Pro Football History.com Blog
October 22nd, 2026
Elo, the chess formula we applied to NFL team strength in late 2025, works on a simple idea. Every result moves a team’s rating up or down, and the size of the move depends on how surprising the result was. Beat a stronger team and the number jumps. Beat a weaker one and it barely moves. How well that works depends on how much evidence the formula gets. An NFL club plays 17 regular-season games, one a week from September into January, so every result carries a lot of weight and a single upset can reshape a team’s rating for a month.
Baseball sits at the other extreme. An MLB club plays 162 games between late March and late September, close to one a day, and every game gets a price, a starting pitcher, a total and a run line. That daily rhythm built an entire consumer category in the United States, including guides to the best MLB betting sites that compare which operators cover the sport and what markets they carry. Sports betting in the US runs on state law, with separate licensing rules and minimum ages in each state, and anyone who needs help can call 1-800-GAMBLER. Football never had that volume, and the way its ratings move reflects it.
Seventeen games leave little room for error
With so few games, a rating system cannot wait for the noise to settle. Our football version answers this by moving ratings more per game than a baseball model would, and by carrying part of each team’s rating into the next season instead of starting everyone from 1,500, the midpoint in the Elo scale.
The trade-off is plain. A fast-moving rating catches a real change in a team quickly. In 2008, when the Patriots started the season with one of the highest starting Elos ever, it was built largely on Tom Brady playing as the starting quarterback. But a Week 1 injury that forced Matt Cassel into the starting lineup significantly changed the performance of a team that a slower rating model would not have detected.
A hard cap promotes parity
The league’s structure pushes teams toward parity, and Elo ratings follow suit to the middle. In 2026 every club works under a hard salary cap of $301.2 million and carries 53 players on the active roster, plus 16 on the practice squad. A hard cap ensures that no team can simply buy a deeper roster than its rivals, and the draft hands the best young players to the teams that finished worst.
For a rating system, that forced parity keeps the gap between the top and bottom of the league narrower than in sports without a cap.
The draft keeps adding new inputs
Each spring the draft changes rosters faster than any rating can follow. Since 2017 the International Player Pathway has added another layer, bringing in players from outside the American college system. Two of these players were drafted on April 25, 2026. Miami took the British tight end Seydou Traore in the fifth round, and Philadelphia picked Uar Bernard, a defensive end from Nigeria, at No. 251 overall.
None of those offseason moves can show up in a rating until the player takes the field, which is one reason early-season numbers deserve some caution.
Neutral sites test the home-field adjustment
Our internal Elo model gives the home team a fixed bonus, and that assumption gets harder to apply as the league plays more games abroad. The first regular-season game outside North America came in 2007, when the New York Giants beat the Miami Dolphins 13-10 at Wembley Stadium in front of 81,176 people.
The 2026 international schedule set a record with nine games across four continents, seven countries and eight stadiums. It opened at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on September 10, where 100,021 people watched San Francisco beat the Los Angeles Rams 27-7. For these games, the home-field bonus in a rating model has to be removed, because neither team is really playing at home.
By Stephen Juza,
October 21st, 2026
As the NFL season approaches Week 7, three teams remain undefeated (Kansas City Chiefs, Minnesota Vikings, and the San Francisco 49ers), while two teams are still searching for their first win of the season (Miami Dolphins and the Los Angeles Chargers). The Chargers will have to wait just a little bit longer for their first win since Week 7 is their bye week, which comes at a moment where head coach Jim Harbaugh is desperately hoping to right the ship.
While football fans across the country tune in to see if these early-season matchups continue to unfold, many are also looking for ways to stay entertained between game days. Exploring online gaming platforms has become a popular pastime for sports enthusiasts wanting to test their luck without breaking the bank. For those looking to dive in with zero upfront commitment, checking out options at https://www.playusa.com/sweepstakes-casinos/no-deposit/ offers a fun, risk-free way to enjoy casino-style games from home.
Game of the Week:
Don’t miss Thursday Night Football this week for the best matchup of the week. The defending AFC champion New England Patriots (4-2) will travel to take on defending NFC North champion Chicago Bears. Both teams sit at 4-2, and this game represents just one of three games this week that feature both teams above .500.
The Patriots had a rocky start to the season, with quarterback Drake Maye showing a lot of struggles compared to his 2025 campaign. However, a three-game win streak has helped to give fans something more to cheer for as the Patriots chase the division-leading Buffalo Bills.
For the Bears (4-2), they are coming off a Week 6 scare where they held a massive 24-point lead against the Atlanta Falcons well into the 4th quarter, but allowed two late touchdowns and 2-point conversions to let the Falcons make a game of it. The Bears gained just 24 yards on their first four drives of the last quarter during the Falcons run until their defense forced a fumble to seal the game.
Undefeated Teams:
The Chiefs, Vikings, and 49ers are all still undefeated entering the week, with the Chiefs facing the toughest game of the three to remain undefeated. The Chiefs travel to Seattle to take on the defending Super Bowl champs, and while the Seahawks sit at just 3-3 entering the week, their defense has been a turnover machine. They have snagged seven picks, good for second in the league.
Meanwhile, the 49ers will travel to Atlanta to take on the 2-4 Falcons and the Vikings will host the 2-4 Colts. While anything can happen, look for all three undefeated teams to continue their unbeaten streak.
Winless Teams:
While the Chargers have their bye week to try and fix a season that has gone tragically off the rails, the Dolphins have their best opportunity for a few weeks to secure their first win of the season. Coming off their bye week, they will travel to face the New York Jets (2-4). The Dolphins are averaging only 14 points a game, second-worst in the league, while also generating the least amount of sacks on defense. If they cannot pull the upset here, they may not have a good chance until November 15th against the Colts.
October 7th, 2026
"4 to 1 on Yale." That was the betting in New York on Thanksgiving morning in 1891, according to the front page of The Evening World, which printed the prices from New Haven and Boston underneath: 2 to 1 and 3 to 1, on the same team, for the same game. The first player known to have been paid to play football did not take the field for another 50 weeks.
Betting on football, in other words, was popular earlier than most fans would guess. It also came with a map attached. Each city on that list priced the game for itself, and nearly every chapter since has turned on where betting could happen and who got to decide. This piece starts with the map as it stands in 2026, with licensed sportsbooks working state by state and a sweepstakes layer beside them, and works backward one era at a time until the record runs out on that front page.
The Modern Map Has A Sweepstakes Layer, And States Keep Redrawing It The sweepstakes casino sits on its own layer of that map. It is built on promotional sweepstakes law instead of a gaming license, and it checks each player's location before play. Searches for a Lonestar Casino sign-up code end at a review that says plainly there isn't one: the welcome credit is added automatically when an account opens.
Each site runs two balances. One is for play only. The other is a promotional currency that players can redeem for prizes, and the model includes a way to get it without buying anything. Whether that design sits inside a given state's law is something each state decides for itself, and they have not all decided it the same way.
That review also lists the states where the site does not operate, and the list reads best against the publisher's category-wide one. Legal Sports Report's sweepstakes coverage names eleven states as closed to the model at its latest update: Washington, California, Nevada, Idaho and Montana in the West, Michigan and Indiana in the Midwest, Tennessee in the South, and New York, New Jersey and Maine in the Northeast.
State action has run in one direction for more than a decade. The first bans hit the storefront version, in Florida and Ohio in 2013, and North Carolina had pushed providers out by July 1, 2015. The online version drew the next round. By mid-2025 six states had sent cease-and-desist letters or passed new laws, Michigan and New Jersey among them, and New York passed a restricting statute the same year. Tennessee followed in December 2025, ordering operators to cease and desist.
The LoneStar review's own list runs to eighteen, adding Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Louisiana, Maryland, Oklahoma and West Virginia. Connecticut, Louisiana, Maryland and West Virginia are the other four of those six states that had acted by mid-2025. Arizona, Delaware and Oklahoma do not appear in that record at all. An operator staying out of a state is its own call, which is not the same as a statute or an order saying it must.
None of it settles the question nationally. Each move came from one state reading its own law, and the model still reaches most of the country. Nothing on the record suggests the list has finished changing. The older chapters of football betting have the same shape: a habit that spread faster than the rules about where it could happen.
Legal In Two States, Flourishing In The Other 48
In 1999 a legal sports bet could be made in two states: Nevada, at its sports books, and Oregon, through a lottery game built on pro football results. Congress had drawn the outer edge back in 1961. The Wire Act barred betting businesses from using wire communications to take bets, or to send information that helps place them, across state or national borders, and it named sporting events and contests outright.
The betting went on regardless. The National Gambling Impact Study Commission put the legal side at $2.3 billion, the amount wagered at the 142 sports books in Nevada in fiscal 1998, in the 1999 final report's chapter on gambling across the country. For the illegal side it cited estimates of $80 billion to $380 billion a year.
A range that wide is an admission that nobody knew. The commission still called sports betting "the most widespread and popular form of gambling in America," and it explained how a habit that size ran without a legal home. The Las Vegas line was printed in most of the 48 states where sports wagering was illegal, and office betting, in its word, was flourishing.
That is the right context for 2018. When the federal ban on state-authorized sports betting fell at the Supreme Court that year, the ruling did not create a habit. It moved an existing one onto a map drawn by state legislatures, one statute at a time.
A Quarter Bought A Pool Slip, And Congress Taxed It
The mass-market form of football betting arrived long before television, on a printed slip. In October 1937 the Waterbury Democrat reported that the state police in Connecticut would take over wiping out the "football pool" racket across the state. The local dealers and newsstand operators who sold the slips were worried, and with reason: the lottery laws allowed a fine of up to $300 and up to a year in jail.
The pool had flourished in the paper's own city for several years, it said, as it had in most of the state's cities. Officials at Dartmouth had demanded it be stamped out the week before, and the police chief in New Haven had just ordered the arrest of anyone found offering slips for sale.
The product explains the reach. Each slip listed eight college games, usually the hardest of the week to call, and the operators took any wager from 25 cents up, with the payoff growing as the number of winners picked rose. A single tie among the selections lost to the house. Slips were said to sit on store counters to attract customers.
The columnist Dan Parker spelled out where the edge sat a few weeks later. The operators' rule was "Pick the winners. No scores. Ties lose!" and a scoreless tie between unbeaten California and Washington had just sunk a whole weekend of slips. He called the business "a better racket than bootlegging ever was." Congress answered in 1951, with a tax: 10% on wagers, legal or not. Today's tax code still defines a wager to include any wager placed in a wagering pool on a sports event or contest run for profit. The rate fell to 2% in 1974. Since 1982 a bet authorized by the state where it is placed has carried 0.25%, and any other bet 2%.
A Betting Scandal Helped Sink Ohio's Pro Rivalry In 1906
Ohio gave pro football its first famous rivalry, and betting helped break it. In 1906 Canton and Massillon, which the year-by-year record kept by the Hall of Fame calls the two best pro teams in America, met twice. Canton won the first game. Massillon won the second, and the Ohio League championship with it.
The Hall of Fame puts what followed down to a betting scandal and the huge salaries both clubs had paid, which together cut interest in pro football for a time in both towns and, to a lesser degree, across the state. It was the same season the forward pass became legal.
Canton recovered. The meetings that organized the league now called the NFL were held there in 1920, the first on August 20 in a car showroom. A Canton Bulldogs club played in the new league from 1920 to 1926 and won titles in 1922 and 1923, as the club's franchise history on this site records.
Small Bets, Lots Of Them: New York In 1893
Two years after the 1891 table, the same paper called the city "football mad." Its 2 o'clock extra on Thanksgiving, November 30, 1893, described a city dressed in the rival colleges' colors, stores included, and the deck under the headline read "heavy odds on the blues," the blues being Yale.
The report measured the betting by count rather than size. There had been "considerable betting so far as to number of bets," it said, but "principally in small lots," mostly from $5 to $25, and a bet over $200 was rare. That, the paper added, described the betting among the students. The bets themselves would look familiar now. A Yale man offered $25 to $15 that Princeton would not cross the Yale goal line, and a Princeton man took a $200 even-money wager on the same question. Princeton won 6-0.
The betting had its own venues, too. That morning the Hoffman House hotel was, in the paper's words, "the neutral ground for the friends of the opposing teams," where "the sporting element congregated at an early hour," and the local sporting men backing Yale struggled to find takers unless they laid long odds. Earlier that month, before Princeton played Pennsylvania, The Sun had reported it "a favorite in the betting at the Stock Exchange" at 100 to 75. Even the Stock Exchange had a price on a college game.
The Evening World printed more than one edition that day. The one quoted here, the 2 o'clock extra, went out before kickoff under a headline announcing that all was ready for the big game.
For the map in the first section of this piece, the nearest thing to an extra now is a publisher's social feed, and the one behind that LoneStar review is on Facebook as Legalsportsreport.com, at https://www.facebook.com/legalsportsreport/.
Pittsburgh Bet On Yale And Princeton The Month Its First Pro Played
The clearest statement of when the change happened came from a paper more than 300 miles from the field. On Thanksgiving in 1892 the Pittsburg Dispatch wrote that there had never been as much local interest in a football game as in that day's meeting of Yale and Princeton at Manhattan Field in New York.
"The time was when the interest in the annual contest between these two teams was almost confined to ex-students of the two universities," it went on, "but now everybody who takes an interest in sporting events at all are more or less interested." The proof it offered was the number of local people who had gone to New York, and "the vast amount of betting there has been here on the result of the game."
Twelve days earlier the Allegheny Athletic Association had paid Pudge Heffelfinger, a former Yale guard, $500 to play the Pittsburgh Athletic Club on November 12, and the chronology kept by the Hall of Fame counts him as the first person paid to play football. He picked up a fumble and ran 35 yards for the only touchdown, and his side won 4-0.
That report put the real shift earlier than that autumn: the game had once belonged to its alumni and now belonged to anyone who followed sport. The 1891 table in The Evening World, with the Princeton price too smudged to read today, is the oldest map in this story. Every map since, from the Wire Act to a location check on a phone, has been an argument about what may cross the lines between those cities.
By Stephen Juza,
October 6th, 2026
With four weeks in the books for the NFL season, there are three teams still holding on to undefeated records, while five teams are still looking for their first win. At least one team will finish Week 5 undefeated, since the Kansas City Chiefs have their bye week upcoming, and at least one team will get their first win of the season when the Texans travel to Nashville to take on the Titans.
The upcoming week features several major divisional clashes that could shape early standings. Keeping a close eye on the Lucky Rebel NFL Team Odds can allow you to spot movement across key point spreads early in the week. Incorporating these shifts into your weekly breakdown provides critical context before the opening kickoff.
Games of the Week:
San Francisco 49ers at the Seattle Seahawks, Sunday, 4:25 ET
Make sure to mark your calendar for Sunday afternoon to catch the NFC West matchup between the undefeated 49ers versus the 3-1 Seahawks. The winner will take the divisional lead in what looks to be the toughest division in the NFL.
The 49ers boast a very balanced team, ranked third in both scoring offense (30.5 pts/game) and scoring defense (16.0 pts/game), while the Seahawks have the twelfth rated offense (26.3 pts/game) and the fifth ranked defense (18.3 pts/game).
The Seahawks offense has been succeeding behind wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba who is currently second overall in the NFL with 481 yards receiving, good for an incredible average of 120 yards a game. Smith-Njigba led the league last year with 1,793 yards receiving, and if he can maintain this pace, he would log the first ever 2,000 yard receiving season in NFL history.
For the 49ers, Brock Purdy has continued to excel as one of the top quarterbacks in the league. He has thrown eleven touchdown passes this season, tied for the league lead, while only giving the ball away once.
Coaching Hot Seat:
Our preseason model had predicted the Chargers would regress from their 11-6 season last year, but I think everyone is surprised by their 0-4 start to the season. When Jim Harbaugh was hired before the 2024 season, there were high hopes that he would be able to help Justin Herbert take the next step towards being in the top tier of quarterbacks, but this season has not looked pretty.
The offense has not found its rhythm, with only three teams scoring fewer points, and Herbert has taken a beating through four games. Herbert has sacked twelve times, and only two quarterbacks have been sacked more. Harbaugh has his work cut out for him to turn around the season and take his name off the hot seat.
October 6th, 2026
Nielsen counted an average of 31.61 million US viewers for the Chicago Bears' 31-27 win over the Green Bay Packers in last season's wild-card round, a game Amazon Prime Video carried nationally. That broke the NFL streaming record Netflix had set only 16 days earlier, when the Vikings and Lions drew 27.5 million on Christmas Day. Outside the teams' home markets, where local stations carried the feed, fans could only watch either game through an app.
That record marks the far end of a long process. The NFL game a fan watches in 2026 carries layers a viewer in the early 1990s never saw, or knew only on paper: a graphic painted on the field, a fantasy roster that scores itself, an endless supply of clips, an account with money in it, and an app where the channel used to be. Each one arrived at a different moment, and each changed what following the league involves.
For the league's fans in Canada, two of those layers look different from the American version, and one of them, the betting account, turns out to hold more casino than football.
The Yellow Line Taught Fans To Expect More Than The Stadium Shows
The first layer went onto the field itself. On September 27, 1998, ESPN's Sunday Night Football telecast of the Baltimore Ravens and Cincinnati Bengals carried a yellow first-down line that looked as if it had been painted across the grass.
SportVision, a young graphics company, built it and pitched it around the networks. The others passed, and ESPN secured exclusive rights for the whole 1998 season.
The trick owed more to a weather map than to paint. By 2013, SportVision's chief executive, Hank Adams, was describing sensors in NFL stadiums that map the field and feed a computer graphic laid over the broadcast picture. He traced the idea back to the FoxTrax glowing hockey puck, which some viewers loved and others hated. Jed Drake, the ESPN producer who approved the line, even suggested its color.
What the line really changed was the balance of knowledge. The viewer on the couch now had a piece of information the paying customer in the end zone seats didn't. ESPN observed in 2013 that many young fans had grown so used to the line that they wondered why it was missing when they went to a game in person. Nearly every layer since has followed the same pattern, with the screen offering more than the stands.
Fantasy Turned Tuesday's Mimeograph Into A Live Scoreboard
The second layer is older than the first, which is the surprise in its history. In October 1962, on a Raiders road trip to New York, Bill Winkenbach, an Oakland businessman who held a stake in the club, worked out the rules of a football game in a Manhattan hotel room with the Raiders' publicity man, Bill Tunnell, and Scotty Stirling of the Oakland Tribune.
Their league, known by the acronym GOPPPL, held its first draft in August 1963 in the basement of Winkenbach's house in Oakland. George Blanda, the Houston Oilers quarterback and kicker, went first overall. Winkenbach served as commissioner partly because his office had phone lines, typewriters and a mimeograph machine, and he sent out the weekly report on Tuesdays.
In 1969, Andy Mousalimas, who had shared the first pick at that draft, opened a public league at his Kings X bar in North Oakland and filled it with regulars. Information was the scarce part in those years. In 1963 the only preseason preview guide was Street & Smith's, and injury news was hard to find, so each owner brought in a second person to help dig.
The digital version kept the draft and the scoring and threw away the wait. Points now update on the play that earns them, and that rewrites what a fan watches for. A Chiefs fan with a Bengals receiver on the roster has a reason to cheer when a conference rival scores. A lopsided fourth quarter still matters if a running back needs six more yards. Loyalty used to run to one club, and fantasy spread it across a roster drawn from many.
For A Canadian Fan, The Betting Account Is Mostly A Casino Lobby
The third layer is where the Canadian experience splits from the American one. Until August 27, 2021, a Canadian who wanted a regulated bet on a single NFL game couldn't place one, because provincial lottery products required a parlay of at least three events. Bill C-218 changed the federal law that day and left each province to regulate the market as it saw fit. Ontario opened a private online market on April 4, 2022.
That market arrived for football, but by money it's mostly something else. In February 2026, the month the Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots 29-13 in Super Bowl LX, iGaming Ontario's monthly workbook recorded C$8.74 billion in cash wagers on the province's regulated sites. Casino games took C$7.65 billion of that, or 88%. Sports, esports, proposition and novelty betting together took C$946 million, about 11%.
Nor was that a Super Bowl quirk. In September 2022, the market's first NFL kickoff month, casino games already took 77% of cash wagers. Casino's share has climbed since then. The workbook excludes wagers funded by bonuses, doesn't cover OLG's own website, and remains unaudited, but the direction is plain. For a Canadian fan, the wallet layer that came in with single-game betting is mostly slots and table games, which makes it worth knowing who stands behind the lobby.
That answer changes at provincial borders. Ontario's private market answers to the AGCO and iGaming Ontario, and Alberta's, which launched on July 13, 2026, answers to AGLC. In the other provinces the regulated option is a lottery corporation's own site, BCLC's PlayNow in British Columbia being one.
The other casino sites Canadians reach sit outside provincial regulation, licensed at best by the Kahnawake Gaming Commission or a regulator overseas. A fan trying to tell one kind of lobby from the other would start at best Canadian online casinos, where Bonus.com sets out that province-by-province picture, offshore sites included.
The same rules shape what that fan sees during a broadcast. Ontario confines any advertising that talks about bonuses or inducements to the operators' own sites and to direct marketing a player has opted into, and Alberta's regulator wrote a similar ban into its standards before launch. A brand's name can still turn up in a commercial break, but its offer can't.
The League Chased Clips Off YouTube, Then Opened A Channel
The fourth layer took the game apart. For years the NFL treated highlights posted online as something to remove, and ProFootballTalk noted at the time that the league had often ordered clips taken down for copyright violations. Then, on January 26, 2015, days before Super Bowl XLIX, the NFL and YouTube announced an official league channel, with its videos showing up directly in Google searches.
The reversal paid off quickly. When the two companies renewed the deal in May 2016, the NFL said its YouTube content had drawn almost 900 million views since the channel opened. The renewal also put classic games on YouTube for the first time, three for each of the 32 clubs.
The clip changed the unit of fandom. A fan can now follow a whole season through short plays without sitting through a full game. The highlight stopped being a byproduct of the broadcast. It became a product of its own, published on the league's schedule rather than the network's.
Canada Streamed Every Game Years Before Thursday Night Went To Amazon
The fifth layer moved the game itself. On July 20, 2017, DAZN launched in Canada as the only place to get NFL Game Pass there, carrying every live game of the season, the Sunday games Canadians had previously bought as NFL Sunday Ticket, and NFL RedZone, all without blackouts. A Canadian fan could stream any game online five years before Thursday Night Football became a Prime Video exclusive in the US.
The American switch came in stages. Prime Video's first exclusive season in 2022 averaged 9.58 million viewers, as fans adjusted to a weekly package that lived only on a streaming service. By 2025 the average had reached 15.33 million, a 60% rise, the NFL reported after the regular season. The league's overall average of 18.7 million per game was its second-highest since 1988.
YouTube took over Sunday Ticket in 2023, ending a run DirecTV had held since the package began in 1994. CNBC reported the deal as a seven-year agreement. Netflix joined on Christmas Day 2024, when its two games averaged 24.1 million and 24.3 million US viewers.
Canada still keeps a foot in both worlds. CTV carries Sunday afternoon games free over the air, and TSN has the prime-time windows, the playoffs and the Super Bowl, while DAZN carries every game through Game Pass. That split may preview where the American market ends up, with a free broadcast package, a pay-TV tier for the marquee windows, and every game in an app a fan chooses and pays for. The numbers so far suggest viewers follow the game wherever it goes.
Every Layer But The Line Comes With An Off Switch
The line is the one layer nobody signed up for. It came with the broadcast, and a fan who wants the game without it has to be in the stadium. Everything else is opt-in: a fantasy league has to be joined, a clip has to be tapped, an account has to be opened, a subscription has to be paid. Even following the team has become a feed rather than a fixture list, with club accounts, beat writers and publishers such as Bonus.com on Facebook sharing one scroll.
That makes the 2026 fan experience a set of opt-ins stacked on a broadcast that has kept one fixture since 1998. Which of them earn a place on a given Sunday is a decision each fan makes alone, and it can change from week to week. A fan can run every one of them at once or none of them, and the yellow line will still be there.