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NFL Futures: Best Bets for 2021 NFC & AFC Championships

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Betting on football, especially the NFL comes with distinct advantages/disadvantages. On the “negative side”, with 22 humans on the field on any given play, the amount of chaos leads to variance very few other sports see (when looking through the lens of a sports bettor). However, on the plus side, because of this high level of variance, we can often glean significant opportunities to profit from season-to-season because of the crazy variance, and regression that inevitably follows. With that, today we look at the best strategy/ideal play to bet on current futures in the AFC Championship Futures and NFC Championship Futures.

Compare odds from all major sportsbooks for AFC and NFC Champions >>

To kick us off, the odds for each conference’s respective 2021 Championship (3/17/21) are listed at:

Given these odds the place we’ll start is by setting a baseline performance metric. In other words, who were the best teams from 2020. Remember, wins are a mediocre indicator of success, and a terrible predictor of future performance, which is all we care about here. Let’s instead take a look at Football Outsiders DVOA (and variance) from last year to give us that baseline.

*Note DVOA teases out variance throughout games, adjusts for opponent strength and gives a performance metric relative to a replacement level.

*Note as predictive as the Football Outsiders DVOA numbers are, we’ve found including and combining the “team consistency DVOA metric”, aka variance, into one data-point, DVOA/Variance (think coefficient of variation from back in stats class) is the single most predictive team metric. It combines efficiency and consistency into one variable.

2020 DVOA numbers, eliminating garbage that’s not predictive will give us a great place to start, but we need to make adjustments given this is a bet based on 2021 outcomes. Understanding regression is key here. As noted in FPS’ article from last year, there are a few “team level” variables that are especially vulnerable to year-to-year regression. We will include the following “regression adjustments” to the above table:

  • PWT – Pythagorean win Theorem. Helps tease out close games won or lost and give a better indicator of performance by a team
  • Fum Rec – Fumble Recovery. Forcing fumbles is a skill, recovering them is not, its 100% luck. Luck changes, hence, teams are likely to move back to 50% overtime (good for low recovery teams from the year before, and bad for high recovery teams)
  • 3DR – Third down Rebound. 3DR is an effect studied by Football Outsiders that notes teams that perform disproportionately well on 3rd down vs. 1st and 2nd typically rebound back to their norm (and vice versa). 
  • YPP – Yards per Point. Somewhat double-dipping with PWT, but still necessary, YPP looks at how many yards you had to “pay” per point. This helps us understand teams that had “easy” scores, vs. difficult ones.

*Note these variables are NOT weighted, but we hope to include that next year. For now, we use this as a solid proxy of “going up or down”

Now that we have a baseline performance from last year, along with where regression is likely to take us (in the aggregate) lets look at how teams have improved (or not) up until this point, knowing the draft has not happened, so we’re only considering free agent and trade changes to the roster. We use Pro Football Focus’ Improvement Index to shed light on this variable and combine it with the 2020 DVOA.

Tying in regression and bringing it all together, the chart shapes up like this:

Parsing this all in with the odds, with an eye towards positive EV, our chart works out to this:

Best Bets to Win the AFC/NFC Championship

As you can see, this means when all is said and done the best AFC/NFC Championship futures best bets as of today are:

NFC: New Orleans Saints

AFC: Buffalo Bills

However, if you wanted to wager on the following teams, they all have positive numbers according to our model, and we wouldn’t blame you:

  • Tampa Bay Bucs
  • Los Angeles Rams
  • Green Bay Packers
  • Seattle Seahawks
  • *San Francisco 49ers (semi-dark horse)

If you look closely, you see a bunch of NFC teams up there, and no one besides the Bills. It’s why we believe (across all NFL Championship plays) the Buffalo Bills are the absolute best (most likely to hit x best profit) bet on the board as of today.

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