SB Betting Gameplan

Always bittersweet on SB Sunday— excited for the last game of football, but devastated that its our last game for 7 months. Perhaps a nice SGP bink on Sunday will carry us all the way through the offseason.

As usual, we’ll go through some tails angles and some possible SGP builds, and we’ll start with my favorite tails angle which will can serve as a base for understanding some of the other bets.

Bet: O 53.5 +190

• First, let us use the drive-level metric earned drive points (EDP) to establish the base rates of how these teams have played this season.

• EDP captures how well teams sustainably move the ball on the drive level. From this perspective, the San Francisco 49ers have fielded a 97th-percentile offense and a league-average defense. The Kansas City Chiefs have fielded a 75th-percentile unit on both sides of the ball.

• Season-long numbers are valuable when setting the base for how the market might be pricing this game, but they are not the best way to understand where the teams currently are. So, to better understand the current form, we can look at EDP since Week 12.

• Over the last couple of months, the 49ers have retained their elite offense but have struggled to prevent opposing offenses from moving the ball.

• Not only have the Niners been bad in the aggregate, but they have also been consistently bad. In each of their games over the past few months, Kyle Shanahan's squad has allowed offenses to play above league average from an EDP perspective.

• Choose any defensive efficiency metric, and it will suggest a similar story of decline. There is also little evidence to suggest the team will look more similar to its early-season version, especially against this Chiefs offense.

• The Chiefs offense has looked far more like its 2018-22 iteration than the stuttering unit we saw early in the season. After struggling mightily to generate explosive plays — Patrick Mahomes and company ranked in the 20s for most of the season in explosive play rate — the Chiefs have been the third-most explosive offense in the NFL over the last few months.

• Scoring via explosive plays — and not by efficiently and methodically marching down the field —  is precisely how to drive up the total.

Matchup Angles

• While the fundamentals suggest there is good reason to take the over, we can also turn to some matchup factors that further elevate this spot.

• The market is pricing in a downgrade on the 49ers offensive production, as their point total is sitting at around 24 points, roughly 5 less than their season-long average.

• However, elite offenses tend to beat good defenses and drive play. On average, teams with 95th-percentile (and above) EDPs that face defenses with 75th-percentile EDPs will outperform the defense’s averages by nearly 40%. In other words, when an elite offense plays an elite defense, it is the offense that drives the matchup, limiting the advantage a defense possesses.

• Further — and on a more granular matchup level — the Chiefs have played man coverage at one of the highest rates in the NFL this season. As PFF has studied, man coverage tends to be a true reflection of the talent on the field, where better wide receivers will typically beat worse cornerbacks and vice versa.

• For most of the season, the Chiefs have been on the right side of their man-coverage matchups.  Their three starting cornerbacks are in the 75th percentile or above when it comes to preventing separation.

• But in this matchup with Shanahan’s scheme, Brandon Aiyuk, Deebo Samuel and George Kittle, it is the 49ers who possess the man-matchup advantage.

• On average, the 49ers have generated around two standard deviations more separation than the average Chiefs opponent. 

• Given what we know about man coverage, we could reasonably expect that had the Chiefs' sample been only matchups with the 49ers, their cornerbacks would have performed far worse and the defensive output would have been diminished.

SGPs:

• Now aside from the alt O here, we can make a case for a Brandon Aiyuk and/or George Kittle SGP build using the same logic— while KC base rates would suggest KC is “good against WR1’s” those rates would surely look different playing SF 20 times and not KC’s median opponent. Aiyuk has also been the dominating man coverage work for the 49ers with a 30% target share (9% higher than Kittle’s 2nd place mark) while maintaining a 3.66 YPRR against man coverage, 5th in the NFL. Kittle, while without the same target share as Aiyuk, still boasts an impressive 2.96 YPRR making up for his smaller share with terrific efficiency. Samuel can of course pop on any play and is the main target against zone coverage but his sample of plays to do damage is smaller against a man heavy team where he ranks 4th on the team in YPRR against man.

  • Usual SGPs in play, though my favorite is Aiyuk 8+ catches + 125 Yards at 28:1. If you want to get real exotic and throw in 2Tds as well that brings you to ~250 or so.

1 last exotic angle:

• It is the Super Bowl, after all, and the Super Bowls call for some exotic longshots. While it is globally true that alt O passing yards, O pass attempts, and U completions are extremely negatively correlated that relationship is slightly strong for Brock Purdy and the 49ers. 

• For most QBs, in order for them to generate large yardage totals they need many attempts, and as a byproduct completion, to put up large yardage totals. But for Purdy, much of his yardage comes off explosive plays (gains of 20+yards) with the highest explosive pass % in the NFL, and with more than 50% of his total yards coming off of explosive plays. This, to some extent, breaks down the usual correlation between our above 3 metrics. 

• Further, because the Chiefs play so much man and are effective doing so, there is even more value in exploiting this correlation. 

• What this graph shows is that there is a far wider distribution of outcomes for offenses in man coverage– meaning more explosive plays while also more negative plays (and incompletions). While the mass of plays for the Niners might include struggling to generate as much offense against a solid Chiefs defense–leading to plenty of incompletions– considering the talent of SF + the man coverage and there is also a good chance to align themselves on the right side of variance and hit some huge explosive plays– exactly the angle we will attack. 

• Last, this angle is far more likely to happen in a 49ers win than a loss as should the 49ers need to be in comeback mode Purdy’s attempts and completions will likely rise way above base rates and we’d lose on the completions, even if we get the correlation right. 

DraftKings 1500:1

Brock Purdy O 31.5 Attempts

Brock Purdy U 20.5 Completions 

Brock Purdy O 311.5 Passing yards

SF -7 

What an awesome season. As always, appreciate all the support and help spread the good word about throwthedamball. I’ll be back periodically in the offseason sharing some of my research and am already eager to get back to betting SGPs in 2024. Good luck to all let’s have ourselves a day and close this season with a bang.