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Differences between CFL and NFL
- Canadian Football Betting Football bettors often bemoan the fact they can’t wager on their sport after the Super Bowl. But up in Canada, there are CFL Odds to check out starting each June – a full summer’s worth of football lines to study and exploit. The CFL is a nine-team league with former NCAA stars and some former NFLers.
- Let’s start with the most obvious reason: The Canadian Football League is professional.
- An Over / Under Bet refers to the number of points that are scored in a Canadian Football League game. Bookmakers will set a line, which may start at 20.5 points and the lines continue in an upward direction. The job of the bettor is then to stake Over or Under one of those lines.
The Canadian Football League is seen as the exciting appetiser for the forthcoming NFL season and while sharing many common elements, the two sports also have distinct differences.
The Canadian version is twelve a side, with the extra player utilised in the back field on offense and is played on a wider and longer pitch with deeper end zones. Scoring also allows for single points via unreturned punts to the end zone and missed field goals.
Most significantly, back field motion prior to the snap is universal and receivers are able to stretch the field by timing their sprint downfield so that they cross the line of scrimmage as the ball is snapped.
Canadian Football League Teams
Defensive coverage is therefore more difficult compared to the NFL, so to partly redress the balance between offense and the defense, the quarterback has one fewer down per series. The CFL is three, rather than four down football, although the aim remains to advance the ball by at least 10 yards to gain a fresh set of downs.
The regular season is 18 games long and is played across two divisions. Since 2005 each division comprised of four sides in each. However, the addition of Ottawa in 2014 has expanded the competition to nine sides and the season’s length to 20 weeks to accommodate bye weeks.
Canadian Football League Draft
Sides qualify for post season football through their regular season records, with the best being rewarded with byes and home field advantage, until two teams ultimately contest the championship game for the Grey Cup. Unlike the NFL, a team can crossover between divisions and gain a playoff place if their record is superior to a potential playoff side from the other division.
Betting OVER/UNDER on the CFL
Betting revolves around markets familiar to the higher profile NFL. Handicap lines give a start to the perceived weaker team in the match up, either measured in full or half points and total match point markets exist for those whom wish to bet on a low or high scoring contest.
Average scoring is elevated compared to the NFL, but not excessively so. The average total regular season points since 2008 is 52 per game, with home field advantage currently worth a shade over three points.
| Total Points | On the number or fewer | On the number or greater |
|---|---|---|
| 48 | 40.2 | 62.8 |
| 49 | 43.9 | 59.8 |
| 50 | 46.9 | 56.1 |
| 51 | 50.9 | 53.1 |
| 52 | 53.9 | 49.1 |
| 53 | 56.3 | 46.2 |
| 54 | 59.1 | 43.7 |
| 55 | 61.5 | 40.9 |
| 56 | 64.0 | 38.5 |
| 57 | 68.0 | 36.0 |
| 58 | 69.7 | 32.0 |
So, for example, 40.2% of regular season games played since 2008 contained, in total, 48 points or fewer and 62.8% had 48 points or more.
Those familiar with NFL handicap betting will be aware that because of the scoring regime in the NFL, certain margins of victory or defeat are more likely to occur than others. Teams more often win by three points (the value of a field goal), seven (the value of a touchdown) and multiples of these two common numbers.
This effect is somewhat diluted in the CFL, partly through a wider diversity of scoring options. However, as the plot from the 2008-13 regular seasons below demonstrates, there is still a bias towards matches being settled by three points.
As well as sharing some common ground with the NFL, the scoring patterns are also partly comparable and so bettors may use similar techniques to estimate how successful sides may be in the 2014 season.
Using Pythagorean to predict the Grey Cup winner
Pythagorean estimates are well established in many American sports. Introduced to baseball by Bill James, this approach uses points scored and conceded as a more reliable indicator of a side’s true ability.
Therefore, it is more likely to project future wins and losses than a team’s recent actual win loss record, which may be influenced by luck, either good or bad. A team’s talent may determine their ability to score or concede points, but they may not be able to greatly influence how this scoring is distributed within individual matches.
To take an example from soccer in the Premier League, Newcastle’s goal difference of +5 in 2011/12 would rarely be good enough to gain 65 points and 5th spot, but a fortuitous split of many narrow wins and fewer large defeats ensured that is what happened.
However, the good fortune that was present in 2011/12 did not persist and Newcastle’s raw points differential gave a better indication of their subsequent performance than their actual win/draw/ loss record.
Where p is the Pythagorean constant, initially set at 2 by James, in deference to Pythagoras, but it is subject to change for different sports, various run or points scoring environments and different eras.
Past performance is a major influence for future performance, but ideally bettors would wish to allow for excessively lucky or unlucky outcomes and a Pythagorean approach appears to achieve this. Using a Pythagorean constant of 2.6 and comparing actual win/tie records for the CFL teams in year N to their performance in year N+1 since 2006 alongside Pythagorean wins from the previous year, James’ insight overall has the better predictive record.
Of the 56 individual team seasons since the start of the 2007 regular season, Pythagorean wins from the previous campaign predicted win records in the next season more accurately for 31 team seasons, ten were tied and on only 15 times did the previous season’s win/loss record prove to be a better predictor.
| Team | Actual wins in 2013 | Pythagorean Wins in 2013 |
|---|---|---|
| BC | 11 | 10 |
| Calgary | 14 | 12 |
| Edmonton | 4 | 6.5 |
| Hamilton | 10 | 8.5 |
| Montreal | 8 | 8.5 |
| Saskatchewan | 11 | 12 |
| Toronto | 11 | 10 |
| Winnipeg | 3 | 4 |
| Ottawa | - | - |
The return of Ottawa as an expansion team for the first time since 2005 may complicate the dynamics of the 2014 season, but Calgary and Hamilton appeared to be fortunate to post the wins they did in 2013 and Edmonton and Winnipeg may well be better than they appeared.
If luck plays a role over an 18 game season, it is even more of an influence over a single match. However, the granular nature of gridiron, where each down presents a discrete data point makes the sport data rich and allows bettors to identify consistent pointers to a successful final score line.
Highly efficient NFL sides in terms of yards per passing or running play appears to go hand in hand with success. Also previous levels of efficiency usually indicate similar levels of such play in the future.
Logistic regression can be used to determine actions that correlate to discrete outcomes, such as winning or losing a gridiron game and using play by play data from the 2011 Canadian season it is possible to highlight the importance of an efficient passing game to success in the CFL.
In the NFL passing ability is more important to success than rushing talent and the current CFL appears to heighten this divide.
In the CFL punting may become an enforced option after just two downs. So the much larger playing area, an extra eligible receiver and the larger average gains made through the air compared to on the ground, dictates that passing ability is a valuable asset and this is reflected in the win loss records of the sides.
There is a strong, significant relationship between passing efficiently, denying your opponent the same luxury and winning a single game.
In 2013, Calgary excelled in both, Winnipeg in neither, with BC, Saskatchewan, Hamilton, Toronto, Montreal, and Edmonton filling the gap in between in that order. A statistic that was largely consistent with the ranking of both the Pythagorean and actual wins for all eight sides.
To illustrate the potency of passing efficiency in the CFL, if two statistically average passing sides met, the home team’s chances of winning the game would increase from around 58% to over 62% if they could improve their passing efficiency by 5%. A fall of 5% would see their win probability fall to 54%.
Canadian Football League Salaries
A similar relationship isn’t seen, either in terms of size or significance on a game by game basis, between match outcome and a side’s rushing efficiency for the CFL, at least in 2011.
Canadian Football League History
Therefore, likely passing efficiency, as measured by the historical yards per passing attempt records for each side, from an offensive and defensive viewpoint, is an excellent starting point to predict probabilities and ultimately points spreads for individual games in the CFL when the regular season opens on June 26th.