NFL road team betting strategy: when a road team is worth a bet

We earn a commission if you open a Bovada account through links on this page.

There’s no NFL road-team system that wins just because a team is traveling. The point spread already credits the home team for playing at home, so a road bet only makes sense when you think the market has that credit wrong or has missed something about the trip. The work is figuring out what home field is really worth right now and which travel and rest spots the line may be underrating.

How home field shows up in the spread

A point spread is roughly the book’s estimate of the final margin, and home field is one piece of it. Say two teams are exactly equal and you think home field is worth 2 points. Your fair line is the home team -2, which makes the road team +2.

At standard -110 odds you risk $110 to win $100, so you need to win 110 ÷ 210 = 52.38% of your bets to break even. A road team at +2 is only a good bet if you expect it to cover more often than that.

For years the rule of thumb was that home field is worth 3 points. An Open Source Football analysis of the 2006 to 2020 seasons found it was close to that over the whole period, but that it had been shrinking since 2017. In 2019, road teams slightly outscored home teams.

If you still give every home team a flat 3 points, your numbers will lean toward home teams more than they should, and you’ll pass on road teams that deserve a look. Use a current estimate, and assume the market is already using one.

Travel and time zones

Researchers have looked closely at travel. A study of regular-season games from 1981 to 2004, published in the Journal of Sports Economics, found that a visiting team traveling west to east across at least one time zone made the home team significantly more likely to win. The effect grew with distance, though by smaller amounts the longer the trip.

The same study found signs that betting markets didn’t fully price travel. When the model was tested on games outside the data it was built from, though, it didn’t produce a profitable strategy, and the author concluded that any bias was likely too small to exploit.

Kickoff time adds a body-clock wrinkle. A 2013 study in the journal SLEEP looked at games starting after 8 p.m. Eastern between West Coast and East Coast teams from 1970 to 2011.

West Coast teams beat the spread in 70 of those 106 night games. In day games between the same kinds of teams, neither side had a significant edge.

That’s 106 games spread over 42 seasons, and the study has been public for more than a decade. Use travel direction and kickoff time as adjustments to your own number, alongside everything else you know about the game.

Rest, byes and short weeks

Thursday games, Monday games and bye weeks leave teams with different amounts of time to recover and prepare. A study of the 2011 to 2015 seasons, also in the Journal of Sports Economics, found that differences in rest between opponents affected both the home team’s chance of winning and the total points scored. The effect depended on how familiar the teams were with each other and on the visitor’s travel.

Before you bet a road team, count the days of rest for both sides. A road team coming off a bye against an opponent on a short week is in a very different spot from one playing its second straight road game on a Thursday. Our guide to NFL bye week betting covers byes in more detail.

Road favorites and public money

Road favorites tend to be popular with bettors. Economist Steven Levitt studied picks from a handicapping contest at an online sportsbook during the 2001-02 NFL season. When the visiting team was favored, 68.2% of the picks went on it. Over 21 seasons, from 1980 to 2001, road favorites covered the spread only 46.7% of the time across 1,483 games.

Levitt concluded that bookmakers “appear to be strategically setting prices in order to exploit bettors’ biases.” When a book expects heavy action on a popular road favorite, it can shade the price against that team. That can leave the home underdog a slightly better price in those games, though the data is more than 20 years old. Our look at the Monday night home underdog goes into that angle.

How to test a road-team angle

Road-team systems usually come with an impressive record attached. One example backs a team in its second or third straight road game after it lost the previous one. Say someone shows you that angle at 43-29 against the spread. That’s 59.7%, comfortably above 52.38%.

Now flip a fair coin 72 times. You’ll get 43 or more heads about 6% of the time. Test 20 unrelated angles of that size and the chance that at least one of them reaches 43-29 or better by luck alone is about 72%. Search through enough angles and you’ll find a record like that even when none of them has a real edge.

Before you trust an angle, check these things:

  • How many games it covers. A few dozen games prove very little.
  • Which lines it was graded against. The same games can produce a different record against opening lines than against closing lines.
  • How pushes were handled. Dropping them or counting them as wins changes the percentage.
  • Whether the rule was set before anyone looked at the results, or found by sifting through them.
  • Whether it kept working in the seasons after it was first published.
  • Whether there’s a football reason behind it, such as rest or travel, that you can check in this week’s game.

Even a real edge of a few percentage points takes hundreds of bets to show up clearly. Our piece on 55 percent winners covers what a realistic win rate looks like.

A practical way to bet road teams

Start with a power rating or another number you trust, add a current home-field estimate, and adjust for travel, rest, injuries and weather. Then compare your line with the market’s. Bet the road team only when your number beats the posted line by enough to cover the -110 price.

Shop for the best number, especially around 3. In the NFL, 3 and 7 are the most common final margins, so a road team at +3 is worth noticeably more than the same team at +2.5. Our guide to anticipating line shifts covers when to bet early and when to wait.

The same thinking works on the moneyline. A road underdog at +150 implies a 40% chance of winning (100 ÷ 250). If you’re right that it wins 43% of the time, each $100 bet is worth about $7.50 on average: 0.43 × $150 minus 0.57 × $100. At +130 the break-even point is 43.48%, so the same 43% estimate makes it a small losing bet.

Bovada is an offshore sportsbook with no US state license. Our Bovada review explains what that means for you as a customer.

Bovada’s NFL page lists the spread, total and moneyline for each game, so you can compare its road-team prices with your own numbers. If you live in a state with legal online sportsbooks, a state-licensed book gives you more protection, because it answers to a state regulator if something goes wrong.

See Bovada’s NFL odds

Affiliate link. 18+ (or older where your state requires). Not available in 19 states and Washington, DC.

Only bet what you’ve set aside to lose. If gambling has stopped being fun, call or text 1-800-MY-RESET (1-800-697-3738) for free, confidential help, 24/7, or chat online with the National Problem Gambling Helpline.

Sources