How to handicap the NFL first touchdown scorer odds
I believe it was the wise poet Cornell “Nelly” Haynes who once said, “I am number one. Two is not a winner, and three, nobody remembers.” And I couldn’t have said it better myself when it comes to my favorite NFL prop bets. It doesn’t matter to me who scores second or third in a game, just let me predict who’s No. 1 and I’m ecstatic. It wasn’t a perfect science, but in an effort to get better at betting the first touchdown market, I tracked who scored the first touchdown for every team all last season. It began as an experiment to see if there was even anything to be learned, and wound up being a pretty helpful tool. There were some clear trends that helped me make some cash.
My “system”, as I refer to it, focuses on three aspects of each and every first touchdown –
- Was it the first TD of the game (or just the first for the team)?
- Which player scored it?
- Which position do they play?
This information allowed me to find mismatches between teams’ success rates when it comes to scoring first, and then bet on their most popular targets.
Before I give some predictions for Week 1, I’d like to remind everybody about some common misconceptions about first touchdowns: