NFL Record Predictions for 2026 NFL Season & Over/Under Picks

Each spring, sportsbooks give bettors a gift when they release the opening lines for every week of the upcoming NFL season. The gift is not the ability to place a bet on a Week 13 game you think presents value, but rather the pieces of a (complex) puzzle that when put together properly, give you a detailed picture of what sportsbooks are expecting from each team this season—also read as, “NFL record predictions”.

Using these opening NFL betting lines, I’ve already put together SBD’s NFL Power Rankings, which is based on a simple ATS +/- for all teams from Weeks 1-18. I’ve gone one step – or maybe 130,000 steps – further with these opening spreads in my NFL record predictions, though.

I have used the betting lines to mathematically predict each NFL team’s record for the 2026 NFL season, using a calculation I have dubbed “SBD Win Probabilities”. You’ll find more on the process and specific steps of the SBD Win Probability calculation later in this article. With these mathematical NFL record predictions, I have then highlighted the teams with the best probability to go over or under their respective NFL win totals, as well as some teams who present value to go over or under.

To be clear, these NFL record predictions are not based off my opinion in any way. It’s also not as simple as taking the sportsbooks’ win totals and making predictions from those. We’ve gone deeper into their data to pull out these record predictions.

NFL Record Predictions | Best Over/Under Probability | Best Over/Under Bets | SBD Win Probability Calculation Explained | Past Results

2026 NFL Record Predictions

The results of the SBD Win Probability calculation, or our NFL record predictions, say the Baltimore Ravens, Detroit Lions, LA Rams, and Seattle Seahawks will finish the 2026 NFL season tied for the best record in the league at 11-6, and the Arizona Cardinals will finish with the worst record at 4-13.

There are 17 teams predicted to finish the season with a winning record, leaving 15 teams projected for losing records. As expected with this type of calculation, nine teams are predicted to be one game over or under .500.

In the image above, you’ll see the chances of each team winning zero through 17 games this season, based off the SBD Win Probabilities calculation. To get the record prediction above, I have just taken the most likely outcome for each team from the calculation.

How Can NFL Record Predictions Help You as a Bettor?

It’s a lot of fun spending the summer looking ahead at how you think each NFL team will perform in 2026. While I wouldn’t suggest taking every person’s record predictions to the sportsbooks, this mathematical method for NFL record predictions has proven successful in the past. After all, I am just using the sportsbooks’ betting lines against them.

The best market to attack at the sportsbooks with these record predictions is win totals. Here’s how my NFL Win Probabilities can help you bet NFL win totals.

Teams Most Likely to Go Over/Under Win Total

It’s important to read this for what it is: the teams with the best chances to go over or under their win total. This does not mean they are the best bets to do so. We need to factor in the odds before determining the best bets. We will do this in the next section!

The team with the best chance to go over their win total is the Pittsburgh Steelers with a 61.9% probability to go over 7.5 wins. There is a 19.5% chance Pittsburgh wins eight games this season, a 17.8% chance they win nine, and a 12.8% chance they win ten, according to my calculations.

Although the Steelers are only favored in seven games this season, they are more than 3-point underdogs in just four games, and are more than a field goal favorite in two. The heaviest spread they face is just 5.5 points, which comes up twice. This is a result of the Steelers being tied for the 10th-easiest NFL strength of schedule. So, the math says they will end up right around .500.

The team with the best probability to go under their win total is the Baltimore Ravens. The Ravens’ win total is set at 11.5 but they have a 65.9% chance to go under. Baltimore is favored in 14 of the 17 games they play this season, but only three of those spreads are greater than seven, which tells us many of their games are expected to come down to the wire.

Based on the SBD Win Probability calculation, here’s each team’s probability to go over/under their respective win total this season.

NFL Win Total Predictions for Every Team

In the table above, I’ve put any probability above 60% in bold font. I already highlighted the five teams most likely to go over their win total and the five most likely to go under. But you can see there are some other teams showing strong probability towards the over or under as well.

Should any teams suffer any significant injuries in the offseason, that would of course change things dramatically for not only that team, but all their opponents in 2026 as well.

Now let’s dive into those best bets I was talking about earlier. (If you are just looking for the bets with the best probability of winning, not caring for the value, then go ahead and bet the teams bolded above.)

Best NFL Win Totals Bets from Record Predictions

You’ll notice a lot of the teams listed in the best bets table above are the same ones from the best probability table. There are a couple newcomers, though. The Bills, Dolphins, and Seahawks don’t have overly strong probabilities to go over/under their win total based on the record prediction calculation, but the odds at sportsbooks are a bit off, opening up a value play on each.

What Is SBD’s Win Probability Calculation?

As I said earlier, I started with the opening lines for every game of the 2026 NFL season. (I did this calculation for the first time in 2020.) These are the truest odds you can get your hands on. Money has not influenced them yet and it’s the closest thing you’ll find to the sportsbooks’ true perception of each team – they are still considering the public perception of each team, but they don’t have as good of a read on the public before money comes in.

And while there will be teams who surprise us every season, sportsbooks have a track record of being pretty accurate in how they view teams.

I knew my ATS +/- (or SBD NFL Power Ranking) would help with Super Bowl and playoff futures. But I wasn’t able to find a ton of great win total trends or correlations from that calculation. So I started thinking about what I could do with these spreads to help with win totals.

And then it hit me! I realized I could use these opening lines to poke holes in NFL win totals that have been influenced by money and public perception.

Here was my thought process:

1. Convert the spreads/moneylines to implied probabilities to simply win the game;
2. Calculate every win-loss combination for a 16 17-game season – did you know there are 65,536 131,072? There may only be one way to win 17 games, and 17 different ways to go 16-1 (depending which game you lose), but there are 24,310 different ways to go 8-9;
3. Going one team at a time, input their probabilities to win or lose each game of the season;
4. Add together all win-loss combinations that result in the same number of wins.

After doing that work, I now had the probability for each team to win zero through 17 games this season.

Full disclosure, I see two very minor flaws with this: (a) I did not factor in the probability of a game ending in a tie; and (b) while many of these spreads will be different from what we see at their more traditional opening (a week prior to the game), Week 18’s spreads will likely be much different than what we have now.

But I don’t see either of these having much of an effect on the teams whose SBD Win Prob is way out of line with their win total at sportsbooks – we’ve seen 13 ties in the NFL since 2012, only one last year, which comes out to one per season – and if any of your over/under bets don’t have anything to play for in Week 17, it probably means your bet has already been graded.

Past Results

Last year’s NFL record predictions bounced back from the previous year, as the teams with the strongest probability to go over/under their win total ended up going 7-4 to win 1.76 units. (This assumes you bet one unit on each of them.) If you tailed my calculation’s pick for every single team’s win total, you would have gone 17-15 and been +0.47 units. If you tailed the best bets, which all presented an edge of at least 9%, you would have gone 7-5 to win 1.26 units.

The image below is 2025’s calculation with the green cell indicating their most probable record and the blue cell indicating how many games they actually won. If you do not see a blue cell for any team, it is because I nailed their record.

Here’s a quick look at 2024, where the calculation went:

• 3-5 on the top value plays (-2.40 units)
• 5-6 on probabilities of at least 64% (-2.02 units)
• 15-17 overall (-3.65 units)

Here’s a quick look at 2023, where I went:

• 7-2 on the top value plays (+4.88 units)
• 7-3 on probabilities of at least 68% (+2.79 units)
• 18-14 overall (+2.73 units)

Looking to the previous year (2022), here is a quick breakdown of the stats:

• 8-3 on most probable to go over/under to win 2.36 units
• 20-11 overall (Browns didn’t have a win total when calculation was done)
• 5-0 if tailed only the over/unders with at least a 66.7% chance of winning
• The best bets, which had an edge greater than 11%, only went 3-2 for a small profit

The image above shows the probabilities for each team to win zero through 17 games in the 2022 season.