I hear ya, and I do it all the time too. Whenever we talk about the public, we are always guessing to some degree on whether it's really the public moving the lines, or is it the sharps? Though early line moves are usually sharp money, and gameday moves, especially in the hour or two before kickoff, ARE usually the public. There are other sources out there too for checking out who the public is on. I quote Big Guy's #'s a lot because it does seem to represent the general public from my experience. About 2/3 of the guys there lose, and they take mostly favorites and Overs.
What I don't agree with is your second paragraph, saying we should give trends more weight. Trends in my opinion are very misleading, and are often data-mined to work. IE. A trend will say Team X has gone 14-3 when favored by 4 to 5? points. The author of something like this surely started out looking at a wider spread range, but then trimmed off the 3? and 6 point games, and everything beyond that, to get numbers that really stood out. Doing this just produces misleading fluke numbers because there is no reason for a team to cover 4 to 5? but not 3? or 6.
With thousands of possible trends out there, there are always going to be a few that stick out simply by the randomness of it all.
The other thing I don't like about trends is that for a trend to have validity, it must have a certain number of plays, or trials. But to get a proper number of trials, a trend has to go back more than a few years because there just aren't that many games each year. Any trend that compares a specific team or matchup that goes back more than about 3 years is in my opinion irrelevant because so much has changed in that time. Chances are there are only a handful of players on the current team that were on the team 3+ years ago...probably a different coach...maybe even a different stadium...and then the opponent has also changed just as much. A team may have built a huge edge years ago because they were simply much better than the opponent you are comparing them to, but now that formerly-bad team is good, and vice versa. So we're basing today's game on things that happened in 1992 or 1981 or whatever, when it has no real bearing.
