For basketball and football, point spread bets receive a ton of attention, but there’s also moneyline betting for these two sports. A common misconception is that there’s not enough value to be found on the moneyline in comparison to the spread. There are a lot of people out there beating the bookies every single weekend, making thousands and thousands of dollars a month betting football. These people follow strict rules and are. Serious enthusiasts like to bet on the NFL from the start of the preseason all the way until the Superbowl. They’ll find everything they need at SportsBetting.ag including NFL pointspreads, money lines, totals, props, futures, live betting and all of the statistical information necessary for successful handicapping. Scroll down for and read our NFL betting guide for gambling odds, and an introduction to the art of placing bets on the National Football League. Styles of Betting Odds on the National Football League “Old ladies with hat pins!” That's a phrase NFL experts once used to mock betting handicappers of the sports league.
NFL spread betting is probably the most common and popular way to bet on football as it adds some excitement and better odds from just picking an outright winner. If you are new to betting the NFL altogether, be sure to check out our great How to Bet on the NFL guide.
Ever wondered how you are actually doing in sports betting?
Just like tracking your finances can be an eye opening experience (I spent how much at restaurants last month?!), tracking your bets can shed some light on your performance.
Download the free sports bet tracking spreadsheet below to get started (available for both Excel and Google Sheets):
Bet Tracker Spreadsheet: Instant Insights
If you want to measure your performance and see where you are succeeding and failing, you need to track it.
With this free tool, you can see your performance broken down by various dimensions.
Have a great ROI on betting NBA 2nd halves? Getting solid closing line value on NFL point spreads? This spreadsheet allows you to answer questions like this and more.
How to use the spreadsheet
While the spreadsheet is pretty straightforward, I’d like to walk you through how it works.
How to track sports bets
Everything lives in the “Bet Log” tab. This is the only place information is manually entered. Once the data is entered there, all other tabs will automatically populate.
In the “Bet Log” tab, blue columns are required while red columns are optional. The more information you input, the more useful the spreadsheet will be.
Entering things like the closing line, while slightly annoying, will also be the most important to your success.
How to analyze performance
Each tab will have different graphs and tables that show your performance. The beauty of this is that you can filter the data by any dimension you like.
Any yellow cell is an “input” cell that can be changed. All of these are dropdowns that are pre-populated based on the information you enter in the Bet Log.
How to add more leagues and teams
To add new leagues and teams, you will do so in the “REF” tab. This tab holds all of the lookup information for the dropdowns throughout the spreadsheet.
Again, the cells available to modify are in yellow. You can add the following dimensions:
- Leagues (ex: WNBA)
- Teams (ex: Chicago Sky)
- Tags (ex: 2nd half)
Bet Tracker Spreadsheet Metrics
Deciding what to track is important in determining how you measure success. The spreadsheet tracks the following key metrics:
Closing Line Value
Closing line value (CLV) is a measure of how much better or worse the odds you bet at were compared to where they closed.
If you believe the markets you are betting into are efficient (NFL point spreads, MLB moneylines, etc.), then CLV is a great predictor of long term success.
All you need to do is input the odds you placed your bet at as well as where the odds closed. Preferably you use a market making sportsbook like Pinnacle to decide what the “true” closing line was.
Profit
Profit is about as simple as it gets. Are you making or losing money?
While this is the “bottom line”, surprisingly it isn’t always predictive of long term success. Still, you will obviously want to see how much money you have made or lost.
ROI
This is what most people tend to look at. It is a measure of how profitable you are relative to how much you are risking.
While at the end of the day, the money in your pocket is what matters, this metric focuses more on results rather than process and is a measure of efficiency.
ROI isn’t as predictive of long term winning as CLV, but is useful to track to see where you stand.
Risk
This one is simple, yet will likely give you insights into where you are putting your money.
If you have a model, does it consistently value the Dallas Cowboys differently than the market? Thus making many of your bets on the Cowboys? Analyzing your risk by league/team/bet type can give you these types of answers.
Bankroll
Bankroll will track our running total of how much money you have in your accounts across all sportsbooks. You can also see this trended over time to help you see any changes in your betting strategy and how that has affected your bankroll.
It is very useful to see, at a glance, where your money lies. Is 95% of our bankroll at FanDuel? Maybe you should shift some to DraftKings.
Bet Tracker Spreadsheet Dimensions
Having these metrics available is important, but insights really come from slicing the data by different dimensions.
League/Team
Tracking your performance by league or team can give you clues into where your strengths or weaknesses are.
Do you watch every second of every New York Knicks game? Think you have an edge on Knicks games? You can find out using the spreadsheet.
Football Sports Betting Tips
Same goes for leagues. Do you follow NFL closely but use strictly numbers for NCAA Basketball? Compare the performance of the two and see what’s working.
Football Odds For Today
Bet Type
Looking at performance by bet type can also shed some light on your process, especially if it is model driven.
Track your performance by the following bet types:
- Spread
- Moneyline
- Total
- Prop
- Future
You can also use the “Tag” field to designate special types of bets. For example, if you want to see your performance on moneylines for NBA 2nd halves, you would put “2H” (or something similar) in the Tag field and “moneyline” in the bet type field.
Date
A common way to analyze performance is to look at metrics trended over time.
Look at any of the metric/dimension combinations above trended over any time period you’d like.
Nfl Sports Betting
Want to see your performance over the last 14 days? Or how about the last 12 weeks? Both are possible here.
Google Sheets Sports Betting Tracker
The sports betting tracker is also available on Google Sheets. While the features are the same as the Excel file, Google Sheets has some notable benefits:
- Available/online at all times
- Can enter bets on your phone using the Sheets app
- You don’t need to be at a computer to enter your bets
- Google Sheets auto saves any changes
- Allows multiple users to be in the sheet at the same time and make changes