NFL Picks: Betting Based on Circa Sports Million Lines

This article is part of our NFL Picks series.

In just its fifth season, the Circa Sports Million contest has emerged as the premier NFL point spread competition.

Contestants pay $1,000 to enter and pick five games against the point spread each week. One point is awarded for each correct pick, and a half point is earned on a push. The entry with the most points at the end of the season takes home a cool $1 million and the famous blue jacket, and $3.65 million goes to places 2-100. Further, $300,000 gets divvied up to leaders each quarter, and there are $100,000 and $50,000 "booby prizes" for last place and second to last, respectively. Circa guarantees a total prize pool of $6 million, with no rake. If they get over 6000 entries, the overage will be passed along to the quarter and full season prize pools. 4,691 entrants played Circa Sports Million in 2022, so there was an overlay.

Thanks to the price point and available prizes, the contest gets a pretty "smart money" crowd on balance. Full disclosure, I split an entry, so I will emphasize the "on balance" part. Aside from wanting to do well with my picks, I was curious if we can glean any betting ideas by looking at the weekly choices.

Circa releases the contest lines each Thursday at roughly 1:00 PM ET. Picks for Sunday games are due by late Saturday afternoon, though the deadline is effectively earlier for most entrants. That is because picks must be entered from within the state of Nevada. Those outside the state -- including yours truly -- need to use a proxy and thus must enter picks by mid-afternoon. Non-Sunday games -- mostly Thursday games -- require a much earlier submission.

The data on the contest picks gets disseminated via Circa Tweet on Saturday evening. There you can find the preference on each game and the percentage of entrants on each side. I looked at 2022 data for any future betting ideas. It is important to note that the Circa contest lines are frozen at their Thursday release, whereas actual bettable point spreads move. Thus entrants routinely "beat" spreads with their picks, and bettors tailing these picks on Saturday or Sunday will not see the same lines. Still, even accounting for all of that, the results are interesting.

I eliminated Thursday games from any analysis since those are infrequently played in the contest and already booked by the time the pick information comes out Saturday. I also deleted any game with no pick preference in the pool. That left 251 games. I then only looked at the side with the majority of picks on that game, and ranked each of those 251 games by the quantity of picks. I then split it into deciles, with the 25 most selected games in the first decile, the next 25 in the second decile, etc. On the left is how the picks did vs the Circa contest line, and the right are the results versus the actual closing line on the game as per the game line used in RotoWire's Historical NFL Odds.

The wisdom of the crowds actually worked here! The most selected games went a sterling 17-8 against the contest lines and 16-9 vs their closing spreads. The 25th most selected game was picked by 1,348 entrants. It is super important to note that in those 25 games, the contest line was better than than the closing spread 16 times and worse only four times. Still, the betting results only differed once from the contest results. More on that below.

Low enthusiasm picks were duds, and in fact nice betting fades. The bottom three deciles went a combined 24-51-1 versus actual point spreads. What's more, the betting lines were more favorable to faders -- less favorable to contest players -- 29 times, versus 17 that were less favorable. The threshold here was 806 picks or fewer, and again, selected by more entrants than the opposition.

Some quick caveats! Sunday closing lines are a great metric to see what is available to bettors, but an imperfect measure of what the contestants were looking at when they entered their picks by Saturday afternoon. Plus there is gamesmanship going on within the contest. Players can enter Circa Sports Million up to five times, thus some might "hedge" with opposite sides on different cards. Also, going with an unfavorable contest line at times is a reasonable strategy when it does not cross over a key number like "3" or "7." If a contest line is Cowboys (-5.5), for example, and the actual line is Cowboys (-4.5), some players will take a shot on the Cowboys anyway knowing "5" is not a key number and it is an opportunity to gain a point on a pick that might be popular on the other side. It is similar to going with an ostensibly weaker pick in a Survivor pool.

Additional Observations

• The most picked game of the 2022 season was Minnesota (-2.5) over New Orleans in Week 4 in London. 2,042 entrants went with the Vikings -- a whopping 44.1 percent of that week's picks. To note, not everyone submits an entry each week. This game is interesting for another reason, as the closing spread was Minnesota (-4.0) and the Vikings won by 3. Entrants got a win, but anyone tailing Circa picks lost.
• Entrant majority picks beat the closing spread 113 times and went with a line worse than the closing spread 52 times.
• There were 11 games where the contest results were different from the betting results. In 10 of those instances, the betting results were worse.