Three NFL Week 1 Upset Picks To Consider

Three NFL Week 1 Upset Picks To Consider (2023)

These upset picks for NFL Week 1 stand out as value bets based on model predictions, matchup research, and/or recent news.

September 7, 2023 – by Jason Lisk

Will the Big Dog be part of an underdog Week 1 win? (Bryan Lynn/Icon Sportswire)

Hitting an NFL Week 1 upset pick that the public didn’t see coming isn’t just about the bragging rights. Historically, NFL underdogs tend to offer more fertile hunting grounds for betting value than favorites do.

Thus begins our quest to identify which Week 1 teams truly have that dog in them.

In this article, we pick our three favorite NFL Week 1 underdogs to win outright based on moneyline odds, or the relative payout you’d get if you bet on them to win the game.

Some picks will be fairly close to coin-flip winners, while other picks might be longshots that we expect to lose much more often than they win. (See the end of this article for some important notes on expectations.)

The unifying theme is our belief that these picks are all sensible gambles from a risk vs. reward standpoint, and hopefully will prove to be profitable bets over the long run.

Performance Tracking

We will keep track of our overall season performance against consensus moneyline odds for each pick at publication time.

We started writing this article a few weeks into the 2021 NFL season. From inception through the end of the 2022 season, the picks we highlighted went 44-56-2 (a 44% win rate) for a total profit of +23.1 units, if you had flat-bet one unit on each pick.

(Because these picks are all underdogs on the moneyline, we don’t need to hit 52.4% or even 50% to turn a profit.)

If you want to see the archives, you can view the final 2022 article here and the 2021 end-of-year version here.

Finally, to get our favorite NFL betting picks for Week 1, which may include point spread picks, over/under picks, props, or other bet types, check out our Staff Betting Picks.

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Week 1 NFL Upset Picks

In the analysis below, “SU” means a team’s straight up win-loss record, while “ATS” means its record against the spread.

Arizona Cardinals (at Washington Commanders)

Moneyline: +271Point Spread: +7

Let’s kick off the season with a highly contrarian banger for Week 1.

This is our top playable moneyline value pick according to our Ensemble Forecast model. Washington is also an extremely popular public play (77% picked) in pick’em contests this week, rating as the most popular spread pick according to pick popularity data from multiple pool hosting sites.

Arizona is expected to be the worst team in the NFL this year. QB Kyler Murray is starting the year on PUP coming off a knee injury, and the team is expected to start Josh Dobbs, who they acquired via trade two weeks ago.

But there are multiple uncertainty factors here which could play to the favor of the underdog side. We have:

Washington starting a QB with one career NFL start (Sam Howell)An Arizona team with a new coach (Jonathan Gannon) and QB situationThe general uncertainty of bigger favorites and underdogs in Week 1

To elaborate on that last point, over the last 20 seasons in NFL Week 1:

Big favorites in general have not lived up to expectations, as teams favored by 7 points or more have gone 44-14-1 SU (75.4%, below historical expectations) and only 24-34-1 ATS (41.5%).Favorites of 4.5 points or more facing an opponent with a new head coach are only 15-24 ATS (38.5%).Favorites of 4.5 points or more who are starting a QB with four or fewer starts for the franchise are only 7-5-1 SU. All other Week 1 favorites of 4.5 points or more are 94-30 SU.It’s pretty rare to play against a backup QB in Week 1, since starters are more likely to be healthy at the start of the season. But in the five games in our 20-season data set where a team was favored by 4.5 points or more against a backup QB, the favorites were 2-3 SU.

Add in a dash of “Washington hasn’t been favored by this many points in five years” and Commanders WR Terry McLaurin’s status being in question with a preseason toe injury, and Arizona seems to have some value at these odds.

This game could go any number of directions, including a Washington blowout, but the history of NFL Week 1 is littered with crazy results. And yes, we think Arizona is going to be the worst team in the NFL in 2023.

But in just the last few years, we’ve seen Chicago beat eventual playoff team San Francisco in Week 1 in Trey Lance’s third career start, then go on to get the first overall draft pick by the end of the season (2022). We’ve also seen Jacksonville beat Indianapolis in Philip Rivers’ debut with the Colts, then fail to win a game the rest of the year (2020).

Tennessee Titans (at New Orleans Saints)

Moneyline: +149Point Spread: +3

This is a playable moneyline value pick according to our Ensemble Forecast model.

Besides our models showing value on Tennessee, some season betting trend factors appear to favor the Titans. For instance, teams with starting QBs who missed a chunk of games the prior season have tended to be a bit undervalued the next year. Titans QB Ryan Tannehill missed five starts last year, with the team going 1-4 without him.

(The Titans closed last season with a seven-game losing streak, but injuries played a big role in how the team fared down the stretch.)

On the New Orleans end, teams that acquire new veteran starting QBs have tended to be at least slightly overvalued, especially adding QB’s with profiles similar to Derek Carr.

Injury and other personnel factors could also provide some subtle value for Tennessee. Second-year wide receiver Treylon Burks has returned to practice after an August knee injury. If Burks, veteran DeAndre Hopkins, and second-year tight end Chigoziem Okonkwo are all active in Week 1, the Titans’ offense might me much more explosive than it was at the end of last year.

Meanwhile, New Orleans will be without RB Alvin Kamara, who is suspended for the first three games, and rookie RB Kendre Miller, who is nursing an injury. That leaves the Saints pretty thin at running back, where Jamaal Williams should get most of the Week 1 work.

These teams aren’t far from being even, and there’s at least some chance that Carr, who got himself benched in Las Vegas, is also getting deeper into a declining career performance trend.

Cleveland Browns (vs. Cincinnati Bengals)

Moneyline: +118Point Spread: +2.5

This is a playable moneyline value pick according to our Ensemble Forecast model.

The Browns draw the Bengals in the Battle of Ohio, with Cleveland catching points at home. This line briefly dropped after Bengals QB Joe Burrow’s calf injury, which kept him out for the preseason, but it rebounded to its original number after news that Burrow will start.

Still, Burrow missed reps in the preseason, and there’s a chance that he’s not in peak form from the get-go in Week 1. He presumably faces some re-injury risk as well.

Another factor here is that the Browns have recently had success against Burrow and the Bengals. Cleveland held Cincinnati to its lowest point total and yardage output for the entire season last year in a Halloween matchup, and sacked Burrow five times.

Finally, there is the hope that Browns QB Deshaun Watson regains some of his old form in 2023, after returning to the NFL for the first time in over two seasons and struggling last December.

If Cleveland’s offense improves and the Bengals show some rust, it might be enough to tip the scales here.

Upset Pick Expectations

Whenever you read about upset picks from a betting perspective, it’s important to understand the implications. Both the betting markets and our models give all three of these three teams less than a 50-50 chance to win.

If you bet an underdog on the point spread, that isn’t such a big deal to you. You’re just hoping for the pick to at least keep it close and cover the number.

If you bet an underdog on the moneyline, though, you need them to win the game outright. When that happens, you get an outsized return on your bet.

Depending on the payout odds, you can still turn a profit by winning, say, 30 or 35 out of every 100 moneyline bets that you make on underdogs. However, you need to manage your bankroll carefully to weather what could be long losing streaks along the way.

Remember that we expect to get most of these picks wrong, and we also expect to see big swings in results from week to week. That includes losing all three picks in plenty of weeks.

After two straight seasons of profitable picks for this column, will the advice be profitable again in 2023? Who knows. Given the lower win probabilities and larger payout odds inherent with underdogs, variance can be pretty wild over an 18-week season and only around 50 total picks.

Profitability may end up depending on whether or not we hit a few homeruns over the course of the season with longshot picks, or whether a several-week heater more than offsets most weeks being losers.

Given the dynamics at play here, week-to-week performance is not worth dwelling on. We’ll see how pick performance ends up overall when the dust settles at the end of the 2023 season.

NFL Week 1 Betting Picks & Model Predictions

To see a curated list of some of our favorite Week 1 betting picks, along with the rationale behind each pick, check out our Staff Betting Picks.

To see algorithmic picks from our various data models for Week 1 (including game winner, point spread, over/under, and moneyline value predictions), visit our NFL picks page on TeamRankings.

To find your own trends and angles for NFL betting, check out our free and customizable NFL betting trends tool.

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