If you’re a company that buys advertisements during football games, I think you should hire a professional sports-better to help you determine the ideal way to spend your advertising money. We all know that if the game sucks or is a blowout that fewer people will be watching by the end of the game – sure the diehard fans of either team will still be watching, but they will be watching no matter what. We’re only concerned with what game the people who have no strong ties to any game will be watching.

Now, presumably, advertisements have a certain cost depending on lots of factors. For example, a game with two division leaders is more likely to attract viewers than a game between two teams in the cellar. Similarly, ads later in a game are cheaper by virtue of the chance that people will have switched to another channel. For example, the most expensive ads for the Superbowl are right after kickoff, and those late in the game are heavily discounted.

Now if we assume that if the expected number of people are watching a particular game, that you are getting your money’s worth for an ad, and if more or fewer people are then you are either getting a deal, or getting screwed. This means that you want to get the most bang for your buck, you need to, as a company, be able to pick which games will exceed viewer expectations and which games will be blowouts. And who knows this better than somebody who makes a living betting on football?

Someone who devotes their life to following the sport to this degree is already doing copious amounts of research into the games, and makes their living by, among other things, determining when a game will be closer or more of a blowout than the public thinks. I think you could offer such a person a nominal fee to share some of their information, with the obvious caveat that none of your employees would go place large wagers using the information, since that would lower their betting odds and thus their winnings. You’re pretty much offering somebody, say, an extra $20,000 a year to spend an hour a week telling you what games you should advertise the 4^th quarter of. No doubt, they would get some wrong, but they would probably be doing better than the other companies, which is, of course, your goal.