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Yards Per Point

College and NFL Football Handicapping Methods

Yards Per Point is probably the single most powerful stat in handicapping college and NFL football. It's a stat that at a glance, can tell you a whole lot about any given team. It's a stat that should be used by professional sports bettors and recreational sportsbettors alike.

What makes this stat attractive to the recreational sports handicapper is that it allows a guy or gal who works a full week, and has a life outside of sports, to make educated selections on football games with only a minimal amount of work.

The stat is very easy to compute. Simply take a teams offensive yards gained and divide by points scored. On defense, take the yards given up and divide by points given up. Many publications, tip sheets, etc, do the work for you. Power Sweep is one such publication.

So now you have two numbers for each team. An offensive number and a defensive number. The lower the offensive number, the better the offense. The higher the defensive number, the better the defense.

You can now take these numbers and use them as a power rating.

Let's take a look at an actual game from the past. .Buffalo was playing at  New England.

Buffalo's offensive number was 14.1 and there defensive number is 12. We subtract the offensive number from the defensive number and get -2.1 which would be Buffalo's rating.

The Pats numbers were 13.5 on offense and 15.4 on def. Making their rating +1.9. So, the difference between the two is 4 in favor of the Pats. We add 2 points for home field and have a Yards Per Point line on this game if New England -6.

Look for significant difference between the YPP line and the sportsbooks line.

Now there's all sorts of variations of this. You can break this down and figure out YPP for home and away. You can ferret out common opponents and look at a teams YPP against the same teams. The stat really requires at least 4 games to be effective. You can also keep a running tally of this stat only going back 4 or 5 games, which will give you a clearer picture of how a team is doing lately.

You'll notice many of the games fall right on the number. Yet others you'll spot differences.

So there you have it. This can also be used for college football but you need to be careful. The stat can become distorted as a result of the blow outs so common in college ball.

A few minutes work each week and you can take a lot of the guesswork out of your selections. This method, used as a power rating, in conjunction with other stats such as turnovers, trends, weather and injuries have produced very positive results for many football handicappers over years. Give it a try! Your Sportsbook will wish you hadn't.  : )