The one thing the market might undervalue: which teams simply kept their guys
Roster talent is priced. Roster CONTINUITY may not be — early in the season, betting the team that returned more of last year's production beat the number 55–56% in 2023 and 2024. It's a lead, not a lock: it faded in 2025, so we're tracking it live.
After ruling out every version of 'we can predict the game better,' one lead survived — and it's not about talent, which the market prices efficiently. It's about continuity: not how good a roster is, but how much of it came back.
Early in the season, before any 2025 games exist to judge a team by, we bet the side that returned more of its production from the prior year. In 2023 and 2024 that won 55 to 56% of the time against the spread — genuinely past break-even, and notably, a signal our own model wasn't already using. The market, it seems, may over-react to roster churn: it gets excited about splashy transfers and new faces and slightly under-credits the boring team that just ran it back.