Hall-of-Fame game - The kick-off to the 2009 NFL Preseason schedule is closing in, with the first matchup taking place Hall-of-Fame weekend. That launches a little more than four weeks of NFL action, featuring 11 nationally televised games and is the official start of the NFL betting season.

Online sportsbooks will have all the NFL preseason odds posted soon, as teams head to camp. NFL preseason Week 1 odds will be up, plus you can look at Week 1 NFL odds which are live now.

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The annual Hall-of-Fame game features the Buffalo Bills vs. the Tennessee Titans in Canton, Ohio on Sunday, August 9th. The matchup, which will be nationally televised on NBC, was created to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the American Football League.

When you’re involved in online sports betting, you are probably already starting to think about these preseason games, reading one or two NFL annual preview magazines and cruising NFL-focused sites.

Preseason NFL betting takes some finesse, as handicapping the exhibition games is quite different than handicapping NFL regular season tilts.

The first thing I do when betting on the NFL Football Betting Online during the preseason is look at QB depth and then quickly move on to handicapping the situation. If a team has a real QB battle going on, with two or three decent pro-level pivots on the roster who are going to be playing, this is of real interest. Look for quality on the depth chart below the starter. Peyton Manning and Tom Brady won’t have a significant impact on the NFL preseason betting results over the first couple of weeks. But the second and third stringers will. Keep this in mind.

The situation is also highly relevant. Particularly look for coaches and teams that are in spots where they might be really motivated to win. Preseason NFL games is the only time of the sports betting year when you will find varying motivations coming into a game. One coach might not care at all about whether his team wins or loses, he simply wants to get some players reps, evaluate a few key newcomers or watch for a positional battle or two. But it is not uncommon for a team like that to be facing a coach who does actually want to record a “W”, for whatever reason.

If the coach is a rookie and lost in Week 1, or the team is coming off a bad season and a new coach is looking to install a winning attitude early, etc. Fact is, some coaches simply don’t care about winning during the preseason and others do. Try and read local papers for pre-game interviews and see if you can pick up whether the coaches have been gameplanning for their preseason matchup. It’s unusual for a coach to spend time gameplanning for an opponent during the exhibition season, as they’re more focused on player evaluation, getting their schemes in place, etc. But if they’re studying film and putting in place plays to counteract or go after another team’s schemes, pay extra close attention. This is important to know when handicapping preseason games.

Looking at the betting odds during preseason games is not as critical as it is during the regular season. The first step in NFL handicapping during the “real” season is to check out all the NFL odds for that week and start the process of looking for value somewhere on the betting board.

That isn’t the case during August. You really don’t see significant favorites through the first couple of weeks of preseason ball. You’ll see many of the lines hover around 3, the obligatory number of points given to the home side. Don’t get too caught up with the pointspread when online sports betting during the early going of the NFL preseason.

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