Betting The NFL Schedule Drop

The NFL schedule dropped last week.

For most fans, that means circling revenge games, planning road trips, and — unless they cheer for the Cowboys — watching their team get snubbed from primetime.

But for bettors, it’s an inflection point.

It’s one of the rare moments in the calendar where we get a new dataset that affects betting outcomes — before prices adjust.

No injuries have happened. No preseason narratives have formed. But knowing who each team will face — and when and how — carries real predictive value.

As the Robin Hood of sports betting — taking from the books and giving to the bettors — I’m excited to share how I’m approaching NFL futures based on this year’s schedule release.

This week, we’re talking about rest — a factor that’s invisible in many projection sets and not widely considered, but very relevant for betting.

We’ll break down rest disparity, how it impacts teams, and highlight the most actionable 2025 edges from the schedule drop.

As always, we’ll look to continue our winning ways with another NBA playoff bet of the week.

Let’s get after it.

What Is Rest Disparity?

My interest in the topic was piqued by Warren Sharp’s written analysis on the inequality of the NFL schedule, and additional podcast discussion on the topic.

First, a quick primer: teams that enter games with more rest than their opponents have historically outperformed expectations.

There are two main ways to measure rest disparity:

1. Game-Level Rest Disparity — This tracks how often a team plays a game where they have more or less rest than their opponent. Example: If the Lions play the Bears coming off a bye while the Bears played the previous Sunday, that’s a +1 game rest edge for the Lions that week.

    

2. Net Rest Edge (Total Days) — This adds up all the rest advantages and disadvantages over a full season to create a net rest edge using days. It’s the cumulative number of extra (or fewer) days of rest a team has compared to its opponents. Example: If the Lions play the Bears coming off a bye while the Bears played the previous Sunday, that’s a +7 day net rest edge for the Lions that week.

You can think of Game-Level Rest Disparity as the shape of the schedule, and Net Rest Edge as the weight of it.

Teams that rest both more often and for more total days gain a compounded edge. Teams on the wrong end of this equation get slowly ground down over the course of the season.

Why It Matters

Warren Sharp emphasizes that this isn’t just trivia. Rest advantages translate into meaningful performance differences. Not only are better rested players fresher — but:

• Coaches with a rest edge get more time to gameplan

• Injured players with addition rest return more quickly

• Teams with rest advantages consistently outperform their market expectations, especially in November and December

Sharp puts it simply:

This is a market inefficiency that, historically, wasn’t appropriately priced in futures betting markets until deep into the preseason (if it all).

Teams with Notable Disparity in 2025

✅ Lions (+13 Net Rest Edge, 8 Rest-Advantage Games)

Detroit has 8 games in 2025 where they have a rest advantage over their opponent, and zero games where they’re at a disadvantage. That’s the highest positive disparity count in NFL history when assessing by game disparity.

In bullet form, the Lions have:

• 8 games with more rest than opponent

• 0 games with less

• Three “mini-byes” (extra rest off TNF)

• Key games late in the season with extra prep built in

Betting Angles: The Lions are priced like a contender (season win total 10.5), but this kind of schedule support makes them a live look for alternate win total overs, NFC #1 seed futures, or division winner futures.

If you liked them already, treat this as a green light. If you were on the fence, do some additional diligence on Detroit.

❌ Raiders (-19 Net Rest Edge, 6 Rest-Disadvantage Games)

The Raiders are at the opposite end of the spectrum. This year they’ll face:

• 6 games with less rest than their opponent

• 1 game with more rest

• Late-season schedule includes multiple games vs. rested opponents

Betting Angles: Already viewed as a bottom-tier team (win total 6.5), this schedule makes things even worse. Season win total “unders” are playable. I’ll also look at “fewest wins” prop bets, “no” to make the playoffs bets, and weekly single-game fades during high-rest disadvantage games.

One final note on making these types of futures bets.

Locking up money in NFL futures this early used to come with a real opportunity cost — those dollars sat frozen, earning nothing for many extra months.

Now, platforms like Kalshi actually pay interest on your posted funds (3.75% currently), so while you wait for that divisional or future to cash, your money’s still working.

It’s a subtle but important shift and is leading me to a more aggressive approach to early NFL futures.

Bet(s) of the Week $$

Last week we won our only bet and profited 1 full unit. The Thunder came out strong in Game 6, as predicted, and covered the first half spread.

With another positive week, since starting the newsletter, bets given out in this section are ahead 17.13 units, at a positive 21% ROI. We’ll update this regularly.

Based on my research, I am making the following bet this week:

• Minnesota +8 @-107 on ProphetX for 1 unit

In Game 1, the Thunder hit 52.4% of their 3s. The Wolves hit just 29.4%. That’s a +23% three-point shooting gap, and it explains most of the margin.

I don’t anticipate that gap continuing and see this as a game state ripe for regression.

This line has moved from OKC -4.5 in Game 1 to OKC -8 in Game 2 — a big swing based on one blowout. I believe in shot variance normalizing and am thus taking Minnesota to cover the larger spread.