An historic scoring barrage in Week 1 produced the type of NFL betting results that have cost sportsbooks hundreds of millions of dollars before.
Teams scored 791 points, tying 2012 for the most in an opening week since the AFL-NFL merger and delivering a bettor-friendly start to the NFL betting season. Favorites went 12-4 straight up, totals finished 9-6-1 to the over and eight of the 10 most popular touchdown scorers at Caesars Sportsbook found the end zone.
The results cashed plenty of popular straight bets, props and parlay legs.
But the growing share of same-game parlays and player props has made favorites and totals a less reliable measure of sportsbook performance and using weekly NFL results to predict sportsbook margins has become increasingly outdated.
High scoring cashes popular bets
Citizens found weekly sportsbook margins correctly signaled the following Monday’s stock direction just 52% of the time last season, which produced historically favorable margins for sportsbooks, but ultimately weighed on handle.
Week 1 still favored bettors across plenty of individual markets. Chicago was the most-bet early spread by tickets at BetMGM and among the most-backed teams at DraftKings before covering -3 in a 59-37 win over North Carolina that cashed plenty of player prop overs and touchdown bets.
Both the Bears-Panthers and Bills-Texans games cleared their totals before halftime.
Meanwhile, nearly one-third of Circa Survivor picks were eliminated when the 9.5-point underdog Arizona Cardinals upset the Los Angeles Chargers 26-14, a strong indication that a popular favorite leg also busted plenty of parlays.
NFL betting volume breaks records
Kalshi generated $2.46 billion in trading volume Sunday, setting a single-day platform record one day after breaking the previous mark thanks to college football.
Parlay-style combos accounted for 61% of weekend volume. NFL player props made up just 12% of straight football trading Sunday but 44% of football legs in combos, while nearly 70% of Sunday combo volume included at least one football leg, according to TickerTracker. Combos represented more than 83% of Underdog‘s weekend volume and more than half of the activity on DraftKings Predictions.
Citizens tracked 28 pregame moneyline and total prices Friday and found Kalshi offered 3% lower implied vig than FanDuel and 4% lower than DraftKings across the sample.
Notional volume is not directly comparable with sportsbook handle, particularly for longshot combos. Still, standalone football trading is approaching $2.5 billion this season, roughly five times the volume at the same point last year, according to TickerTracker.
Prediction markets dominate downloads
U.S. and Canadian gaming apps generated 3 million downloads in Week 1, up 11% year over year, per Sensor Tower:
- Polymarket — 762,000
- Kalshi — 592,000
- DraftKings — 415,000
- FanDuel — 265,000
- Sleeper — 239,000
- bet365 — 104,000
- Hard Rock — 97,000
- PrizePicks — 94,000
- Fanatics — 81,000
- BetMGM — 64,000
- Underdog — 47,000
- Caesars — 40,000
- Betr — 36,000
- Rebet — 36,000
- Novig — 28,000
- BetRivers — 28,000
- theScore — 26,000
- Bally Bet — 22,000
Polymarket and Kalshi combined for 45% of the total. DraftKings downloads fell 46% year over year and FanDuel fell 36%.
NFL betting app logins surge
Prediction market app downloads did not stop the NFL from driving a surge at regulated sportsbooks. GeoComply recorded 99.8 million geolocation checks Sunday, up 176% from two weeks earlier, while new sportsbook account registrations jumped more than 310% to 135,700.
The industry entered the season expecting slower growth for the year. The American Gaming Association projects $29.5 billion in legal NFL betting handle, essentially flat from last year, while September has fewer NFL games than a year ago due to a calendar shift.
Week 2 kicks off Thursday with the Detroit Lions visiting the Buffalo Bills, the NFL’s two highest-scoring teams over the past two seasons. The total has moved from 52.5 to 54.5, while Buffalo has moved from a three-point favorite to around -5.5 at some sportsbooks.
