The NFL regular season is halfway over and most teams have played between three and five games. The majority of teams have shown at least one or two areas that need work.
Whether it’s offensive line play, third-down defense, red zone efficiency, or something else, every team has a weakness to fix.
When your favorite NFL team needs help in a certain area, you can bet there are plenty of people willing to take them up on their offer to come to coach their team and show them how to improve on the weak area.
If you’re not fortunate enough to be one of those people, here are some ways you can become a better NFL picker (straight up) by studying tapes of different teams and improving your own game.
Read The Game Guide
A game guide is a document that breaks down all the phases of the game of football. If you are looking for information on how to break down the passing game, the running game, or the kicking game, then a game guide is where you will find it.
Unfortunately for us, the passing game is where the majority of the focus is on the offensive side of the ball. On the defensive side of the ball, we have coverage schemes. Man coverage, zone coverage, and the ability to disguise coverage and line up in different formations are all key to defensive football.
If you are serious about becoming a better NFL bettor, you must learn all you can about the passing game and the defending passing game. There are plenty of books out there that cover all aspects of the passing game.
These books are perfect for studying and breaking down the different routes that are run in the passing game.
Watch Plays In Slow Motion
NFL computer picks straight up games are played at a very high speed and it is sometimes difficult to recognize what is happening on the field when you only have a couple of hours to watch several hours of game tape. One way you can slow the game down and make it easier to recognize what the players are trying to do on the field is to watch the game film in slow motion.
There are several ways you can watch game film in slow motion. If you have the NFL Game Pass, you will find that the games are slowed down by default. If you are looking for an even slower version of the game, you can find many video editing software programs out there that allow you to slow the video down to a speed that is more comfortable for you to recognize what is happening on the field.
Check Out Game Film From Last Year
Just like players make a lot of progress between their junior and senior years of college, the league tends to evolve every season. A good example of this is the league-wide increase of third-down conversions since the end of last season.
Unfortunately for bettors, it is very easy to make a mistake and think that whatever team did well or poorly on a certain element of the game last year will do the same this year. This simply isn’t true. We are seeing tons of defensive line play that is much more aggressive and less patient than it was last year.