If the MLB and NBA seasons are a marathon, the NFL regular season is a sprint. With only sixteen games in the NFL regular season, every week is critical and a single play can be the difference in making the playoffs and sitting at home come January.
No other sports league offers the high stakes and drama that the NFL is able to bring week in and week out, making the NFL regular season a thrilling time of year for NFL bettors. As teams duke it out for four months to determine who will qualify for the playoffs, fans get to soak in over a dozen games a week and earn money betting on the NFL.
Betting on the NFL regular season can be highly profitable for those who keep up to date on the league and use FootballBetting.org to make smart bets.
NFL Regular Season Schedule
The NFL regular season kicks off on the first Thursday in September and runs through December, often into the start of January. The season lasts seventeen weeks, with each NFL team playing sixteen games (eight home and eight away) with one bye week. While opponents are determined well in advance, the schedule is announced annually in April.
Every team plays six divisional games, facing off against each division rival twice every season. Each division will rotate its opponents against two other divisions from respective conferences. For example, every team in the NFC North may play every team from the NFC West and NFC South in 2012, before rotating to a different pair of divisions in 2013.
This helps to ensure that teams playing within the same division have similar schedules, evening out their strength of schedule. The other two games on each team’s schedule rotate among conference opponents not already accounted for.
This means that every NFL team plays twelve games within their conference and four games against the opposite conference. This scheduling is important to betting, as familiarity of opponents can play a key role in the outcome of games.
Each NFL team is highly familiar with its divisional rivals, as they face off twice a year. This familiarity tends to make the games closer because both teams have a good idea of how to game-plan and execute against their opponents. Conversely, NFC and AFC teams often only face each other every four years, making interconference matchups a more unpredictable affair. These games often lend themselves to upsets or more one-sided affairs for betting on the NFL.
NFL Regular Season Parity
The nature of the NFL and the NFL regular season is that every team in the league is capable of showing up big and upsetting any other team in a particular week. The cliché of “any given Sunday” has become as true as ever in the modern day NFL regular season.
The NFL has parity unlike any other professional or college sports league, and the slim gap in talent on NFL rosters is evident from season to season and week to week. This makes betting on the NFL regular season both exciting and tough to predict, which means prospective NFL bettors need to keep a close eye on the latest news and team performances.
Considering the number of games over the course of the season (512) and during each week (14 to 16), bettors are often best off placing many bets over the course of the regular season to offset the upsets they’ll occasionally encounter.
NFL Regular Season Betting
There are many different types of bets available in the NFL regular season. Bettors can make wagers on the outcomes of games, including money line, point spreads, and the over/under. Prop bets are also a fun form of wagering game to make money on and allow bettors to pick smaller propositions.
There are also futures bets available that pertain just to the regular season, such as the number of wins a team ends up with or divisional titles. The Daily Betting Tips can keep bettors up to date on the regular season betting and help serious bettors win money during the regular season.