NFL Divisional Home Underdog ATS
Divisional home-underdog spread value
Rejected — 668 divisional home-underdog bets returned PF 0.894. The 2020–2025 holdout improved to PF 0.966 but remained below break-even.
- Category
- Sports betting
- Window
- 1999-09-12 → 2026-01-04
- Instruments
- NFL divisional regular-season point spreads
- Timeframe
- Pre-game closing spread
- Tested
- 2026-01-04
Measured equity history
Recorded directly from the chronological test ledger.
Shown in the backtest's native equity or cumulative P&L units. It is not scaled to an investment amount because the published artifact does not provide a defensible capital denominator.
How it works
BackfillingThe bet
What market behavior this strategy is wagering on.
Plain-English explainer is backfilling — check back tomorrow. We publish the explanation only once it's written and reviewed, never auto-filled.
How it decides
What makes it enter, size, and exit a position.
Plain-English explainer is backfilling — check back tomorrow. We publish the explanation only once it's written and reviewed, never auto-filled.
How it can break
The regimes and failure modes that turn the edge negative.
Plain-English explainer is backfilling — check back tomorrow. We publish the explanation only once it's written and reviewed, never auto-filled.
Gate scorecard — 2 / 6
auto-imported from results.json| # | Gate | Result | Pass |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Minimum sample ≥250 bets | 668 bets | ✓ |
| 02 | Profit factor ≥1.05 | PF 0.894 | ✗ |
| 03 | Max drawdown no worse than -20% | max DD -45.7% | ✗ |
| 04 | Real PF beats permutation p95 | real PF 0.894 vs permutation p95 0.898 | ✗ |
| 05 | Holdout profit factor ≥1.00 | holdout PF 0.966 | ✗ |
| 06 | Holdout sample ≥75 bets | 154 holdout bets | ✓ |
VERDICT: REJECTED
Restricting the home-underdog rule to familiar divisional opponents did not create an edge. Across 668 bets from 1999–2025, the strategy returned profit factor 0.894. The untouched 2020–2025 holdout improved to 0.966, but remained below break-even.
The screen cleared 2 of 6 gates. Divisional familiarity may narrow scoring margins, but the closing spread already incorporated enough of that information that the bettor still lost after price.
This is published as a failed hypothesis, not tuned into a narrower spread band or selected-team variant after seeing the result.
Frequently asked
Is NFL Divisional Home Underdog ATS profitable in 2026?
In this pre-registered backtest (1999-09-12 → 2026-01-04), NFL Divisional Home Underdog ATS returned a profit factor of 0.89 and passed 2/6 validation gates (placebo N/A). Verdict: REJECTED. Every result is published, pass or fail.
Has NFL Divisional Home Underdog ATS been backtested honestly?
Yes — through 6 pre-registered evidence gates appropriate to the available dataset, with the specification locked before any out-of-sample metric is computed. It failed and is published anyway.
Methodology: 11-gate validation — pre-registered spec, 6-gate battery, real market data. Full reproducible report: backtests/nfl_divisional_home_underdog/REPORT.md in the source repository.Author: Validated Research Team (Methodology v1.0 — 11-gate validation). Backtests are not investment advice.