Betting

That is the expected result and worth stating first. A closing spread is the sharpest number in sports, and a rating built from final scores is not going to out-argue thousands of people with money at stake. Anyone whose model beats closing lines by a point and a half is either wrong about their backtest or should not be publishing it.

Against the number the market opens at

Openers are a different question, because they are posted before the market has digested anything. Here the picture is better but not conclusive: 53.1% over 1,936 bets (+31 units) across 2023–2025, the only seasons for which opening lines exist.

That carries p = 0.2559. It is not significant, and the best individual bucket does not survive correction for the number of buckets examined. Treat it as a hint.

The one clean signal

Closing line value — whether the market moves toward your side after you bet — is the honest early indicator, because it converges in hundreds of bets where win-loss records need thousands. It rises steadily with the size of the disagreement:

A dose-response pattern across ordered bins is much harder to produce by chance than one good bucket, and it is positive in all three seasons. It says the market tends to drift toward this model's side after the opener — which is what genuine information looks like, and is the reason to keep measuring rather than to start betting.

How much more would it take to know

To confirm a true 53.5% edge at conventional power would take roughly 12,000 bets — about seventeen seasons of betting every game. Even a 56% edge would need close to two full seasons. The honest conclusion is that this question cannot be settled from history. It can only be settled forward, which is what the card below is for.

This week

Tracked, not recommended. These are the largest disagreements with the opening number. They are published so the record accumulates in public, including the losing weeks.

1 game(s) set aside because the model has no prior season for one side: North Dakota State. An early-season "edge" against a team the model has never rated is ignorance, not an opinion.