East v West MNF

One of the podcasts I listen to on a regular basis on my daily walk is Steven Bartlett's The Diary Of A CEO and his latest episode is a conversation with Dr Cheri Mah, who is "a sleep scientist and Professor at the Stanford Sleep Medicine Centre, specialising in the relationship between sleep and performance in elite athletes."

As readers of this blog and subscribers to "the document" will know, the impact of teams crossing time zones has long been an interest of mine, since markets tend to be inefficient in certain scenarios, and one of my systems does take advantage of this.

At the 14:50 mark of the episode, Dr Mah claimed that over 25 seasons, if you had bet on a West Coast team when playing an East Coast team in a Monday Night Football (NFL) game, you would have covered the spread 68% of the time. 

On returning home, I took a look at Killer Sports data which goes all the way back to 1989, and found that when a West Coast team (there are only five of them) hosts an East Coast team (there are 17 of these), the Western team has covered the spread 60.6% of the time with 20 wins, 13 losses and 1 push. 

For the games where an East Coast team hosts a West Coast team, the numbers are slightly better, at 23 wins, 13 losses and 2 pushes, a win rate of 63.9% and overall an impressive 62.3%. 

Given that I'm not sure what 25 year period she was referring to, or where the spreads were sourced, that claim wasn't as far off as I thought it might be. 

72 matches over 35 seasons isn't a lot, but the upcoming 2024 season actually has six such matchups.  

There's also an interesting inefficiency on the Totals market for these games, and additional qualifier that takes this 62.3% win percentage to over 70%, but reduces the number of qualifiers from an already low 72 to an even lower 29. I'm going to add this system to the Sacred Manuscript with a few additional details. 

Even though the system doesn't generate a lot of bets, it's a great example of how certain markets are affected by biases, and of the kinds of angles people should be looking at.