• The 49ers offense is elite, but the defense has taken a step back: Over the last couple of months, the 49ers have retained their elite offense but have struggled to prevent opposing offenses from moving the ball.
• The Chiefs have peaked at the right time: After struggling mightily to generate explosive plays to start the campaign, the Chiefs have been the third-most explosive offense in the NFL over the last few months.
• The playstyles will dictate the game: Scoring via explosive plays — and not by efficiently and methodically marching down the field — is precisely how to drive up the total.
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Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Many bettors place wagers in multiple markets — spreads, totals, teasers, props, etc. — where they generally get oriented by following a bottom-up approach: “Which spreads do I like?” or “Which totals stand out this week?”
However, the goal in this space is to follow a top-down approach. We will take a deep dive into one game a week and consider how bettors can best apply a specific theory on a team, player or trend and capitalize on it in the betting market.
Some bets will track more traditional markets, but we will more often look to maximize our upside in the multitude of different markets offered by sportsbooks.
Bet the over 53.5
• First, let us use the drive-level metric earned drive points (EDP) to establish the base rates of how these teams have played this season.
• EDP captures how well teams sustainably move the ball on the drive level. From this perspective, the San Francisco 49ers have fielded a 97th-percentile offense and a league-average defense. The Kansas City Chiefs have fielded a 75th-percentile unit on both sides of the ball.
• Season-long numbers are valuable when setting the base for how the market might be pricing this game, but they are not the best way to understand where the teams currently are. So, to better understand the current form, we can look at EDP since Week 12.
• Over the last couple of months, the 49ers have retained their elite offense but have struggled to prevent opposing offenses from moving the ball.
• Not only have the Niners been bad in the aggregate, but they have also been consistently bad. In each of their games over the past few months, Kyle Shanahan's squad has allowed offenses to play above league average from an EDP perspective.
• Choose any defensive efficiency metric, and it will suggest a similar story of decline. There is also little evidence to suggest the team will look more similar to its early-season version, especially against this Chiefs offense.
• The Chiefs offense has looked far more like its 2018-22 iteration than the stuttering unit we saw early in the season. After struggling mightily to generate explosive plays — Patrick Mahomes and company ranked in the 20s for most of the season in explosive play rate — the Chiefs have been the third-most explosive offense in the NFL over the last few months.
• Scoring via explosive plays — and not by efficiently and methodically marching down the field — is precisely how to drive up the total.
Matchup Angles
• While the fundamentals suggest there is good reason to take the over, we can also turn to some matchup factors that further elevate this spot.
• The market is pricing in a downgrade on the 49ers offensive production, as their point total is sitting at around 24 points, roughly 5 less than their season-long average.
• However, elite offenses tend to beat good defenses and drive play. On average, teams with 95th-percentile (and above) EDPs that face defenses with 75th-percentile EDPs will outperform the defense’s averages by nearly 40%. In other words, when an elite offense plays an elite defense, it is the offense that drives the matchup, limiting the advantage a defense possesses.
• Further — and on a more granular matchup level — the Chiefs have played man coverage at one of the highest rates in the NFL this season. As PFF has studied, man coverage tends to be a true reflection of the talent on the field, where better wide receivers will typically beat worse cornerbacks and vice versa.
• For most of the season, the Chiefs have been on the right side of their man-coverage matchups. Their three starting cornerbacks are in the 75th percentile or above when it comes to preventing separation.
• But in this matchup with Shanahan’s scheme, Brandon Aiyuk, Deebo Samuel and George Kittle, it is the 49ers who possess the man-matchup advantage.
• On average, the 49ers have generated around two standard deviations more separation than the average Chiefs opponent.
• Given what we know about man coverage, we could reasonably expect that had the Chiefs' sample been only matchups with the 49ers, their cornerbacks would have performed far worse and the defensive output would have been diminished.
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