One stat is very important in the NFL, and the good news is that it’s one that has good predictive value. That stat is penalty yardage, and you can use it when you’re trying to decide between teams that are otherwise close. Teams that get a lot of penalties tend to do that consistently from week to week, and if you find that a team has this tendency, you can expect the trend to continue deep into the season. You should know that these things matter, though they are not the huge factors that some make them out to be.
If you look at the NFL penalty stats, you’ll see that there is around 40 or 50 years worth of difference between the most penalized team in the NFL and the least penalized club. This amounts to a little less than one yard per play. This is a big difference, for sure, but most teams will see a gap much smaller than that. There is not a significant difference between most teams, and you should not give too much importance to a few yards when you’re making your NFL picks.
The important thing is to put the yardage in context, and you might be smart to consider this as a tie-breaking factor when all other things are mostly equal. Penalties tend to keep drives going, and they can hurt you when you don’t think about them. Don’t plan on betting a bad team over a good team just because the bad team avoids penalties, though. Other factors are still very important, and you should be smart enough to put all of these things into a mixer to come up with your NFL picks at the end of every week.