What the Schedule Hides: How Bye Weeks & Travel Skew the Spread
The first NFL bye week is coming up, and you want to be prepared ahead of time for the post-bye action. Positioning yourself ahead of the books is a great way to get the edge with inefficiencies on NFL odds.
Sharps know how to leverage byes and travel issues to maximize their betting advantage. Trap games come up every year and casual NFL betting fans are usually looking the other way while the smart money spots them.
The Bye Week Bounce: Rest, Recovery, and Betting Edge
The NFL season is a grind. The collisions on every play add up and rest periods are short between games. Since owners and the league added an extra game to the schedule to rake in a few more billion dollars, the grind of playing and travelling just increased.
Overall, byes are a solid chance for most teams to heal a few nagging injuries and game plan for an extra week for the next opponent. That’s why we see a slight edge right off the bat: teams coming off byes cover the spread almost 53% of the time over the last 20 years. That 53% means it’s not chalk for bettors, but that edge is often just what the smart money needs to win.
The real betting edge when it comes to playing bye weeks to your advantage? Favorites, and especially road favorites.
The rest and recovery of bye weeks help strong teams get stronger. The road favorites coming off a bye cover close to 69% of the time. (Watch for trap games though. More on that below). The extra rest, mental prep, and more time to study game film and the team’s playbook give the stronger team the extra edge that regular road trips can’t. A team might have an extra 2-3 days to get their bodies adjusted to the host team’s city too – a big plus if you need to get used to things like the Denver altitude or recover from a San Fran-NYC time zone change.
The casual betting public and even the sportsbooks tend to put too much value on home-field advantage. At the same time, they can undervalue how important rest can be to an NFL team. Perfect combo for sharps to exploit the lines.
Even regular favorites – home or road – score a 59% spread cover advantage after coming off a bye.
Teams that have byes in Weeks 5 or 6 usually do better than any other bye week teams. They have between .615 and .625 winning percentages in the week after their bye. Not huge numbers, but enough of an edge for sharps to dig deeper to spot an opportunity.
Blanket betting on every team coming off a bye is obviously not the move. You still need to factor in matchups and a team’s health to really spot best odds. And momentum heading into the bye week is worth looking at too. A team that goes into the bye hot usually comes out that same way, and teams that are not doing great can come out flat again.
Bottom line: byes aren’t fun for regular fans if they can’t see their team in action that weekend, but coaches and players love them. So does the smart money.
On the Road Again: Travel Fatigue and Schedule Pain Points
On top of byes, smart NFL bettors can cash in on travel and scheduling issues that come up every season.
With the increase in NFL games outside of the US, travel will impact teams more often – even beyond the cross-country games that teams play every year. In 2025 there are 7 international games in places like London, Madrid, Dublin, São Paolo, and Berlin. Too much, in our opinion. Teams need to put the best product on the field, and grinding out thousands of extra miles and multiple time zones isn’t the way to do it. Teams on the West Coast can get hit the most. The Rams and Chargers are looking at logging 17,000+ miles this season alone.
Anyway, betting edges don’t care about opinions.
You can even find NFL fatigue indexes now. That’s how much travel has become a factor in the league. They factor in things like travel miles, time zone changes, altitude, rest days. Every extra 100 miles a team logs reduces their winning percentage by 1.3%.
The body has its own scoreboard, even for the elite athletes of the NFL. An East Coast early home time slot for a West Cost team means the visitors are expected to kickoff at 10am according to their body clock. Most of us get slammed by a one-hour daylight savings change twice a year. So imagine having to block Abdul Carter or tackle Cam Skattebo at a time when your body says you should be sitting down for bacon and eggs. Performance can drop by up to 25% when a player is playing outside their circadian rhythm too. Fatigued brains can also hit hard, leading to misreads and mental errors. There’s added value in watching for second half drop-offs where you see all these travel factors lining up, especially if you’re live betting the NFL.
Bettors should definitely factor in the schedule on top of a team’s W-L record or obvious matchup advantages. Fade teams with recent heavy travel or repeated short rest.
Trap Games and Schedule Landmines: Spotting Hidden Value
NFL trap games follow a classic formula: A stronger team coming off a bye, a big win, or an international game travels to face a lesser opponent, with a key division rival or tougher opponent coming the following week. They look ahead. They feel prepared, but their mindset is too cocky or complacent. It’s the NFL though. Reality is, there are no easy games. Especially on the road or after a big travel week.
For bettors, they look at these favorites and don’t think twice. Public money hits the lines and the books shade them to feed the demand. And the sharps win out in the end because they know how to spot these traps.
Smart money watches for teams favored by a touchdown or more after a bye week when they’re facing a weaker opponent with a critical divisional showdown next up. The ‘dog could be the play in many of these games.
They also don’t blindly back favorites later in the season without checking the travel schedule first. Returning from international trips or extended road games are key fatigue spots where favorites could see a dip in performance.