Jacksnow wrote: ↑May 15th, 2025, 7:30 pm
They were 6-11. But how are they better odds to go to SB in 25- 26 than the Rams?
I would suspect that part of that IS the SOS .. and part is draft/FA signings. Another of those things that say to me "Who the fuck cares". The Super Bowl odds of any teams means nothing. The odds don't play games, and they don't equate to wins/losses. They are simply the manifestation of someone's analysis, which is as glorified opinion, which everyone knows is simply a case of just like assholes, everyone has one
This is partly why I made the Dead zone post .. THIS is the shit we are "worrying" and posting about because there is jack shit real FOOTBALL information to play with.
The only people who should give a damn about the odds are bettors, and if I'm a bettor, and I believe in my team, the HIGHER the odds, the better I like it.
I used to play the ponies years ago and I LOVED Kentucky Derby day every year. I found a number that narrowed a 20 horse field to no more than 2 or three horses a year on average. Most who ever met it was 5. The winner met that standard every year, and the good news for me was that most of the time, a lot of those horses went off at great odds. Best winner I got was Charismatic at $61 and I had War Emblem at $43 in a year when only ONE expert even mentioned the horse, and that was basically in passing. I had him as the #1 horse in the race. Won wire to wire. The fact that most of the horses in the race had better odds was manna from Heaven as far as I was concerned. I had a great 10 year run after I figured out that number. Unfortunately for me, when they switched to synthetic turf, it no longer worked. Too many different surfaces I guess.
To show you how far people will go for an edge, I once emailed 30 tracks across the country asking for their dirt track composition. When the tracks were dirt, they were all a combination of dirt, clay and sand. One of the hardest things to deal with, especially at smaller tracks is shippers, horses coming from other circuits, like shipping into Santa ANita from Belmont Park, or even from smaller tracks in the south or midwest. My thought was to get the tracks compositions and look for horses shipping in from tracks with compositions closest to whatever track they shipped to here and keep a database to see how they performed. I was especially wanting to see how horses who shipped in as favorites and shipped in from tracks with much different compositions performed, thinking they might now do well and it would work as a tool to eliminate false favorites. Unfortunately for me, not ONE track responded.
At the end of the day, probably a good thing. I was already manually keeping several. I kept one with EVERY winner on the major tracks, HP, SA, Del Mar's namesake, with date race #, field size, winning jockey, trainer, owner, position and first call, second call, winning distance, sire. Another with strictly maiden races and a third for horses making their first start. Between that and handicapping races, I was about 9 hours a day with all of it, and that doesn't count when I might have a thought and spend 2 or 3 hours off on a tangent to see if it might be worth the effort of keeping the stats on that.
Gamblers though are funny folk. I knew a kid who wanted to play the horses but just couldn't pull the trigger on a bet because he didn't know who the trainers or owners were betting on, thinking those folk knew better and that betting on who THEY were betting on would give him more winning bets. One thing I found over the years was that trainers were BAD bettors. I just couldn't convince the kid that following their money was pretty much useless. Lot of them get something in their head and can't let go.
That's one of the reason I kept my own numbers, for instance, a sire with a 30% winning rate with first time starters, might be only 4% here, with his best performers on other circuits. I was only concerned with how they did HERE, so keeping that data myself made sense to me.
One year, at Del Mar, 8 consecutive winners, iirc, at 1 mile on the dirt had the same sire, I picked up on it because I was keeping that data, several paid good prices, which is the whole idea of keeping your own data, looking for those opportunities that the public isn't aware of
