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Matthew Freedman’s 2022 NFL Projected Win Totals & Bets

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As a full-on degenerate and aspiring sharp, I’ve recently created a projection model (a.k.a. a multi-colored spreadsheet) for NFL spreads and over/unders.

This model, which takes into account home-field advantage and a number of other factors, is driven primarily by my proprietary power ratings. “Proprietary,” because only my brain is wild enough to assign some of these neutral-site opponent-agnostic numbers to these teams.

What are the factors that I take into account when creating and adjusting my power ratings? I obviously look at some basic stats — like #QBWinz and #SuperBowlVictories — but after that I consider two main sources of data.

  1. The betting market itself, specifically odds to win the Super Bowl, conference and division: This helps me anchor my rankings to a “skin in the game”-based reality.
  2. On-field team-level statistics (with some player-focused adjustments), specifically expected points added (EPA), success rate and yards per play: This helps me (hopefully) maintain a degree of objectivism.

With my power ratings, I can use my model to create projected spreads for every NFL game in the regular season — and then I can convert these spreads into win probabilities, which I can add together to get a projected win total for each team.

And that’s exactly what I’ve done.

In this piece, you’ll see my projected 2022 win totals, which — when compared to the win totals on our BettingPros odds page — highlight several exploitable opportunities in the betting market.