Sometimes it’s easier to pick a game situation in March than it is during a National Football League season. In March, or anytime during the offseason, my staff and I will go over every game from the previous season to uncover what we saw and why we did or didn’t have that as a play for our customers.

A game advantage without the pressure of trying to win is a lot easier to locate than when you are confronted during a season with the challenge of betting on a weak team against a far superior squad based on proven motivational factors. If we were to follow the lead to a game where one team has failed and the other has achieved at a high level, it is not difficult to see why most bettors would want their money on the superior physical team.

Most bettors would be wrong.

Situations are more influential in leading to a winner than pure talent, at least in most months during a regular season. The one exception to the rule is November. For some reason, some I will explore as possibilities, the public routinely has good results betting on NFL games in the eleventh month of the year.

It may just be that by the third month of the regular season everyone pretty much knows who the better teams are and they are still rising in the standings and primed to take advantage of weaker opponents.

Earlier in the season, who is good this year and who is not, is still being sorted out. Early in a season there is more of a tendency that underdogs in the right spots will succeed. But in November, routinely the better teams just step up and clear whatever point spreads the books lay out.

In Week Nine of the 2026 NFL season, home team underdogs, who are not the utopia they once were but still win about 50% of the time with the spread, got whitewashed. They went zero for eight on closing lines. The Indianapolis Colts won on the spread as a home team underdog if you bet the game before the line shifted to the Dallas Cowboys only having to give 3½ points on the closing number. Dallas won the game by four points, 27-23.

This too shall pass.

The right underdogs will succeed again this season. We can also expect those teams with the worst point spread marks for the first half of a campaign to excel over the second half of the season.

Why?

Three reasons. First, teams that have failed are meeting opponents that take wins over them lighter than a good effort would require. Second, once the pressure is off of trying to win a division teams can play looser and this often leads to better results. And finally, and this is the most important factor in their success, the public will still be betting on the teams that have done well while the books stack the point spreads to trip them up. Trying to beat the books at their own game is a losing proposition. I found it is much more consistently positive when one is poised to win with the books; in those weeks when the public doesn’t do well … which historically is most of the time.

As for seeing a game that has one team with all the motivational juices in their favor, against a much superior opponent, I offer you the New York Jets. They host the first place Buffalo Bills on Sunday and Josh Allen has won all but one game this year. The Jets have only won two, and the Bills are coming off big efforts in wins over the Baltimore Ravens and Minnesota Vikings.

Of course the public is backing the Bills, but purely based on talent. In the more important factors that include motivation and point spread value, the Jets get the call. That’s right, you can have your friends think you are going to lose if you tell them you are betting the Jets over the Bills, but you are also likely to end up the day in the payout line.