News on a fun, new venture
Including a 30-day free trial for the Stealing Signals community
This will be a little different email than usual, as I’m excited to announce a project I’ve been working on for a few months. I’ve launched a new subscription service called Stealing Lines, in partnership with Dalton Kates, which focuses on the NFL betting landscape. It will be hosted on Substack, much like this newsletter, but will also feature a subscriber-only Discord you gain access to through your Substack subscription. If you’re not familiar with Dalton, he’s an up-and-coming analyst who has done great work with 4for4 over the past year-plus, and recently took a full-time job with a new company called Mojo. I’ve gotten to know Dalton over that timeframe and have been very impressed with his process, but more on why I’m so excited to work with him in a minute.
Over the past couple years, we’ve seen the betting market explode. It has opened up so many new ways to think about football, and I’ve had a blast the past couple years writing weekly betting articles over at OddsChecker. I’ve done that stuff in addition to Stealing Signals since the start of this newsletter, and this new project will in no way impact what you’ll see from me here.
While I’ve had a blast writing about betting, and been in the black both years in terms of my game picks, I wouldn’t call myself well-versed in the various markets, particularly with respect to the uber-popular props markets. Obviously there’s a ton of overlap between the research and analysis I’m doing on fantasy football for Stealing Signals subs, but there’s market expertise that’s required to take advantage of the ever-increasing landscape of prop betting opportunities. This is where Dalton comes in as a perfect partner.
One of the first main ways Dalton came onto my radar as standing out in a crowd of analysts was during the FFPC Main Event playoffs, where we had some conversations about the better of two squads he advanced there. Throughout this background on Dalton, I want to emphasize that it’s not that he’s had success, but that his process stands out. Check out the starting lineup for that squad:
Anyone who follows along here will immediately recognize a host of players I was on last year. This team didn’t win the overall contest or anything — it did finish very high — but the more important thing to me was you don’t fall into this roster by accident. This team featured five key players in common with the $5k buy-in NFFC team I drafted with Mike Leone, Pat Kerrane, and Peter Overzet last year that swept the payouts for that league — Jonathan Taylor, D’Andre Swift, Travis Kelce, Ja’Marr Chase, and Joe Burrow (who is not pictured here but Dalton also had rostered to complete his Bengals double stack). It was otherwise WR heavy and focused on young, breakout players, and while there’s certainly some good fortune to getting all the pieces right on the same roster, Dalton absolutely crushed this.
I often see other rosters late in seasons and think something like, “That’s a sweet team, but I probably wouldn’t have landed on it because I wouldn’t have taken Player A or gone with Strategy B.” That for me is a learning process, a way to consider whether I made missteps or need to adjust my understanding of ways to play this game. But in the case of Dalton’s team, I was just jealous, because it felt like the perfect version of a team I could have landed on. It was immediately clear there’s a common analytical understanding between us.
Not long after that, Dalton shared a pretty sweet prop bet he’d identified where Rashaad Penny was listed at 80/1 to lead the NFL in rushing for Week 17. By this point, Penny hadn’t rushed more than 17 times in a game, but he was coming off three straight starts where he’d been incredibly efficient, and he was Seattle’s only real offensive answer. In a contract year, he also had a lot of incentive to finish the season strong, and the Seahawks seemed willing to give him the room to do that to close out a lost season. Penny would go on to hit this prop, rushing 25 times for 170 yards and then turning around and beating that number with 23 carries for 190 in Week 18, as if to just reinforce how sound the process was.
I keep talking about this idea of process. To me, the allure of working with Dalton was less about his past successes — I’ve got more to share below — and more about the manner in which he analyzes things. This is an area of the always-changing NFL analytical landscape that I wanted and want to get better at, and both because of the evidence I’ve seen but also weekly calls Dalton and I have been doing since before the NFL draft, I’m confident in what I can and will learn from him.
This is also the pitch I’d offer to consider signing up for Stealing Lines. If you’re here, you’re probably a fan of my process. Dalton and I won’t be the biggest shop in town, and we won’t have some of the advantages larger betting communities have. But there’s a tradeoff there, too, because markets react to sharp action, and big communities hammering lines can keep everyone from getting their money down.
I gave a lot of thought to what I would want as a consumer if I was interested in a betting package, and to me the idea of a smaller shop of a couple analysts whose processes I trusted was the ideal. In that ideal, you’re making sharp bets, but not ones that thousands of other people are also making. This is also in part why Stealing Lines is priced higher than Stealing Signals (the other part being that most comparable betting packages around the industry are also priced higher, because you’re able to get a lot more action down when you’re playing things week to week).
But we also want to make things accessible. So for the next couple of weeks, we’re offering a couple of deals. The first is exclusive to the Signals community, where you can sign up for a free 30-day trial through the Stealing Lines Substack, join the Discord, and see whether you want to continue on after a month. We won’t be offering that option into the regular season, but if you want a free month of looks at the futures market, you can sign up for that at think link. I’m honestly not sure if a credit card is required, but I imagine so.
The second offer is available for anyone, so it’s less cool and exclusive, but it’s a two-for-one package on our annual subscription. That’s basically what the name says — anyone who signs up for our $125 annual package can shoot us a friend’s email and we’ll comp them their first year free, with the same full access. Obviously, you and a friend can just split the cost and think of it like a 50% off deal.
We’ve already started posting several season-long player futures, and that, the awards markets, and markets like team win totals or team futures like division winners or Super Bowl bets will be our focus until the start of the season. During the season, Dalton will be in the lead grinding weekly player props, obviously with some input from me. I’ll be doing some game writeups like I have at OddsChecker the past few years. Those are more efficient markets with far more money bet into them each week, and I’ll never claim I can definitely beat them, but I’m encouraged by my results over the past two seasons. Regardless, we’ll have bets posted for whichever way you like to get action down.
And then I’m perhaps most excited for the opportunities in the offseason. Dalton crushed both the NFL combine and draft markets this past year, including a longshot bet on Tyquan Thornton to run the fastest 40-yard dash time at the combine.
This last tweet is my favorite, where Dalton had a list of favorite plays and literally only missed two, the longshots on the Giants to go WR with their first pick and the Rams to go kicker.
Anything close to even odds was a hit, as were the 16/1 and 40/1 bets on Quay Walker to be the first linebacker and the exacta on the specific order of the first three picks.
But as I said before, I want to focus more on process. Dalton’s had an incredible last year, but the last thing I’d want to do is pretend he’s definitely going to nail several 40/1 or 80/1 longshots again this year. That’s frankly unfair to him in terms of expectations. (At the same time, I obviously wanted to provide evidence and not just my word that he knows what he’s doing, for anyone unfamiliar with Dalton. There’s always a tough balance to hit there.)
But that’s the deal with Stealing Lines. Most everything we offer over there will be behind a paywall, which again will be through Substack. You can also find the main site at stealinglines.substack.com. I’m super excited to build a community of people sweating along together with great bets. Our goal will be to make our subscribers money, obviously, and we feel good we’re going to be able to do that, or we wouldn’t be creating this service. But let’s also make sure to mention proper bankroll management and never risking more than you can afford to lose are oft-added footnotes for a reason, because they are incredibly important. I’m hopeful the Signals community is pretty sharp in this area, and that over at Stealing Lines we’ll add another avenue to engage with the sports we love.
Just signed up for Signals and saw this. Is the trial not active anymore? Getting an error when trying to sign up
Will you have a deal for subscribing to both Signals and Line?