NFL Betting: Do Home Teams Have An Edge In Thursday Night Football?

NFL Betting: Do Home Teams Have An Edge In Thursday Night Football?

October 1, 2020 – by Jason Lisk

Regular Thursday Night Football has been sneaking up on us now for 9 seasons (Photo by Scott Winters/Icon Sportswire)

The NFL switched to a schedule with weekly Thursday night games in 2012, providing 17 or more of them each year. These Thursday games allow fewer rest days than usual for the two participants.

One popular theory that pops up from time to time is that the home team has an advantage in a week where travel comes after a shorter practice and rest period. For example:

USA Today wrote about it back in October of 2012, saying that road teams got the short shrift.The Action Network also wrote about Thursday home favorites two years ago, when (at the time) they were on a big ATS win streak.

Let’s take a look at home team records straight up and against the spread on Thursdays, and see if we can dig up any strong evidence to support or refute this claim.

Thursday Home Team Win-Loss And ATS Records

Here is a yearly summary of the records for all home teams in Thursday games, as both favorites and underdogs, excluding Week 1.

(Since the theory is that teams are at a disadvantage on a short week, Week 1 shouldn’t apply as teams have more time to prepare starters.)

The data does include all Thanskgiving Day games, in addition to other Thursday Night Football games.

YEAR	SU W	SU L	SU T	SU PCT	ATS W	ATS L	ATS T	ATS PCT
2012	8	8	0	50.0%	7	9	0	43.8%
2013	9	7	0	56.3%	6	9	1	40.6%
2014	9	8	0	52.9%	8	9	0	47.1%
2015	9	8	0	52.9%	7	10	0	41.2%
2016	12	5	0	70.6%	11	6	0	64.7%
2017	8	8	0	50.0%	9	6	1	59.4%
2018	12	4	0	75.0%	10	5	1	65.6%
2019	9	7	0	56.3%	8	8	0	50.0%
2020	1	1	0	50.0%	0	2	0	0.0%
TOTAL	77	56	0	57.9%	66	64	3	50.8%

No Strong Evidence of A Thursday Home Team Advantage

Looking at the table above, there is no strong evidence that home teams have exceeded betting market expectations in Thursday games, or anything indicating they are likely to do so in the future. In total:

Thursday home teams have won 57.9% of the time, very similar to the 57.1% that home teams have won in all other games.Thursday home teams have covered the spread right around half the time (50.8%).

In fact, after the USA Today article theorizing about the disadvantage of Thursday road teams, home teams promptly went four straight years with a losing overall spread record for the 2012 to 2015.

Then, from 2016 to 2018, Thursday home teams suddenly did very well against the spread. That streak seems to have prompted the Action Network article from December of 2018 talking about the advantage that home favorites had.

The piece even noted that the “last 13 home favorites on Thursday Night Football, dating back to October of last season, are 13-0 straight up and 11-1-1 against the spread, covering the number by 9.8 PPG over that span.”

What happened next? The Chiefs, a home favorite, lost at home to the Chargers in a key AFC West matchup in the Thursday night finale for 2018.

Including that game, Thursday home teams are 8-11 ATS since the Action Network piece was written, and Thursday home favorites (a main focus of the piece) have gone 7-5 straight up and a woeful 3-9 ATS.

As Usual: Beware The Small Sample Size Based Narrative

With such a small number of games to analyze (and certain Thursday night games inevitably sticking out in the public’s mind, since it is a prime-time “island game” viewing spot), we’re seeing exactly the type of stuff here that demonstrates how dangerous it is to be confident about a short term trend.

As you would expect in such small samples, there has been fluctuation in the annual performance of Thursday home teams since these games became a weekly thing in 2012. String a couple winning or losing years together and it is tempting to think you have a trustworthy betting angle to rely on, but in many cases it just ends up being a mirage of randomness.

At the very least, it helps to apply a bit of an eye test: How likely is it that a longer-term sustainable edge in the betting markets could really be this simple? Probably not very.

Overall, since the league went to near-weekly Thursday games, the results for home teams are right in line with what you would expect across other NFL games.

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