August 20th, 2025
When you look at the 2025 NFL schedule and the Week 1 games, you can be pretty sure that there will be a shock or two across the fixture list. It’s inevitable, part of sports in general, not just football. Yet, from a data perspective, we might ask how often the favorite for a game wins in the NFL?
As you might expect, the answer changes season by season, and there are other variables you will consider when studying NFL game betting lines, such as home advantage. Still, the answer is that in a typical NFL season, the sportsbook favorite wins a game around 65%-69% of the time.
In 2024, however, we had a better season for the favorites than average, with the team favored in the betting odds winning 72.1% of the time, going 196-76 across a 272-game season. It’s valuable knowledge for sports betting, even if it does not give you insight into a specific matchup, but where does it rank historically?
The 2024 season was generous to the favorites.
The main takeaway is that the 72.1% rate for the favorite ranks 9th all-time. The highest-ever rate was recorded across the 1975 season, with the favorite winning 76.8% of the time in Roger Staubach and Terry Bradshaw's era.
However, trends are essential when looking at historical betting data, and it is worth noting that the 2024 rate of 72.1% was the highest in almost 20 years, only beaten by the rate of 74.9% posted in the 2005 season. The 2023 season came in at 68%, a bit lower than the previous season, with a rate of 64.9% across 2022.
Historically, the 1970s seemed to be the heyday for beating the bookies, as seven of the top ten best seasons for backing favorites came between 1969 and 1976. The “worst” period came in the early 1950s, with the favorites almost touching as low as a 50% win rate from 1955-1957. However, we should stress that the data becomes less reliable the further you go.
ATS could be a more critical metric
Of course, we should also recognize that this data represents straight-up results, whereas many NFL bettors will be looking at beating the spread. The ATS metric, i.e., the win rate of the favorites who beat the handicap on each game, was also high at 54.1% (the 5th-best rate all-time) in the 2024 season. The 2005 season was the best overall, with favorites beating the spread across 58.9% of games.
It’s worth noting that the ATS metric averages below 50% historically, so it does tell you that unquestioningly backing the favorites to beat the handicap is not likely to be profitable long-term. On the other hand, raw statistics are only helpful up to a point, and they should not impact your strategy for approaching individual games and game weeks, nor the season as a whole.
Ultimately, seeing if last season was an outlier will be interesting. Thus far, the 2020s have been about average historically, yet there are signs we are trending toward the high 60s and low 70s. This could be due to different factors, including AI and algorithmic betting strategies. Still, it can also be down to the schedule and the balance of quality between different rosters. But we won’t be able to call it a trend until those high numbers, like last season, repeat across several years, just like in the late 1960s and 1970s.