Assessing NFL Schedule Releases: A Guide to Game-Planning

When the NFL schedule is released each May, fans start planning which games they want to attend and circle the games they can’t wait to watch on TV. But bettors also can greatly benefit from the schedule release because they have a guide to planning out their predictions and futures bets at the best NFL sportsbooks.

While we know most of a team’s future opponents years in advance, the official schedule is a big reveal in seeing the sequencing of those games, when the bye week hits, how many prime-time games there are, and how many days of rest are gained or lost by these schedule quirks.

With that in mind, we wanted to highlight what information from a schedule release that bettors should be using when they make their preseason futures bets on a variety of popular NFL markets:

• Over/under season win totals
• To make or miss the playoffs
• Division winners or exact finishing position (1st-4th)
• Conference winners
• Super Bowl winner

The NFL may be where “Any Given Sunday” happens, but it is still largely a league where who you play and when you play them matters as much as anything.

You Should Ignore Strength of Schedule

Every year when the NFL schedule comes out, there are usually articles to show which teams have the hardest and easiest strength of schedules (SOS). This calculation is simply the winning percentage from the combined records from last season for the teams on each team’s schedule this year.

But as we know in the NFL, things can change quickly from season to season. Players retire, players change teams, and some teams were never as good or bad as their record from last year suggests they were.

For that reason, you can usually just ignore the strength of the schedule, especially for the teams clustered in the middle. The outliers at the top and bottom, you should focus on those teams, but there is a better way to do it.

From the moment the Super Bowl ends in February, you can count on offshore sportsbooks to post odds for next year’s Super Bowl winner. These odds will change over time as we observe which players retire, who gets moved in free agency, and what the draft brings each team.

By the schedule release in May, you can look at the Super Bowl odds and get a great sense of how hard a team’s schedule is based on how many of the top competitors they have on their schedule.

For example, the NFL really front-loaded the schedule for the 2023 Jets as they hoped to feature Aaron Rodgers in a bunch of marquee games against teams like Buffalo, Dallas, Kansas City, and Philadelphia. If the Jets could go 3-3 against that start before their bye, they might clean up the rest of the way after Rodgers gets comfortable and the schedule greatly eases up.

Incredibly, the Jets did start 3-3, but they did it with Rodgers only playing 4 snaps before he tore his Achilles on opening night. Now instead of watching a team surging towards the playoffs with a Hall of Fame quarterback and 4-time MVP, we get to watch Zach Wilson struggle in prime time with teams like the Chargers and Raiders.

But the 2023 Jets were a great example of a team who could have easily started the season in mediocre fashion, then cleaned up when the schedule got lighter. That information could have helped you as a bettor on when to bet them to win the division or even just make the playoffs, because the odds on making the playoffs at 3-3 would have likely been more profitable in October than if you bet on Rodgers and the gang in May or August.

But we were robbed of that excitement in New York this year. Four snaps.

Home-field Advantage in Big Games

We wanted to quickly note for futures bets on conference winners or Super Bowl winners, you should pay attention to the location of those big matchups in the regular season that will likely determine who gets the No. 1 seed and home-field advantage in January.

As much as the NFL has seen a decrease in home-field advantage in recent years, every team in the league would still prefer to play a big game at home compared to going on the road.

So, if you were betting against the Chiefs to repeat this year and thought it might finally be Buffalo’s year to shine, the schedule could have steered you away from that. The Bills have to play the Bengals, Eagles, and Chiefs all on the road this year. Meanwhile, the Chiefs get to host the Bengals, Eagles, and Bills at Arrowhead. Advantage Chiefs.

While the Bills have shown the ability to beat the Chiefs in Kansas City, having to take the road route and beat a team twice in the same season in its own building is a tall task for anyone.

Focus on Divisions

To give you a good example of why the schedule matters concerning divisions, let’s look at the 2023 NFC South. This was a lousy division in 2022, which was won by Tampa Bay with an 8-9 record while everyone else finished 7-10. Tom Brady retired, the quarterbacks all changed from last year’s Week 1 starter, and it was up for grabs among the 4 teams this year.

But when you looked at the schedule, it was very favorable for all these teams since not only do they each get 6 games against each other, but they were playing the NFC North and AFC South, which were considered to be 2 of the weakest divisions in the league.

For a team like New Orleans, this meant a schedule where they were not expected to face any of the top 10 teams in preseason Super Bowl odds. At best, the only teams they were going to play who were likely to win 10-plus games in 2023 were the Lions and Jaguars.

Sure enough, at the halfway point of the 2023 season, it looks like the only 10-win teams the Saints will have to play are the Lions and Jaguars. Throw in the Saints having a formidable defense and acquiring Derek Carr as a steadier quarterback than Bryce Young (struggling rookie), Baker Mayfield (journeyman), and Desmond Ridder (benched), and the Saints looked like one of the best futures bets for division winner and to go over 9.5 wins.

Now time will tell if they finish the job and do those things as Carr has not played great, but they are leading the NFC South halfway through the season, and their schedule is a huge luxury compared to most teams in the NFL this year. This was apparent the moment the schedule came out too.

Drawing a schedule with a couple of the worst divisions in the league is very favorable. Drawing a schedule with some of the hardest divisions will make it hard for that division to produce more than one playoff team.

The Nth Place Schedule

In the old format with 16-game seasons, it used to get annoying when someone would say “they’ll have to play a 1st-place schedule this year too.” This referred to the old format where each team’s schedule featured 2 conference games against opponents who finished in the same division ranking.

So, if a team finished in 1st place in its division, then the schedule next year would feature 2 games against other division winners from last year. But with the way the NFL changes year to year, that could sometimes be a blessing as often the team that finished No. 2 or No. 3 moves up to becoming the best team in the division the next year.

But when the NFL schedule changed from 16 games to 17 games in 2021, this became a bigger deal as a 3rd game was added based on division finish from the previous season. This game is against a non-conference opponent from a division the team is not scheduled to play.

Not to harp on the 2023 NFC South again, but they were a great example for why this matters. While the NFC South teams are facing easy schedules this year, Tampa Bay, by virtue of finishing No. 1 last year in the division, has to face 3 games against other 2022 division winners in Philadelphia, Buffalo, and San Francisco. None of the Saints, Falcons, or Panthers had to play any of those teams this year. Tampa Bay has already lost to the Eagles and Bills, and this alone was a good reason to pick them to not make the playoffs or win the division again in 2023.

The 17-game schedule also has produced an unequal number of home and road games that alternate between conferences each season. So far, we have not observed this having a big deal on the season. With a rising number of international games turning “home” games into neutral crowd events, the effect should be minimal.

Other Scheduling Quirks

Finally, we wanted to point out some other scheduling quirks that you should be aware of as you try to make your win total picks in the preseason.

Some of these no longer apply like how the Saints used to kill teams in prime-time games in the Superdome when Drew Brees was the quarterback. This is what happens when so many of the game’s top quarterbacks retire and 5-to-8 coaches are replaced on a yearly basis.

But trends do emerge for those who stick around:

• You typically never want to face Andy Reid after a bye week, but the NFL kind of put the screws to the Chiefs this year as Reid will face the Eagles in Week 11 after both teams had a bye week to prepare for that Super Bowl rematch. Starting in Week 12, the Chiefs will play 6 straight opponents who had more rest coming into the game than they did.
• Kirk Cousins is usually bad on Monday nights (2-11), but don’t tell that to the 49ers, who lost to his Vikings this year. The 49ers also had to play 6 days later against a Cincinnati team that was coming off a bye, so that’s a considerable rest advantage. The 49ers will face 4 teams this season who were coming off a bye.
• The Steelers have not lost a home Monday Night Football game since the early 1990s, and sure enough, they beat the Browns in Week 2 this year.
• Even in the Legion of Boom era, Pete Carroll’s Seahawks had some really slow starts in games that kicked off at 10:00 a.m. PST, and sure enough, they were slaughtered 37-3 in an early body clock game in Baltimore in Week 9. Those early body clock games for the Pacific time zone teams are always a concern.

With half a season to go in 2023, it will be interesting to see what happens to a team like the Chiefs who start facing all that rest disadvantage, or a team like the Eagles who are running a gauntlet of Super Bowl contenders with games against the Cowboys (twice), Chiefs, Bills, and 49ers.

The NFL schedule makers sure seemed to front-load the 2023 schedule for Rodgers and the Jets, then stuck all the big games between title contenders in the 2nd half of the year. So, if you think we are heading towards an inevitable Eagles-Chiefs rematch in February, you may want to think again.

The schedule from May showed us we were going to have to wait until November for some real fireworks from this season.