Sunday Night Football NFL Betting Trends: Historical Spread, Over/Under Analysis

• Home Field Advantage on Sunday Nights: From 2019 to 2024, home teams on Sunday Night Football (SNF) had a stronger performance than in other time slots.
• Favorites Perform Similarly Overall, But Road Favorites Struggle: While favorites on SNF win at nearly the same rate as in other games, road favorites underperform significantly.
• Lower Scoring Than Expected: Despite high average over/unders, SNF games have seen lower actual scoring, especially from road teams, leading to fewer overs.

Sunday Night Football is for the fireworks.

Primetime matchups to round out a long day of football often lead to big scoring -- right?

Let's find out.

Let's take a look at past high-level Sunday Night Football betting trends and see what we can find.

Sunday Night Football Betting Trends

I'll be looking at data from 2019 through 2024 -- six full seasons -- to account for historical FanDuel NFL betting odds.

While the Sunday Night Football moniker can be applied to games played on different days of the week, I'm looking at only games played on Sunday nights.

All data is for only the regular season and comes from the numberFire database.

It's important to remember that these are all descriptive trends, meaning they tell us what has happened in the past. We still need to be aware of upcoming matchups and project forward based on current data, rosters, etc.

Sunday Night Football Betting Home/Road Trends

Okay, first, let's take a look at the home/road splits -- from the perspective of the home team to keep things simple.

There has been a better-than-usual home field advantage on Sunday Night Football than in all other games from 2019 through 2024, and that's been tied to an elevated win rate (58.5%) and cover rate (52.8%) for home teams in primetime on Sunday nights.

(Note the low scoring for road teams; that'll come back into play later.)

Of the frequent game times, Sunday night has been tied to the best home point differential:

• Sunday Night: +2.65
• Sunday Afternoon: +1.92
• Sunday Early: +1.42
• Thursday Night: -0.02
• Monday Night: -0.03

Notably, though, the home side's cover rate -- while positive overall -- has fluctuated greatly in small samples by season:

• 2019: 52.9%
• 2020: 64.7%
• 2021: 50.0%
• 2022: 44.4%
• 2023: 44.4%
• 2024: 61.1%

Remember, trends like this simply tell us what has happened in the past and may not always indicate future expectations.

Sunday Night Football Betting Favorite/Underdog Trends

Let's tweak the data a bit and look at favorites' performance rather than just the home side's.

These are really similar numbers in terms of how favorites perform on Sunday night under the lights versus all other games in this sample.

But we just saw that home teams have played better than expectation as a whole in this six-season sample.

So, it's not that surprising to see that road favorites have underperformed in this sample.

Road favorites have won 67.9% of non-SNF games in this span but just 60.5% on Sunday night.

Their cover rate also is down from 50.6% to 42.1%.

Sunday Night Football Over/Under Splits

Now, let's look at some scoring data.

And here's where things get really interesting.

I double- and triple-checked the numbers here because the low-scoring nature of Sunday Night Football doesn't really seem to compute, but what really emerges is that road team scoring is down to 20.7 points per game, a big dip from 22.3 in the rest of the sample.

We've also seen an average over/under of 46.9 points set for Sunday Night Football from 2019 to 2024. All other games have had an average total of 45.0.

So, while scoring is down just 1.8 points per game from the rest of the sample, the expectations have been set much higher -- on average -- in primetime on Sunday.

In 2024, we didn't see a 50+ point game on Sunday night until Week 7, and only 8 of 18 road teams scored more than 21 points.

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The above author is a FanDuel employee and is not eligible to compete in public daily fantasy contests or place sports betting wagers on FanDuel. The advice provided by the author does not necessarily represent the views of FanDuel. Taking the author's advice will not guarantee a successful outcome. You should use your own judgment when participating in daily fantasy contests or placing sports wagers.