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Guides · NFL ATS Records

What an ATS Record Means (and What It Doesn't)

How a record against the spread is counted, why pushes drop out, and how wide a record chance alone produces over 185 games.

Informational only. This guide describes public game data; it is not betting advice, and no wagering is offered or arranged here.

An ATS record counts how often a team beat the point spread. Over the roughly 185 lined games a team played from 2015 to 2025, a fair coin would land anywhere from about 43% to 57%, so most records, good or bad, sit inside what luck alone produces.

How the record is counted

Every game with a posted line produces one of three results for each team. The team covers if its margin beats the line: a 6-point win as a 3.5-point favorite, or a 2-point loss as a 3-point underdog. It fails to cover if the margin falls short. It pushes if the margin lands exactly on a whole-number line.

The record is written covers–non-covers–pushes, like 104–79–5, and the cover rate leaves the pushes out: 104 ÷ (104 + 79) = 56.8%. OddsDial uses the closing line, the last number before kickoff, for every game.

How wide chance runs

If every game were a coin flip against the spread, a team playing 185 of them would still not land on 50%. The typical miss (the standard deviation) is 3.7 percentage points, and about 95% of teams would fall within two of those: roughly 42.6% to 57.4%.

That is almost exactly what the real league looks like. The 32 teams' cover rates from 2015 to 2025 spread out by 3.7 points, the same amount pure chance produces. The league-wide pattern of ATS records is what you would see if no team had any lasting edge against the line at all.

The best and worst since 2015

TeamATS recordCover %
Cincinnati Bengals104-79-556.8%
Minnesota Vikings101-81-655.5%
New England Patriots106-86-655.2%
Atlanta Falcons80-104-243.5%
New York Jets74-102-542.0%
Cleveland Browns73-108-340.3%

Top three and bottom three of 32 teams, 2015–2025, closing lines. Relocated franchises count as one team.

Four of those six sit inside the chance band. The Jets (42.0%) and the Browns (40.3%) are outside it. That sounds meaningful until you count: with 32 teams, about one or two should land outside a 95% band by luck alone. Two teams doing so is what chance predicts.

Splits make it noisier

Home, road, favorite, underdog and off-a-bye splits cut the sample further. With about 90 games, a home or road split carries roughly five points of chance swing either way; with the dozen or so games a team plays after a bye in eleven seasons, the swing is enormous. A split is a description of what happened, not a trait of the team. The same goes for a single season, which is 16 to 21 games.

Reading ATS records on OddsDial

NFL ATS Records shows every team's record since 2015 against the spread and the total, with those splits, and each team page says in plain words whether its record sits inside or outside the chance band. For what a record does or does not tell you about next season, see why hot ATS streaks fade.

Sources

Figures are computed from nflverse's games file (CC-BY 4.0) over the 2015–2025 seasons by scripts/guide-measurements.mjs, so they do not move as new games are played. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the NFL or any team.