Road Underdogs Continue to Have Shockingly Strong Season ATS Heading into NFL Week 7

Every NFL season comes loaded with surprises, but 2019 has some particularly unusual trends shaping up through six weeks. While we'd usually expected favorites and underdogs to each be about 50 percent against the spread (ATS), that hasn't been nearly the case.

As we looked at back in Week 4, road teams and underdogs are performing way above expectation, leaving home teams and favorites consistently disappointing bettors.

Keep in mind that these are ATS records, meaning that underdogs are not winning over 60 percent of games, but the dramatic difference is still shocking.

In 2018, we saw home favorites go 119-133-11 (47.2 percent) ATS which was more or less in line with 2017's 127-120-13 (51.4 percent). Home favorites see similar ATS trends, typically, having gone 78-91-9 (46.2 percent) in 2018 and 79-74-6 (51.6 percent) in 2017.

Extreme results like this over a six-week sample aren't something we should read too much into, but it is worth noting that last year's 46.2 percent cover rate for home favorites was the lowest for an entire season since 2008. This could suggest that home-field advantage may not have as much of an impact as it once did, and that betting market have been slow to adapt to that trend.

Overall, though, it's still hard to read too deeply into this short-lived trend. We're probably still likely to see both favorites and underdogs cover close to 50 percent of the time over the remainder of the season.

This will still be a fun trend to track for the remainder of the year, and we'll get to see whether it keeps up with 14 games on the NFL schedule for Week 7.

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Jason Schandl is not a FanDuel employee. In addition to providing DFS gameplay advice, Jason Schandl also participates in DFS contests on FanDuel using his personal account, username Jaymun. While the strategies and player selections recommended in his articles are his personal views, he may deploy different strategies and player selections when entering contests with his personal account. The views expressed in their articles are the author's alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of FanDuel.