Just for fun - NFL pre-season odds last year

Just for fun - NFL pre-season odds last year

The gambling sites never really like to demonstrate the fact that they sometimes miss by a mile, so I knew I would never be able to find the pre-season odds after the season was over. To satisfy my own curiosity, I downloaded the odds from vegasinsider.com last summer (see below).

Rags to riches:

If you saw the Carolina Panthers coming, you were a genius. They did win their division the previous season, but with a lackluster 7-8-1 record, so you could have been a rich man if you bet on them to win the NFC championship, because the odds against them doing that were 40-1. A mere $25,000 bet would have made you a millionaire.

The Washington team started the season with the 4th-longest odds to win the Big Show. They were rated above only three very weak teams: Titans, Jags, Browns. Those three teams are all in the AFC, so Washington was considered the worst in the NFC. After a 4-12 season the previous year, Washington went a very respectable 9-7. I didn't record the betting info for winning the division, but they must have been long odds, because they were considered the worst team in their group, and by quite a wide margin.

When the season kicked off, the Jets were rated 5th-worst overall, higher only than the four teams mentioned in the previous paragraph, yet they went 10-6, six wins more than the previous season)

Great disappointments:

The Indianapolis Colts started the season as the favorite to win the AFC championship. They went 8-8, three wins less than the previous year.

The Philadelphia Eagles began the season as one of the three co-favorites to win the NFC (Seahawks, Packers, Eagles). They went 7-9, down three wins from the year before.

The Dallas Cowboys were rated in the second tier of the NFC, behind only those three teams listed above. They went 4-12, which gave them the worst collapse in the league, down eight wins from the previous year.