and move on to the next week. With this in mind, I turned to a system that focuses on games between divisional opponents that has produced a 57.5 percent ATS win rate since 2003 and is offering two bets for NFL Week 5.
To get started, I used our Bet Labs software to isolate the ATS performance of underdogs playing opponents from the same division. While underdogs in division games alone don't offer much value, our ATS win rate steadily improves as we look at larger underdogs.
The table below summarizes these results: