As usual, I am going to take a dive into the week’s slate of games and try to dig up some trends. Hopefully, they give us an edge when making game selections each week. For Wild Card Weekend, we're going to split the slate into Saturday's AFC matchups and Sunday's NFC games.
Of course, trends are trends…until they’re not. Sometimes betting on the other end of a trend ending can be advantageous. The goal here isn’t to plant a flag based on a trend, rather to simply shine a spotlight on these trends that exist and talk through some of them as food for thought.
Wild Card Weekend Overview
Just as a brief overview, I'll touch on some big-picture numbers since the NFL expanded to 32 teams and their current playoff format in 2002. Over that span, playing underdogs has been fortuitous. Dogs in the Wild Card Round are 37-30-1 against the line (55.9%). Of course, that also means that home field has held no true advantage for the start of the postseason, with road teams going 36-31-1 (54.4%). Over the past two seasons, home teams (all eight were favorites) are a combined 0-8 against the spread.
One other ongoing trend for the start of the playoffs is lower-scoring games than expected. The Wild Card Round has been an under magnet, with 60.3% (41-of-68) of those games falling short of the implied total. That's held true of late, with unders going 6-2 over the past two seasons. If you played every under over those 17 seasons, you would have 10 winning seasons and just three losing ones, with the last season in which more Wild Card overs hit was in 2011. Since that 2011 season, under have hit in 20-of-28 (71.4%) Wild Card Round games.
Bills at Texans
The Bills have been one of the better teams to bet on this season, going 9-5-2 against the spread this season, which ranked fourth in the league. They were an even better bet on the road, posting a league-best 6-0-2 record against the spread as a road team while holding a strong 5-2-2 record against the line as an underdog.
Buffalo games also fancied the under, going 12-4 under the implied game total, which was tied for the Steelers for the most games to the under in the league. Buffalo games averaged a league-low 35.8 combined points per game.
Josh Allen will be making his first career postseason start, which typically has been a tough spot to bet. Since the NFL expanded to 32 teams in 2002, first-time playoff starters have a 10-28 record (11-27 against the spread) against a non-first time playoff starting quarterback. Since 2013, those first-time playoff quarterbacks are just 2-13 (3-12 ATS) in those spots.
On the road, quarterbacks in that spot have fared slightly better, going 6-13 both heads up and against the spread, but those teams have gone 1-6 both straight up and versus the spread since 2011. The last first-time playoff starter to win on the road was Marcus Mariota against Kansas City in 2017.
If looking for a game edge, the game total has gone under the total 28 times in those 38 games. There’s some symmetry in combining that with the Bills’ penchant for playing low-scoring games this season.
Houston has been a sketchy bet at best in this spot this season. At home, Houston was just 2-6 against the spread and as a favorite, they went just 1-5-1 against the line.
Houston has its own playoff struggles to deal with. Under Bill O’Brien, the Texans have posted a 1-3 record heads up and against the spread in the postseason, being outscored by 14 or more points in all three losses. That includes a 21-7 loss to the Colts in this same spot a year ago at home in which Deshaun Watson fell into the trend of first-time playoff starters facing a non-first time starter discussed above.
Titans at Patriots
As mentioned in the worksheet writeup for this game, the Titans have been lighting up the scoreboard since turning over their offense to Ryan Tannehill in Week 7. They’ve been a sound bet over that span (6-3-1 ATS), but as a byproduct of their offense playing so well, they have been an over machine. The game total has gone over the total in nine of those 10 games with an average of 54.3 combined points per game in those contests.
Of course, this is also Tannehill’s first career postseason game while this is Tom Brady’s 41st, firmly flying right into the trend laid out with Josh Allen and the Bills in first-time quarterbacks facing a veteran playoff starting quarterback. Tannehill is no stranger to playing the Patriots, or playing Foxboro, but it hasn’t been kind. Tannehill-led teams are 0-6 straight up and against the spread playing in New England.
The Patriots have also been a tough team to go against at home in the postseason. Under Bill Belichick, New England has a 20-3 record in the postseason at home, but has been more mortal against the line, going 13-9-1 against the spread in those games. Recently, that hasn’t been the case, however. New England has won nine straight home playoff games, going 7-2 against the spread in those games.
Under Belichick, the Patriots are also 10-0 (6-3-1 ATS) in home Saturday playoff games, going 5-1 ATS over their past six, with all six of those games going over the game total.
This is a spot we typically don’t see the Patriots in since they have consistently had a first-round bye with Wild Card Weekend off. Of those 23 home playoff games, just three have come in the Wild Card Round, with the last one coming all the way back in 2010.
For the 2019 season, the Patriots were a middling bet, going 8-7-1 against the spread, their worst mark in a season since 2015. They went 2-6 against the spread over the final eight weeks of the season.
They were also just 3-4-1 against the line at home, their first sub-.500 season against the spread at home since 2008 and failed to cover in each of their past four home games.
