Ask ten profitable bettors what separates them from the rest, and at least eight will mention record keeping before they mention analysis. I resisted tracking my bets for longer than I care to admit — it felt like homework, and I was convinced my memory was good enough to know what was working. It wasn’t. The moment I started logging every TD prop in a simple spreadsheet, patterns emerged that I’d been completely blind to, and my results improved within weeks.
Record keeping isn’t glamorous, but it’s the infrastructure that makes everything else — your strategy, your bankroll management, your edge identification — actually measurable. The anytime touchdown scorer market is the most popular player prop by total handle, and that popularity means competition for edge is fierce. Without records, you’re flying on feel, and feel is a terrible pilot in a high-variance market.
Performance Auditing: Storing ROI, Odds History, and Bookmaker Records
The temptation is to track too much or too little. Track too little and your records don’t reveal actionable patterns. Track too much and the maintenance burden causes you to abandon the system by Week 6. I’ve settled on ten fields per bet, which takes roughly 30 seconds to log and provides enough data for meaningful analysis.
The essentials: date, game (teams), player name, market type (anytime, first TD, multiple TDs, parlay), odds at placement, stake, closing odds at kickoff, result (win/loss/void), and profit or loss. These nine fields give you everything needed to calculate ROI, yield, and closing line value. The tenth field is a brief note — one or two words capturing your primary reasoning, such as “weak RZ defence” or “goal-line role change.” These notes become invaluable when reviewing your season because they let you categorise your bets by the type of analysis that drove them.
Recording the closing odds alongside your placement odds is the step most bettors skip, and it’s the one I consider most important. The gap between these two numbers is your closing line value, and it’s the most reliable indicator of whether your analysis is adding genuine value or whether you’re systematically mispricing the market. A bettor who consistently gets better prices than the closing line will profit over time, regardless of short-term results — and your records are what prove or disprove that consistency.
I use a basic spreadsheet rather than a dedicated app, because it gives me full control over the data and allows custom calculations. A Google Sheets or Excel file with ten columns, one row per bet, is all you need. Formatting it neatly from the start — with headers, alternating row colours, and locked formulas — makes the weekly update painless and the end-of-month review actually enjoyable.
Calculating ROI and Yield on TD Props
Two metrics tell you whether your TD prop betting is profitable: ROI and yield. They measure the same thing — return relative to investment — but from slightly different angles.
ROI (Return on Investment) is your total profit or loss divided by your total stakes, expressed as a percentage. If you’ve staked £2,000 over the season and your account shows £2,160, your profit is £160 and your ROI is 8%. This is the headline number that answers the question “am I making money?”
Yield is mathematically identical to ROI for a flat-staking bettor, but it becomes more useful when your stakes vary. Yield is calculated as total profit divided by the sum of all stakes, giving you a per-unit measure of profitability. A 5% yield means you’re earning 5p per pound staked on average. For touchdown props, where the variance is high and the odds range from 1.50 to 15.00, yield smooths out the impact of occasional big wins at long odds and gives you a more stable measure of performance.
What constitutes a good yield for TD props? Across the broader sports betting market, anything above 3% sustained over a season is considered strong. For the anytime TD scorer market specifically, I’d set the bar at 5% yield as the target for a serious bettor. First TD scorer specialists, who deal with higher variance and longer odds, might show higher yield figures on a per-bet basis but need larger sample sizes before the number becomes meaningful.
Calculate your running ROI and yield at the end of each NFL month. Weekly calculations are too noisy — a single big winner or a cold three-game stretch will produce misleading figures. Monthly calculations (approximately four weeks of games, typically 15-25 bets for an active punter) give you a meaningful checkpoint without encouraging overreaction to short-term swings.
Spotting Patterns and Adjusting Your Approach
The real value of record keeping emerges when you start slicing the data by category. After a full season, your spreadsheet contains enough bets to answer questions that would otherwise remain mysteries.
Sort by market type: is your ROI higher on anytime TD bets than first TD bets? If so, you may be better served concentrating your volume on the market where your edge is strongest. Parlay bets carry an average bookmaker hold rate exceeding 15% compared to roughly 5% on singles — so if your parlay ROI is deeply negative while your singles ROI is positive, the answer is obvious: cut back on parlays.
Sort by your reasoning notes: are bets driven by “red zone matchup” analysis outperforming those driven by “recent form”? This tells you which analytical frameworks are contributing genuine edge and which are producing noise. I discovered through my own records that my game-script-based picks significantly outperformed my matchup-only picks, which led me to weight game script more heavily in my weekly process.
Sort by timing: do bets placed on Thursday outperform those placed on Sunday morning? This reveals whether you’re capturing better prices by acting early or whether last-minute information improves your selections. The answer varies by bettor and by season, and only your records can tell you which pattern applies to you.
Look at your closing line value trend over time. If your average CLV is consistently positive across months, your process is sound and short-term losses are just variance. If your CLV is negative or declining, your analysis isn’t identifying value that the market eventually confirms — and it’s time to revisit your approach rather than increase your stakes.
The end-of-season review is the most valuable exercise. Block out two hours after the Super Bowl, pull your full-season data, and run every analysis described above. Write down three things you’ll do differently next season based on what the data shows. Then actually do them. That review — honest, data-driven, and acted upon — is the compound interest of sports betting. Each season builds on the last, and the bettors who track, measure, and adjust are the ones still profitable five years from now. Connect this habit with your broader work on closing line value tracking and you have a complete feedback loop.
