Like last year, CG Technology (formerly Cantor Gaming) is the first Las Vegas book to release win totals. For your convenience, I have produced them below, and sorted the list by the difference between 2015 Vegas wins and 2014 wins.

What should jump out to you is that CG Technology has no team moving more than 3 wins from its total from last year; that strikes me as a bit odd. In addition, the eye test shows significant regression to the mean on all parties: the teams expected to make the biggest jumps were the two 2-win teams from 2014, while all eight teams projected to drop by at least 1.5 wins in 2015 won at least 10 games last year.

The eye test isn’t wrong: the correlation coefficient between 2014 actual wins and 2015 Vegas wins is a sky-high 0.79. I ran a simple linear regression using 2014 actual wins as my input, and 2015 Vegas wins as my output. The best-fit formula is as follows:

2015 Vegas Wins = 4.242 + 0.474 * 2014 Actual Wins

What you want to focus on there is the 0.474 number; it means for every win a team had in 2014, CG Technology is regressing that number to the mean by more than 50%! To come up with 2015 Vegas Wins, you start with 4.242, and then add 0.474 — and only 0.474 — wins for every 2014 win. That represents pretty significant regression to the mean.

That makes sense, of course. What doesn’t make sense is that the R^2 was so high. You would expect regression to the mean but with a number of large outliers; that’s not really the case here. I re-ran the numbers, and included Expected Wins based on the regression above. For example, here is how to read the line for the Saints. In 2014, New Orleans won 7 games. Using the regression above — starting with 4.242 and adding 0.474*7 — we would expect Vegas to project the Saints for 7.6 wins in 2015. But in reality, CG Technology has New Orleans at 9 wins, or 1.4 more wins than expected.

In other words, after regressing win totals to the mean, Vegas really likes New Orleans and Atlanta, and really doesn’t like Arizona and Cleveland.

Betting against the Cardinals is not exactly foolproof, but it’s easy to see why Vegas would be pessimistic on Arizona. In 17 games, Arizona scored 326 points and allowed 326 points, despite being super lucky when it came to fumble recoveries. The health of Carson Palmer remains a concern, and the Cardinals were one of the weakest 11-3 teams of all time.

The Browns ended the season on a 5-game losing streak, and I don’t think there’s been a single piece of good news out of Cleveland all offseason. The futures of both Brian Hoyer and Johnny Manziel remain up in the air, while Josh Gordon has (for now) been suspended for all of 2015, and GM Ray Farmer is engaged in his own scandal.

So why is CG Technology so high on Atlanta and New Orleans? It may be schedule-related, as each team gets five games against Tampa Bay, Jacksonville, Tennessee, and Washington. And, given the high-profile nature of Drew Brees and Matt Ryan, the thinking is probably something along the lines of “betters want to bet on New Orleans and Atlanta.”

One subjective note: the 49ers line sticks out to me.  I can’t say I have been impressed with San Francisco management of late, and Jim Tomsula is not someone I’m currently willing to bet on. An 8.5-win line means Vegas is actually kind of bullish on San Francisco, which must mean Vegas is kind of bullish on Colin Kaepernick turning things around. That all strikes me as odd, and perhaps a rare mispriced moment in the market. My hunch is that by August, the 49ers line will have dropped, so now would be the time to get your bets in if you plan on fading San Francisco.