Each week, an elite group of bookmakers and professional bettors provide Pregame.com with their private power rankings. These numbers literally influence the worldwide sports-betting market and together form the Vegas Rankings. Four categories convey what the "experts in the desert" truthfully think about the teams:
TRUE POWER: How good Vegas thinks a team really is.
HOME-FIELD ADVANTAGE: The value of each team's home field.
BETTOR BIAS: How many points the public overvalues (positive numbers) or undervalues (negative numbers) a team.
POINT-SPREAD POWER: The combination of True Power and Bettor Bias.
To calculate the projected winner of any matchup:
To calculate the projected point spread of any matchup:
Biggest Improvement -- TRUE POWER
Philadelphia Eagles
New York Giants
San Diego Chargers
Atlanta Falcons
Biggest Drop -- TRUE POWER
Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Dallas Cowboys
Oakland Raiders
Washington Redskins
Here are the final regular-season Vegas NFL Rankings:
To see the Vegas Rankings of the NFL's top teams, plus where the value is in this week's wild-card matchups, you must be an ESPN Insider.
ABOUT THIS BLOG
Chad Millman
Chad Millman, Editor in Chief of ESPN The Magazine, joined The Mag as an associate editor in 1998. A year later he left to write "The Odds" -- about a trio of Vegas bookmakers and wiseguys -- and to find riches working for an Internet company. He made tens of dollars on "The Odds," the web biz tanked and he returned to The Mag. He also worked at Sports Illustrated and wrote some other books, including "Iceman" with Chuck Liddell, "Invincible" with Vince Papale, "Pickup Artists" with Lars Anderson, and "The Detonators." His most recent books are the national bestseller "The Ones Who Hit the Hardest," about the blood feud between the 70s Steelers and Cowboys, written with Shawn Coyne, and the New York Times bestseller "They Call Me Baba Booey", with Gary Dell'Abate.
Millman's daily blog explores the culture of sports gambling; on Mondays and Fridays in the fall, he investigates trends in point spreads related to professional football.
E-mail Chad: Chad.X.Millman@espn.com
Follow Chad on Twitter: @ChadMillman
Behind the Bets podcast: Subscribe