NFL Week 6 Market Report
Favorites have their vengeance after five weeks of ‘dog dominance
Matt Russell is the creator of THE WINDOW, and former lead betting analyst at theScore. If there’s a bad beat to be had, Matt will find it. You can find him @mrussauthentic on X.
Every week in the NFL is different.
This past week the favorites went to work, with just the Browns (!), Colts (opened the favorite), and Bears (opened the favorite) covering. Reports of sportsbooks having one of the roughest NFL Sundays in recent memory were sprinkled throughout social media, but don’t cry for them. They’ll do just fine for the other 17 weeks of the regular season.
Why didn’t more underdogs cover or win outright? Variance, and market knowledge. In many cases, it was as simple as the best teams winning, which isn’t so frequently the case in pro football.
For a breakdown of Week 6 and all the betting takeaways, check out the Tuesday episode of THE WINDOW: Sports betting podcastEstimated market ratings
Before the season, we explained the process of how the betting market takes the first odds offered from sportsbooks about a team’s quality - regular season win (RSW) totals - and translates that into a team rating.
Each game provides a subsequent data point that we receive from oddsmakers and bettors alike - the closing line (the last available point spread to bet before kickoff).
Taking the most recent game’s closing line into account, we adjust every team’s market rating to reflect where they were relative to the rest of the league before the previous week’s games.
These are not power rankings - a largely pointless exercise done for clicks - that simply list each team in a made-up order for readers to argue about.
They are ratings, which allow for the possibility that teams can be perceived to be equal - or have a large gap - amongst the other 31 teams in the NFL. To better understand the chart above, refer back to Week 1’s market rating column. You can argue about them, OR you can just bet against them.
If you were early to bet the Ravens, you won. If late, you pushed. If you liked the Commanders, saw the number at 6.5, thought you might get +7 and had the patience to wait, you saved yourself a loss. It’s a great example of how that game will be graded one way when we look at team records against the closing spread versus how we grade a bet made during the week.
The Lions, off a bye, shot back up into the Super Bowl contender tier, and played like it. It’s easy to make fun of the Cowboys for getting housed at home yet again, but they had just showed some toughness in beating the Steelers in Pittsburgh. A league-average rating might be fair for the Cowboys, but we’ll make a drastic shift to their range this week. If this game had been in Week 1, a Lions win might have come as the underdog.
That would have been the case if the Steelers had played in Las Vegas in Week 1, since the market thought much higher of the Raiders then than they do now.
Given their respective off-seasons, the Jets would have likely been the favorite in a Week 1 game with the Bills at MetLife Stadium, then we saw the Jets play. Hope for a renewed vigor brought that line away from the key number of +3 and down near pick’em. As a result, buying New York would have meant a loss.
Oddsmakers took a guess before the Browns-Eagles game:
How much of a downgrade should the Browns get after getting blown out by the Commanders with Deshaun Watson’s performance showing no signs of improvement?
Where should the Eagles get rated with AJ Brown, DeVonta Smith, and Lane Johnson back for the first time together since Week 1?
That equation ended up with a line in-between -7 and -10, exactly where you have to worry about a fluke touchdown (such as a blocked field goal return) being enough to have the underdog cover a big number.
We couldn’t understand how the Chargers were -3 on the road in Denver, and it still seems like the Broncos are underrated, but it helped L.A. that Patrick Surtain went out with a concussion early in the first quarter, allowing Justin Herbert to have his best game through the air this season.
It’s time to officially confirm that the Jaguars aren’t even close to an average team, and need to be rated like the bad (and seemingly disinterested) football team that they are.
Derek Carr’s injury sent the Saints from a middle-of-the-pack team to the bottom of the league. For one magical second quarter on Sunday, when New Orleans scored 27 points to hang around with the Bucs, it looked like that was an overreaction. The problem was the Saints did not score in any other quarter, while giving up 51 points to Tampa. Whether Spencer Rattler is more comfortable or not on Thursday, the Saints need to do better than the almost-600 yards they gave up on Sunday.
Had we known the Saints would be this bad defensively, we would have gotten deep down the alternative markets for Friday’s secret podcast-only bet - Buccaneers’ team total: Over 22.5 points.
Betting interest came in on the Patriots at +7, dropping the line to +6.5. We could barely finish a second pat on our backs for beating the market before the Texans took a 14-0 lead and never looked back. New England’s offense did look like it had more potential, and we’ll see if the vibes are high enough to put a kill shot on the Jaguars in London.
The Panthers continue to fall in market ratings but that wasn’t enough to make the line high enough for them to cover against the Falcons. Although, in a game with a 6-point spread, frequently sitting at Falcons by 5 or 8, Carolina was more competitive than the final score suggests. The Panthers won’t cover many inflated numbers with run defense that doesn’t just allow teams to close out wins, but extend leads late.
Week 6 betting results
*Editor’s note: Do you ever give up a prop bet because even though the game is still going on, the 4pm games are starting and you don’t bother to check to see if Juwan Johnson caught a third pass and grade ‘Over 2.5 receptions’ as a loss, only to find out that he caught a pass on the last drive to go over and cash that ticket? I have! So, the record has been updated to reflect that.