Thank you
First I just want to say thank you!!! I know I can be verbose, but I hope you have had some fun during NFL season even if it turned out to be incredibly negative from a performance perspective.
I am truly disappointed with how this year went. Frankly, I think I overreacted to the down year last year and overcorrected and made things worse.
I like to say that I do not owe folks winners but I do owe them transparency so I wanted to make sure this newsletter went out, even if the results are far from what I had hoped or think is acceptable. I also wanted to apologize for how long this took me to get out.
What’s next
This year was the year of change for the newsletter:
I changed the entire format for the newsletter
Then when things were going poorly, I changed the approach to the picks
Then I went back to the more expansive breakdowns for the playoffs.
Part of my offseason will be to do an analysis of what worked and what didn’t and start to put together my content plans for the 2024 - 2025 season. As I mentioned above, I think I overreacted to 2022-2023’s results so as I do my full teardown and rebuild of my models, I am going to take a very critical look at what I have been doing and see how better to streamline the content. For starters, we were betting too many things earlier in the year and it was clear the adjustments I made later in the season improved things (we were profitable the fine 8 weeks of the regular season). I am going to dig into that to see how we can leverage those good things going into next year.
The next thing on our docket is the NFL Draft. I LOVE the NFL draft because it of course allows us to wager, but it lays the foundation for these teams and my player-level predictions that drive my early-season betting and fantasy football work for each season.
This offseason I plan on providing an NFL Draft preview (here is last year’s) with wagering information and some of my views on the players. I am NOT an NFL scout nor do I break down 600+ players like the great Dane Brugler1, but I do my best to figure out what is going on and I will use that note to lay out some of my favorite guys. As you have seen in my columns I make mention of players I liked/didn’t like in the past and I hope to bring some of that content to you. Last year we had a 0.88u profit at the draft, highlighted by hitting Hendon Hooker to the Lions at 14-1!
Now without further ado, let’s get to the season recap!
Season Recap - Summary
If you started the year with 10k and were doing $100 per unit then you ended the year with about $6,800 left for a return of -10.2% on the risk we took per bet. That is below the standards I want to set and clearly, it is hard for me to tell you it was a successful year as it was anything but
As you can see from the picture below, we did not have a straight line to our season-ending total.
If this disappointing season teaches folks anything, I hope it shows that with disciplined betting and bankroll management, you can have a really hard and unfortunate year, BUT you will not blow out your whole bankroll and will have plenty of cash left to come back next fall.
I say that because I know there are people you can buy picks from that chase and lose money hand over fist. I know some folks get emotional and chase (I have certainly been guilty of it), but the BEST thing you can do is still have tight bankroll management and a betting strategy so when things go poorly you do not lose everything.
In case you happened to do way better than I did this NFL season and you have questions about taking profits and growing your bankroll, I can only tell you what I do. At some point, I stopped growing my betting amounts as certain amounts were unscary for me so now I operate with more than 100u bankroll and that works okay for me. What I still do though is that I take half my profits and leave it in my bankroll but twice a year (February and Sept) I take the other half of my profits every year and give some to charity and I put it in savings or I buy something cool/that I have wanted (in early 2022 I used NFL profits to buy an amazing Traeger Smoker!).
If like me, you had a really tough year. I usually take this time to dust myself off and resize my units going into the next year so that I continue to have proper management of the money I am willing to risk.
Season Recap - Detailed
As I mentioned above, we had a really disappointing year to take our overall performance to now a 1.9u loss for the four years I have been doing this. Yes, that really sucks given all the time and effort over the last 4 years, especially given that last year and this year saw us give back 50u of profit!
I always think of gambling as I do investing; you are putting your money at risk and hoping for a return. Much like the stock market, the numbers will go up and they will go down and you need to not take risks that will limit your ability to make future money.
Again, I want to apologize for how disappointing this season was, as well as all the changes I made along the way. This was not how I expected this to go, but again, I hope you stuck to tight bankroll management and you have enough to dust yourself off and go again in the fall!
I hope to see you all back here in a few months for the draft, but in the meantime, I have plenty of golf content and will be breaking out horse betting content!!!
If you are unfamiliar with Dane, I HIGHLY recommend checking him out over at the Athletic. His draft guide “the Beast” is by far the best guide there is and I keep them year after year so that I can always look back and it is impressive how good he truly is.