How to Use Power Ratings and Sportsbook Lines to Calculated Expected Wins
Some of my favorite bets to make on the NFL are future bets on team performance for the entire season. This includes bets on win totals, division winners, conference winners and of course the Super Bowl winner. Projecting team wins is a great place to start with these bets, particularly the division, conference and Super Bowl bets. You can’t make the playoffs if you don’t win.
There are a few different approaches you can take to project a number of teams wins. I like to use the lines for games to help with this. Some sportsbooks, especially online sportsbooks, will post lines for every game of the season. If you don’t have a power rating system of your own, you can use the lines from the sportsbooks that have posted every game of the season. If you do have a power rating system, then you can calculate the lines for each game yourself. I have 2 sets of power ratings, New Mexico and Power Rating, but I also use the sportsbooks lines as a comparison.
Once you have the lines for each game, you need to convert the line to a win probability percentage. The line conversion chart to the right, downloadable in excel, has this information and is shown as the Win Exp Rate. Then simply add the Win Exp Rate for all games together to get the projected win total.
Using the Atlanta Falcons 2025-26 season schedule as an example below, you can see the lines from different sportsbooks, the average line from those books, the power rating line (PR Exp Line) and New Mexico Line (NM Exp Line). I’ve also show the Win Exp Rate from the chart above for the avg line, PR Line and NM Line.
Adding up the Win Exp Rate for the Average Line, Power Rated Line and New Mexico lines, provide the projected win totals to the left. Despite some differences in lines (SF, AZ) the 3 different systems project almost the same number of wins
With the sum of the Win Exp Rate for the 3 different sets of lines, we now have 3 different win total projections that can be used to compare to win total bets and against other division opponents for winning the division. I like to use multiple sets of lines for this exercise so I can have comparison figures. This ensures I’m not putting too many eggs in one basket.
Before I created my own power ratings, I used a 2nd way to interpret sportsbook lines into wins. This was a way for me to compare Win Exp Rate results from that sportsbook to something else. In this exercise, any game that a team was favored by 3.5 points or more I mark as a win. On the other side, if the team is an underdog of 3.5 points or more, I consider that a loss. A line in between I call a coin flip. For coin flips I take the total games and divide by 2 to get number of wins. My reasoning for this is simple, 3 points is the most common point difference in games, so I built projections around that number. Using the average lines for Atlanta’s schedule above, we get the results in the chart on the right. They are a big favorite in 1 game and have a 50/50 shot in 10 games for 6 projected wins (1+(10/2) or 1+5).
After calculating wins by line cluster, we now have 4 different win total projections for the Atlanta Falcons in the 2025-26 NFL season. Unfortunately for Atlanta, the boys in Las Vegas and the online sportsbook retailers don’t think highly of them this season. Below shows the expected wins by the average line, power rating line and New Mexico for every team in order by most wins. Interesting that none of the lines expect a team to win less than 5 games. Cleveland and NY Giants are consistently at the bottom of each systems result. Buffalo is the clear favorite in Las Vegas to have the most wins based on the schedule. Also all 3 expect a big turnaround for San Francisco this season.
If you’d like to take a closer look to the other 31 teams, or see more comparisons for the entire league, you can use a copy of the dashboard on Tableau Public. Here is the link for the NFL Team Schedule Insights dashboard. You can use the team selector to change teams.