Are Look-Ahead Games Real in the NFL?

So often when betting on the NFL you’ll hear talk about teams looking ahead in their schedule as a possible reason why they might not cover the spread on a given week. But for all of this talk about looking ahead, is there any reason to think that teams are sacrificing wins to get ready for games that aren’t the ones they are currently playing?

Every week in the NFL you’ll see someone reminding their team not to look too far ahead. And understandably so, as it is the job of coaches and management to make sure that their team is staying focused on the task at hand. But this phenomenon is overblown in the media to an extent, as NFL players don’t exactly come from a position where they can afford to get complacent with some of the games on their schedule.

Upsets in the NFL aren’t all that uncommon, given how good every team in the NFL can be when they are playing at their best. And all of those upsets can lead to big weekends for sportsbooks, who tend to take more bets on favorites than they do on underdogs from the betting public. But can these upsets be attributed to teams looking ahead in their schedules?

The answer to that question is that most of the time a team’s schedule has no impact on their upset candidacy. This is despite what the sports media will tell you, whose advice is normally based on creating narratives rather than looking at things from a rational and analytical perspective. And anyone who looks at the NFL from a rational and analytical perspective knows that no player would take that kind of chance with their career.

NFL players have the shortest shelf life of any pro athletes, due to the brutal nature of the sport. But besides the violence that can shorten careers, the number of years players spend in the league also has a lot to do with the fact that teams would rather bring in young players to keep salaries down. And without guaranteed contracts in the NFL, players know that their careers can be altered at any time by being cut or waived from a roster. So to think that they would risk everything by taking games off is absurd.

More often than not, the real reason that upsets happen in the NFL is that the underdog manages to execute better than the favorite. It isn’t as interesting or sentimental an explanation, but the truth of the matter is that the team that comes into a football game with a better game plan and better execution will more often than not win the game.

So the next time you hear someone tell you that a team might be looking ahead in their schedule, remember that there are many other factors that could explain a loss before you get to that one. Otherwise, you will be placing speculative bets based on teams looking ahead in their schedule when they might not be doing anything of the sort.