The National Football League is a unique obsession for American sports fans. Of course the Yankees love to see men crush each other on the field and score touchdowns and watch cheerleaders do their thing. But the amount of gambling on American football dwarfs many other industries in the United States.

Enthusiasts drop billions of dollars per year betting on NFL games. The score straight up, against the spread, the over/under on the amount of points in the game and loads of side bets, or as the Americans call them, prop bets.

Get this: at the Super Bowl each year, there is even a popular prop bet on how long the singer will stretch out their version of the United States’ national anthem. The list of side bets is enormous.

But we won’t focus there. Let’s examine how to make money betting on the actual games and the outcomes. All you need to know about betting on American football is right here in this post.

Last year’s Super Bowl was one of the most exciting in the NFL’s history. The Atlanta Falcons were leading the New England Patriots by a blowout score for most of the first 3 quarters. Then Tom Brady and the Patriots staged an epic comeback to beat the Falcons and win the championship.

That makes New England one of the favorites to win in 2017. So Las Vegas, the national seat of sports betting in America has the Patriots projected to be one of the top teams in the NFL, with leading oddsmakers expecting New England to rack up 11 wins this year. When that number was announced, so many people started betting on the Patriots to exceed that number, that the oddsmakers raised their projections to 11.5 wins in 2017. That is one of ways that betting on football works in America.

The same thing happens at the bottom of the spectrum. The Cleveland Browns were one of the worst teams in the NFL last year, so early Vegas bookmakers expected them to win only 4 out of 16 games in 2017. The betting public was more bullish on the Browns, for some reason, so Vegas pushed their projections up to 4.5 wins. Now, it is tough to get someone in Las Vegas to take your bet that the Browns will win less than 4.5 games in 2017.

That is the ultimate lesson about betting on American football. Get in on the good bets early. Once the feelings in Vegas are made public, bettors all over the country will start to make their feelings known. Vegas will move where the money tells them to go. It is up to sophisticated bettors from all over the world to get on their bets early and try to lock in easy wins.