NFL bettors, according to an Optimove study, are pretty much the same as everyone else in that they have very little chance of accurately predicting their own behavior.
When comparing what they said when asked if they were going to bet NFL games with what they actually did with regard to betting NFL games … well, the gap was big, in each and every way.
In fact, at almost no point did bettors actually correctly predict what their betting behavior was going to be.
What Optimove did was ask 425 NFL bettors a series of questions about what they planned to do, betting-wise, before the 2025 season. They compared those answers to what actually happened, across 136 million bets placed by more than 5 million bettors.
For starters, bettors as a collective woefully underestimated what they were going to do during the regular season, with 73% of bettors saying they planned on placing bets during the campaign. In actuality, 87% did.
Even more interesting: That’s the only time they underestimated themselves. In every other case, they overestimated. A full third of them said they would be betting on the preseason, when in actuality only 12% did.
This trend also played out during the playoffs, with intent outweighing action at every turn. In Wild Card round betting, for instance, 48% of bettors claimed they planned to bet, but only 17% followed through. This trend played out through the divisional round (39% intent, 17% did), the conference championship (27% vs 13%), and even the Super Bowl (37% vs. 21%).
What does all this add up to? From the study: “The playoff decline is not only a function of fewer games. By January, part of the casual base has already lapsed, revealing how much of the regular-season audience remains active. The contrast between Wild Card weekend and the Super Bowl is especially important. Wild Card generates concentrated activity because six elimination games take place across three days. The Super Bowl, however, carries enough cultural relevance to bring back bettors who did not participate in earlier rounds.”
Money talks
Bettors were no better predicting how much they planned on wagering either.
About 8% of bettors expected to wager in the $1 to $5 range, and in the end a full quarter of bettors landed there.
This was notable as well at the high end, with 4% of bettors expecting to plop down over $500 a wager, when in fact that number ended up being 8%.
And when you start combining some numbers, the difference between plans and results were dramatic, with 52% of people expecting their typical wager to be above $50, when, in fact, only 18% of bettors routinely hit that threshold.
And on the other side of the ledger? Some 17% of bettors expected to bet under $10 per bet, when in fact it ended up being 44% of bettors.
The takeaway there is pretty obvious, as stated in the report: “The market is more polarized than bettors’ stated expectations suggest.”
Live time
One other area of interest was live betting, with bettors underestimating how often they would be both pre-game and in-game bettors.
Some 21% of respondents thought they’d bet both, whereas in the end 32% of bettors ended up placing both types of bets over the course of the season.
Live-only bettors, on the other hand, were vastly overestimated, with 31% of people saying they’d be live-only. In actuality, that number was halved.
Overall takeaway from this study? It would appear NFL bettors are not particularly aligned with their own brains when it comes to how they are going to bet the NFL, and sportsbooks and marketers would be wise to take anything they say with a grain of salt.
Or, as Optimove put it a little more gently: “Sportsbooks that use these insights can spend against the audience that shows up, not the one that was expected.”
