NFL Moneyline Bets Explained
As legendary football coach Red Sanders once said, winning isn’t everything – it’s the only thing. Sports betting revolves around winners; if you’re one of the millions of football fans placing NFL bets in Canada and across the Americas, you’re cheering for your favourite teams and players to succeed. When they win, you win.
Granted, when you bet NFL spreads at Bodog Sportsbook, the underdog on the NFL odds board can lose the game and still cover if they keep it close. And if you take the Under on NFL prop bets like Total Passing Yards, you’re hoping the players in question fail at their job. These wagers can be lots of fun as well.
But with NFL moneyline odds – including those incredibly popular Super Bowl moneyline bets – you simply pick the team you think will win the game straight-up. If they succeed, your bet pays out; if the game ends in a tie, the result is a push, and your money is returned.
Moneyline Bets
NFL moneyline bets have been around as long as the league itself – over 100 years now. They remain popular to this day because moneyline bets are easy to wrap your head around: If your team wins, you win, if they lose, you lose, and on those rare occasions when the game ends in a tie, everyone gets their money back.
To show you how moneylines look at Bodog Sportsbook, let’s go back in time to one of the classics: Super Bowl XLIV between the Indianapolis Colts and New Orleans Saints. We’ll show you how much you would have been paid in the next section.
NFL Moneyline Odds
As with all NFL moneyline bets at Bodog, the amount you get paid with Super Bowl moneyline bets depends on the odds you locked in when placing your wager. With most games, there’s a favourite and an underdog, and they each have their own odds. Using the “American odds” format, the favourite typically has a negative sign (“–“) in front of their odds, whereas the underdog has a positive sign (“+”).
Let’s take a look at the moneyline for Super Bowl XLIV:\nNew Orleans Saints +180\nIndianapolis Colts –220\nPeyton Manning and the Colts were the Super Bowl favourites on the moneyline at Bodog after leading the league at 14-2 during the regular season, although the Saints weren’t far behind at 13-3. NFL moneyline odds are easy to understand using the American format; when you see a negative sign, the amount shown is how much you’d have to wager to win $100. In this case, a $220 bet on the Colts would have paid $100.
For underdog payouts, the amount you see next to the positive sign is how much you’ll win if you bet $100. Betting that amount on the underdog Saints at Super Bowl XLIV would yield a $180 payout if they were to pull off the upset – which they did, winning 31-17.
There are also times when the two teams in a game are so closely ranked, they’ll both have negative signs next to their odds, with the favourite having the bigger number. For example, a team priced at –115 would be a slight favourite over a team priced at –105. The game might even be a “pick ‘em” with each team priced at –110. But in most cases using the American odds format, you’ll be looking at one team with negative odds and one team with positive odds.
Although this way of reading NFL moneylines is based on $100 bets/payouts, you can wager any amount you like within the minimums and maximums allowed at Bodog Sportsbook. For example, a $22 bet on the Colts would have paid $10, while a $10 bet on the Saints earned $18.
How do NFL moneyline bets work
As a general rule, the oddsmakers here at Bodog Sportsbook try to balance the “action” (i.e. the amount of money wagered) between each team on the moneyline by adjusting the odds, which can change frequently up until kick-off. Going back to our Super Bowl 44 example, the Colts were available at –185 the week of the Big Game, but because so many people bet on Indianapolis, their odds were moved to –200 and eventually to –220, while the Saints shifted from +165 all the way to +180.
The increased potential payout for New Orleans, combined with the pricier odds for Indianapolis, helped encourage more bets on the underdog, thus balancing the action at Bodog and making payouts easier to process. Whichever odds you have when you place your bet are locked in once you submit your Bet Slip.
NFL Spreads betting vs Moneyline bets
Moneyline bets used to be the only way to get your money down on a football game. Then the NFL point spread was invented in the 1940s, and sports betting would never be the same. The NFL spread proved so popular, it became part of the larger sports narrative, printed in the daily newspapers alongside the box scores and talked about on the Sunday pre-game shows.
If you’re already familiar with NFL spread betting, the moneyline should be a breeze. There’s no point spread to worry about, and no half-points, either; the only way an NFL game can push on the moneyline is if it ends in a tie (including overtime), or if the game is graded No Action because of some rare event like a lightning storm or a hurricane.
NFL Moneyline betting strategy
Bet for NFL Favourites or underdogs
First, the more lopsided a game is, the more polarized the moneyline odds will become. That often results in poor betting value for the favourites, but you can sometimes find great value betting the underdogs in these situations.
When we say “polarized” in this sense, we mean the odds for the teams in question grow further apart as the game becomes more of a mismatch. The bigger the favourites, the less risk there is that they’ll lose, so you get a smaller reward when they win. This effect gets more pronounced as the moneyline odds for the favourite get shorter.
This doesn’t always mean you’ll find more value with the underdogs when you bet on the NFL at Bodog. But if you pay close enough attention, you’ll find games where the long shots are just too good to pass up.