Associated Press The Patriots can’t possibly be much better than they were last year.

Inexperienced sports bettors love to make a common mistake in the early parts of both the college football and NFL seasons: They put entirely too much stock in the previous years’ results against the spread.

The New England Patriots covered the spread in each of their first 13 games last year. It was an achievement unsurpassed in the gambling arena. Can you expect them to do the same in 2008 with a roster that’s nearly identical to the 2007 version? Hell no.

New England’s run was nothing more than a statistical anomaly, a deviation from the norm that traditionally forces all bets against the spread to be a 50-50 proposition in theory.

But this isn’t to say that the results of the previous year should be disregarded entirely. There’s a lot of good material in a year’s worth of analysis.

On Wall Street, there’s a very risky form of doing business in the futures market. These are the type of deals where you buy a contract on an item such as oil, corn or gold and hope that the price increases so you can sell it when the contract expires at a higher price.

The standard operating procedure with futures trading is to stay in the realm of the obvious. Take out a natural gas contract in the winter, when people need more of it to heat their homes. Diamonds are traditionally a great investment in the summer because that is when most couples want to get married.

However, if you pick a bad futures investment, there’s a risk of holding the bag, and your savings account is sucked out like a vacuum.

Dan Akroyd’s character Roman Craig tried to prune his brother Chet Ripley (played by the late John Candy) of his retirement money for a “can’t-lose” investment on a futures deal in the classic 1988 comedy “The Great Outdoors.” Man, I laugh when that bear gets shot in the ass, but let’s get back on point.

Futures thinking works very well in the NFL.

About now, if you’ve ever dabbled in online sports betting or at least considered it, you will have received a book from an online site such as betus.com with the entire season’s worth of games listed with odds. The odds show who did what against the spread, a recap of the previous year’s scores and statistics and a schedule for this year’s games.

If you haven’t received the book, the information isn’t hard to find. Every online sports book makes it readily available.

The proper way to approach early-season betting in football is to analyze if the team you are wanting to bet on has improved categorically from the previous year’s version.

For example, the Dallas Cowboys added star linebacker Zach Thomas and cornerback Adam Jones to the secondary. It’s only right to think that the defense should improve, so standard over/under bets in the first few games that books list will probably provide a better investment opportunity to the under. The Cowboys should give up fewer points from week to week.

The New York Jets added Brett Favre at quarterback. This might not be enough to get them into the playoffs, but the offense should be improved over the 2007 version, so a divisional matchup against a team like Buffalo might be a wise investment if the points spread is similar to what it was last season.

In short, look at the performances against the spread, and ask yourself if the team has improved in each particular category.

There are a lot of hidden gems out there in the early portions of the football season, but if you use common sense, they aren’t difficult to find.

Chuck Blount | 210SA contributor