It is a timeless piece of wisdom from Gill Alexander—I’ve heard him drop this Wild Card nugget on his VSiN program, ‘A Numbers Game’ for years, and it’s backed by solid historical data.

The core idea is that Wild Card games tend to produce decisive outcomes: favorites either blow out opponents (covering comfortably) or underdogs pull off outright upsets, with very few “win but no cover” scenarios for the favorite.

Recent trends support it closely. In the last 74 Wild Card games (per VSiN data from early 2025), the outright winner covered the spread 86.3% of the time (63-10-1 ATS). “Win-no-covers” (favorite wins but fails to cover) are rare, happening only about 14% of the time—very close to Gill’s 12% figure from the pre-expansion era.

Even with the playoff format expanding to six games per round since 2020, the pattern of lopsided results has largely persisted, though underdogs have been strong ATS overall in recent postseasons.

You’re spot on about this year’s setup adding extra intrigue: opening lines show three home underdogs entering Wild Card weekend (as of January 5 lines).

My advice is to simply to focus on picking the winner of any particular contest and let the spread take care of itself 86–88% of the time it is sharp—especially in a round known for blowouts or chaos.

Good luck this weekend, Let’s cash some winners!