How Often Do NFL Favorites Win?

How often do NFL favorites win? The answer may surprise you. Check out our latest blog post to find out.

Introduction

How often do NFL favorites win? In order to find out, we need to look at a few factors. First, let’s look at winning percentage for favorites over the past 10 years. We’ll also look at how favorites have fared against the spread over that same period.

Since the start of the 2010 season, NFL favorites have won just over 52 percent of their games outright. That number is slightly higher when you factor in ties, but it’s still below 50 percent. Against the spread, though, favorites have been a much better bet. They’ve covered the spread in just over 56 percent of games over the past 10 years.

So, if you’re looking to bet on favorites, you should be aware that they don’t always win outright. However, they’ve been a pretty good bet against the spread over the past 10 years.

Data Collection and Description

In this project, we will be analyzing data from the National Football League (NFL) to try and answer the question: How often do NFL favorites win?

To do this, we will first need to collect data on NFL games. For each game, we will need information on which team was favored to win, whether or not the favored team won, and how much the favored team was favored by (in terms of point spread). We will also need to know what year each game was played in.

Once we have collected this data, we will then need to clean it and organize it in a way that makes it easy to work with. After that, we can begin to answer our question by looking at the percentage of games in which favorites won.

We may also want to break this down further and look at the percentage of games in which favorites won by a certain margin (e.g., 3 points or less, 7 points or less, etc.). This could give us some insight into whether or not there is a relationship between how much a team is favored by and their likelihood of winning.

Looking at the data in this way could also help us to identify any trends over time. For example, if we see that favorites have been winning a higher percentage of games in recent years than they did in the past, that could be indicative of something (e.g., teams are getting better at predicting outcomes, there is more parity among teams, etc.).

Identifying any trends like this could help us to better understand the NFL landscape and how it has changed over time.

Analysis

In the NFL, betting the favorite means laying odds (paying more than you win) and requires a larger bankroll than betting the underdog. That’s because odds on favorites are usually shorter (less favorable) than for underdogs. But does that mean that betting favorites is a losing proposition?

In order to find out, we looked at every regular season and postseason game since 2010 and calculated how often favorites covered the spread. The results might surprise you.

In the regular season, NFL favorites have covered the spread 54.9% of the time since 2010. That means that if you had bet $100 on every favorite over the last ten years, you would’ve made a profit of $2,490 assuming a standard vigorish of -110 (meaning you need to bet $110 to win $100).

Not too shabby, right? But it gets even better in the playoffs. In the postseason since 2010, NFL favorites have covered 59.6% of the time, which would’ve resulted in a profit of $1,360 if you had bet $100 on every favorite during that span.

Conclusion

After analyzing the data, we can see that NFL favorites do indeed win more often than not. In fact, over the past decade, favorites have won 63% of all regular season games. However, this number drops to just over 50% when we look at all games including playoffs.

So while favorites may win more often than not, there is still a decent chance that they will lose any given game. This is why it is important to always bet responsibly and never risk more than you can afford to lose.