After Thanksgiving is when the Real Football Season Starts.
Times change and so should your betting strategy
Thanksgiving Day in the NFL is a time-honored tradition. The Turkey’s on. The TV too. And those illusions or stories that NFL betting fans have held onto since Week 1 are soon coming into contact with reality, if they haven’t already.
Why NFL Narratives Bust by Thanksgiving
Every September, NFL fans and talking heads are understandably excited. They’ve been missing pro football since early February.
That excitement leads to bold predictions. Too bold, in many cases. The kind that come from last season’s data and the meaningless preseason games leading up to opening day. The new coach that’s going to revolutionize his team. The rookie quarterback who’s the next big thing.
By Thanksgiving, or Week 13 on today’s NFL schedule, all 32 teams have played enough games to make those September takes look wrong or plain embarrassing. Problem is, narratives, storylines, talking points – they’re all strong. Even when some media types openly admit they’re overreacting, it still hits as if what they’re saying will hold true.
These narratives bias bettors (and even the sportsbooks sometimes) into making bets on the NFL based on stories that are hard to shake, even multiple weeks into the new season. Some teams (looking at you Kansas City) have captured the public imagination so strongly over the past 7-8 years that they’ll still get inflated lines and the lion’s share of the public betting money, even though they’re about 2-3 years past their expiry date.
Sample size and emotion drive these shaky narratives. The first 3-4 weeks of NFL regular season football are all about last season’s data and this year’s hopes. Every scientist or sociology major will tell you that sample size is super important when making a claim or predicting what comes next. The NFL doesn’t give us that luxury – we need to make calls based on what we knew 8-10 months ago.
Then you throw in a couple of soft matchups that inflate a team’s record or make a mediocre quarterback look like the next Tom Brady. That wears off as the games add up. By around Week 8 – and definitely by late November when the turkey’s on the table – injuries pile up, schedules get tougher, weather turns, and divisional rivalries heat up. Then you see how that rookie QB performs under adversity. Luck, both good and bad, starts to even out.
Betting-wise, we know the sharps have removed emotion and bias early in the season. But the casual betting public still chases brand names and storylines. Players like Patrick Mahomes and Aaron Rodgers get all the headlines while their teams actually battle staying above the .500 mark.
By the time NFL Thanksgiving Day games roll around, all the excuses for bad performances are up though. Mirages fade. Real teams emerge. And the smart money knows that the books and the public may not have quite caught up just yet, giving some lines extra value.
Classic Collapsing Narratives: Hype and False Heroes
There are at least two types of storylines that crumble by late November every year in the NFL:
Early-Season Hype Teams: There’s the surprise contender who takes the league by storm through September. A mediocre team can look unbeatable just by beating a few weak opponents or getting a lucky bounce or a gift from a ref. But regression is coming. The schedule eventually gets tougher. More importantly, the NFL is the league that has the most assistant coaches and coordinators of any pro sport. That means every bit of film on a surprising team is sliced and diced, especially if their QB is punching above his weight. They’ll attack every weakness he has, and he and his team will get a rude awakening by Week 7 or 8. To make it worse, every other team will copy paste whatever game plan it took to beat him.
The 2020 Steelers are just one example. They went 11-0 to start the year, the hottest start in the NFL. Their last 5 games? They went 1-4, starting with three straight L’s after Thanksgiving. All before crashing out of the Wild Card Round.
The lesson? Ride some momentum, sure. 11-0 is no joke. But never fall in love with a hot narrative, especially as the season approaches the Thanksgiving period. Stay objective.
The Doormat-to-Playoff Team Myth: Everyone loves a good Cinderella story, but the NFL makes a mockery of these most years. The preseason narrative that a weak team loaded up with a hot rookie QB and some free agent additions and is suddenly destined for a breakout season nearly always collapses under the weight of regression, depth, and injuries. By Thanksgiving, the real surprise teams (like this year’s Colts, as an example) are obvious. The rest often turn out to be pretenders who got by on a soft schedule and some luck before the NFL coaching brains figured out how to scheme against them and put them back in their place.
Single-season turnarounds are rare. It happens – roughly 5 teams in the past 10 years have gone from a bad record like 3-13, 4-12 or (now with the 17-game schedule) 5-12 to making the playoffs the very next year. But that’s not a track record you can reliably bet on. NFL turnarounds take 2-3 seasons at least. Rosters need time to get the right overhauls and the best draft picks to make it happen.
The Books get Wise by Thanksgiving
NFL Thanksgiving Day is when betting odds start reflecting reality, not wishful thinking. To be fair, the sportsbooks have it pretty much dialled by week 7 or 8, when that sample size we talked about is large enough. Each week after that only builds the data set and sharpens the lines more.
That leaves less value for sharps than the early season chaos allowed. But lines that are more true are also preferred by the smart money in some cases. You can evaluate teams and make your bets based on your best knowledge and research. Any deviation from this on the books’ side – anything they missed on the field or with the intangibles – and you can pounce.
By Thanksgiving, coaches and players stop talking about “finding their identity”. They know who they are. And so do you.