Does momentum matter in January?
The NFL regular season is over, and the playoffs are here. NFL bettors are looking for an edge wherever they can, and momentum heading into the second season is always a popular topic. Should it be, and how much should it impact betting?
The Myth and Math of Momentum
NFL fans know. Aside from opening weekend, January is the best time of the year.
Wild Card Weekend kicks it off, and then it’s a straight month of increasingly intense games. There is no next week for players and teams. Sure, for bettors, there is always a “next week”, but with the offseason just a month away, you still want to make your NFL bets count. It’s homework time.
The teams are who they are at this point. The talent and parity – especially this year – is on such a level playing field that there no dynasties left, no AFC and NFC unicorns that are on a path straight to the Super Bowl. The Chiefs era, with Mahomes and Kelce at their peak, had to drop off sooner or later. The Eagles only got in because of a weak NFC East division, and they’re battling each other every week it seems.
So this is the time for intangibles, where momentum and matchups matter.
Teams can peak too early. The Indianapolis Colts looked like a runaway train in the first 10 weeks this year. Now they’re on the golf course even before the opening Wild Card kickoff. If you bet NFL Futures and started hitting the Colts too soon, you shot your shot and missed. It happens. All the more reason to reset and lock in for January.
Other teams that were floating around the .500 mark even up to Week 12 or 13 can go on a tear just in time to ride into Wild Card Weekend firing on all cylinders.
The sportsbooks know momentum too, but they also need to set the lines based more on data from the past 18 weeks than on vibes. When the Wild Card odds first hit the board, they don’t just factor in injuries, power rankings, and advanced metrics. They also bake in perception and more importantly, how the betting public is perceiving things. A team riding a win streak from late November all the way into the playoffs – say, this season’s Jaguars – will often draw early public money. This can push lines artificially by a point or more.
At the same time, a team that coasted through Week 18, or maybe limped along in December on the back of a strong defense or a star QB, can look flat to bettors and be undervalued in the market. They might have been resting starters for several weeks already, gearing up for a big January push. Watch for sleeping tigers in this case.
But does momentum actually translate to winning in January?
The math says: not as much as people think. Over the past decade, Wild Card teams entering the postseason on a four-game or longer win streak are only about .500 against the spread. The public sees a team of destiny, especially when they’re a big brand name or have a star player or two drawing all the attention.
The numbers, though, see regression waiting to happen. The books can count on that emotional bias every year – people’s belief that what’s just happened will keep happening. Recency bias can hit us all, but the smart money knows it and is able to evaluate teams for the next game, not the past five.
If a team finished December hot, casual bettors often ignore the reasons behind it. Maybe those wins came against backup QBs or teams that were planning their January Cancun trips by mid-October.
Both sharps and the books know to dig deeper. They’ll get into matchups and weather, plus recent stats like EPA per play, turnover differential, and schedule strength. The books will use that to tap into the public’s emotion and shade the lines. The smart money will spot the edges and not fall into any traps.
Bottom line: Momentum storylines sound great, and we’re all drawn to them. But they distract the casual bettors from looking underneath the hood.
Check out the latest odds at Lucky Rebel.
Rest vs. Rust
Do you sit your stars and risk rust, or play them and risk injury? That’s the question for Weeks 17 and 18 for the top teams in the AFC and NFC. The split in coaching philosophy here tells you everything about how unpredictable momentum really is.
History doesn’t give a great answer. In 2022, the Eagles rested Jalen Hurts late, shook off a sluggish start, and rolled to the Super Bowl. Conversely, the 2011 Packers benched most starters in Week 17 after a 15–1 season—and promptly lost at home in their playoff opener.
Those opposite results should cancel out the rest question when it comes to betting on the NFL playoffs. But the betting public still tends to overreact. They’ll often fade a top seed coming off a rest period and go in on the hotter story of a wild card team with a recent winning streak.
The smart money will often look for the opposite. That means looking for talented teams who are undervalued because they haven’t been stacking up big wins for the past two or three weeks.
The rust factor also sounds like a thing, but is it? It changes depending on the quarterback and the coaching staff, plus a team’s playoff experience. They’ll make the most of a few weeks off and can shake off any rust because they’ve played meaningful January football before. But a young QB and inexperienced playoff team could get hurt by stopping the rhythm of the week to week season. Then again, rookie QB CJ Stroud and the Texans blew up the NFL playoffs a few years back with a 45-14 Wild Card win over a tough Browns’ defense, and they had a rookie head coach.
Sportsbooks might account for rust or rest questions by opening lines conservatively, then adjusting them once they see where the early money flows. Tough to find a real edge there, since they know the game inside and out by this point in the season.
Matchup readiness and the data we mentioned above are the real edges here, since you can’t rely on rest or rust to make the call. The true playoff advantage comes from coaching quality and opponent strengths and weaknesses, not talking yourself into a rest or rust situation.
One final edge in momentum betting?
It moves markets, not actual team performance. This matters in Totals betting too. High-scoring teams heading into Wild Card Weekend can produce high O/U lines because everybody assumes that the scoring will continue. But in the past decade, 55% of Wild Card games have finished Under. Teams tighten up, control the clock, and take fewer chances.