USFL odds: How oddsmakers are setting lines for a brand new league

By Sam Panayotovich
FOX Sports Betting Analyst

The USFL's inaugural season kicks off on Saturday, and bettors and bookmakers are still cramming for the first test of the regular season this coming weekend.

Since this is a completely new football league, the handicapping process is extremely difficult because there’s nothing you can build off from a season ago. Oddsmakers and handicappers generally roll over their power ratings from the previous campaign and make the necessary adjustments when a team trades for a new quarterback, retools its offensive line or signs a star pass rusher in free agency.

The problem is that there was no USFL in 2021, so there is no previous data.

What I’m trying to tell you is that most of us are simply guessing as the league returns to the playing field and American sportsbooks prepare to book bets.

"The league is so wide-open because of all the unknowns," FOX Bet content integration specialist Jacob Blangsted-Barnor told me late last week. "No team’s odds are too short or too long in the future market.

"Michigan is the favorite because it has the most recognizable personnel," JBB added. "Jeff Fisher is the head coach and Shea Patterson and Paxton Lynch are the quarterbacks. Those are known quantities and names that bettors will gravitate toward, and it’s as much as how well we think they’ll do."

Odds to win USFL at FOX Bet:

Michigan Panthers: +333 (bet $10 to win $43.30 total)
Tampa Bay Bandits: +425 (bet $10 to win $52.50 total)
Philadelphia Stars: +450 (bet $10 to win $55 total)
Birmingham Stallions: +550 (bet $10 to win $65 total)
New Jersey Generals: +600 (bet $10 to win $70 total)
Houston Gamblers: +650 (bet $10 to win $75 total)
Pittsburgh Maulers: +650 (bet $10 to win $75 total)
New Orleans Breakers: +700 (bet $10 to win $80 total)

* Odds as of 4/17/2022

I can already close my eyes and picture some of you getting ready to bet your hard-earned money on the Houston Gamblers. I can almost hear the reasoning from one of your buddies telling you that you’re a gambler at heart, so you should fire on the Gamblers.

"At the start, recreational gamblers might very well be looking to bet the [Houston] Gamblers because of the name," JBB said with a laugh. "I could see people wanting to dabble on the Gamblers."

All jokes aside, the cream will eventually rise in the USFL after a few weekends, as it tends to do every NFL and college football season. And oddsmakers will collect and crunch plenty of data to recalibrate new power ratings on the fly. Think of it as checks and balances, football-style.

It will take time, but it’ll all get sorted out eventually.

"We’ll start to have a good idea after three weeks," JBB admitted. "We’ll have a very good idea after about five. You’re really looking for teams to have common opponents. Say Tampa Bay wins by 50 points in Week 1. That could be that they’re the best team in the league or that they were playing the worst team in the league.

"You don’t really work all that out until the team Tampa Bay clobbered plays somebody else and then somebody else and so on. The more common opponents that you work out, the more you get an idea of the true order and the true power ratings. By five weeks into the season, we’ll have a very good idea who should be where."

FOX Bet was first to post spreads and totals for USFL Week 1, and its trading room learned rather quickly that the totals were way too high. The totals opened at [O/U] 53.5, 53.5, 55.5 and 56.5.

"We looked at the XFL and the AAF and those totals trended way lower in the early going," JBB explained. "That’s because the offensive schemes took longer to come around while most of the defensive schemes were familiar and built around very basic stuff that everybody has played.

"But things like the three-point conversation and the double-forward pass will make these games a little more offensive. We’ll obviously see where the money comes in and what the results are on a week-by-week basis. If we write nothing but ‘Under’ money, we’ll move rather quickly."

Ironically enough, the market moved very fast. Those aforementioned totals are now being dealt at 42.5, 42.5, 43.5 and 44.5, so there was clearly a sharp push on "Under" for all those numbers that were perceived to be way too high.

It’s not every day that you see double-digit total adjustments on every game.

There’s no doubt in my mind that sportsbooks will continue to pay close attention to betting habits from "sharp" accounts. When players that usually beat the market in other sports start placing USFL bets, a bookmaker will use that information as his north star.

"It’s important in every sport, but in the USFL, it’ll be tenfold," JBB admitted. "We don’t have much to rely on out of the gate. We’ll use sharp accounts and sharp bets to our advantage, as every good bookmaker should. If they’re always betting one team or a certain team’s total, we’ll make the necessary changes. It’s such an art to use the right information the right way."

As for making a USFL futures bet, I have an ace in the hole. 

My buddy Eric Eager, who runs research and development for Pro Football Focus, put together an analytically-driven model to calculate the probability of all eight teams winning the USFL Championship.

His numbers have Tampa Bay winning the title 17.6% of the time.

If you trust those numbers as I do, FOX Bet is dealing the Tampa Bay Bandits at +425 to win the whole enchilada. So a $100 bet wins $425 and pays out $525.

I’m down if you are.

Sam Panayotovich is a sports betting analyst for FOX Sports and NESN. He previously worked for WGN Radio, NBC Sports and VSiN. He'll probably pick against your favorite team. Follow him on Twitter @spshoot.

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