How to bet on the NFL Draft
The NFL Draft is a bet on a decision, not a game. Nobody plays, nothing is scored, and the result is already known to a few people in a few team offices before it is announced. Every draft market comes down to how much of that information has reached the price, and how fast.
What you can bet
Draft betting is all props. The common markets are:
- the first pick, and who goes at each of the top few picks
- which position the first player taken plays
- how many players at a position go in the first round
- a player's draft position, as an over/under
- which team drafts a given player
Books offer more as the draft gets close, and not every book offers the draft at all. Whether you can bet it where you live depends on your state's rules, and some places that allow sports betting don't allow bets on events like this. The props page explains how books price markets with no game behind them.
A bet on what people already know
In a game, nobody knows the result until it happens. In the draft, the team picking knows what it plans to do, and so do its scouts, its coaches and the player's agent. Reporters spend the weeks before the draft trying to find out, and on the night they often report picks before they are announced.
That makes the draft one of the few markets where the line moves on information, not opinion. A report that a team has settled on a player can move a price from long odds to a heavy favorite in minutes. If you bet after that report, you're paying the new price. If you bet before it, you are betting against people who may know.
Books know this. They put low limits on draft markets, and they take a market down quickly when news breaks. I'd treat a sudden move in a draft price the way I'd treat one in a small table tennis match: someone knows something, and it isn't me. The league also bars its own people and the teams' staff from betting on the draft, for obvious reasons.
Mock drafts and the crowd
Most of the public's draft opinion comes from mock drafts: analysts and reporters predicting each pick. They are useful, especially the ones from people with sources inside the teams. They are also the crowd's view, and the price already reflects them.
Where a mock draft goes wrong is the trade. A mock assumes each team picks where it sits, and real drafts are full of trades that change who picks when. A player's draft position over/under depends on trades as much as on how good he is. When I look at a draft-position line, I'd ask which teams want this player, where they sit, and how far one of them would trade up to get him.
A draft position line, worked through
Say a quarterback's draft position is set at 9.5, with the under at -130 and the over at +110. The under is the bet that he goes in the top nine. At -130 the book is saying 56.5 percent. At +110 it is saying 47.6 percent for the over. Together that is 104.1 percent, a cut of about 4 points, which is normal.
Now think about how the market moves. If teams near the top need a quarterback, the risk to the over isn't that he is worse than people think. It is that one team trades up for him. One trade can settle the bet. That is why I'd rather bet a draft position line where I understand the teams' needs than one where I only have an opinion of the player. The implied probability page shows how to turn any price into a chance.
Parlays and correlated bets
Draft markets are tied together. If a quarterback goes first, he can't also go third, and the number of quarterbacks in the first round depends on who goes where. That makes draft parlays tricky. Most books won't let you parlay markets that depend on each other, and the ones that do price them to take the link into account. The same-game parlays page explains how books handle bets that move together.
How I'd approach it
Bet early if you have an opinion based on team needs and the order, because that is when the price is still the book's guess. Bet small, because the limits are low and the information is uneven. Stay away once the reports start flowing on draft night, unless you know you are faster than the people writing them.
Treat it as entertainment with a little edge, not a market to make your living in. Keep each bet to 1 or 2 percent of your bankroll, and set aside the amount for the whole draft before it starts. The draft runs over several days and offers a bet on every pick, and that is more bets than anyone has real opinions about.
The season's real betting starts in September. The how to bet on football page is where that begins.