Winning Isn’t Everything: The Sports Teams That Made Bettors the Most Money

Winning more games should mean making more money, right? Well, that could be at first glance, and it sounds logical – you pick the strongest team, back it throughout the season and watch the victories pile up. Sports betting doesn’t quite work that way, though, as the bookmakers also know which teams are good, and the odds reflect it.

Sometimes, the team offering the most value isn’t the one lifting the trophy at the end of the season, in fact, It might not even finish with a winning record. True! New research looking at the most recent NFL and NBA regular seasons makes that point rather clearly. The study calculated what would have happened if a bettor had placed $100 on every team to win every single game, regardless of the opponent or the odds.

Some of the results are surprising. None more so than the Carolina Panthers.

An 8-9 team managed to go on top of the NFL

Carolina finished the regular season with eight wins and nine defeats, normally, that wouldn’t be a record you’d associate with being the NFL’s most profitable team to back.

Yet anyone hypothetically placing $100 on the Panthers to win every week would have finished the regular season $1,208.24 in profit. That translates to an ROI of 60.4%, comfortably the best return among NFL teams included in the research.

And now comes the tricky question – how does a team lose more games than it wins and still produce that kind of return? Well the answer is in the price of those victories, as Carolina wasn’t expected to win many of its tougher matchups, meaning successful bets could produce considerably larger returns than backing a heavy favorite. The Panthers then delivered several results that went against those expectations.

Their Week 9 trip to Green Bay was a perfect example of this, Carolina entered Lambeau Field and came away with a 16-13 victory, and then just a few weeks later, the Panthers produced another surprise by beating the Los Angeles Rams 31-28.

Results like those helped compensate for the games Carolina lost.

There was also plenty of genuine improvement behind the numbers. Rookie wide receiver Tetairoa McMillan won Offensive Rookie of the Year, while quarterback Bryce Young continued his development. Head coach Dave Canales ultimately guided Carolina to its first NFC South title since 2015 and a return to the playoffs.

Not bad for a team that still finished below .500.

New England won far more games but made less money

The New England Patriots provide perhaps the clearest illustration of why win-loss records don’t tell the whole story.

New England went 14-3.

That’s six more victories than Carolina, yet backing the Patriots with the exact same $100-per-game strategy would have generated $797.22 in profit, more than $400 less than the Panthers.

Their ROI was 46.9%, good enough for second place in the NFL ranking but some distance behind Carolina’s 60.4%.

The Patriots certainly weren’t short of memorable performances. Their 23-20 victory over Buffalo in Week 5 was one of the highlights of a season in which they produced one of the league’s biggest turnarounds.

Drake Maye became one of only a small group of NFL quarterbacks to complete at least 70% of his passes while throwing for more than 4,000 yards and 30 touchdowns in a season. Stefon Diggs added another major weapon to the offense, while Mike Vrabel oversaw a ten-win improvement after taking over as head coach.

The problem, from a hypothetical bettor’s perspective, is obvious. Once everyone knows a team is good, the odds begin to reflect it.

Winning regularly isn’t enough. The question is whether a team wins more often than the market expects.

The odds matter as much as the result

That’s where the distinction between a great sports team and a profitable betting team becomes important.

A $100 winning wager doesn’t automatically return the same amount every time. Back a strong favorite and the profit may be relatively small. Back an outsider and one victory can cover several previous losses.

Sports Illustrated’s betting coverage regularly examines this relationship between odds, expectations and potential returns across the US market. The prices available can also vary between operators, which is one reason bettors may compare the best sports betting sites, listed by SI.com rather than looking at a team’s record alone.

The profitability study demonstrates why those differences matter. Over one game, a small change in price might not look particularly significant. Repeat the same process throughout an NFL or NBA season and the effect becomes much easier to see.

Carolina is the perfect example. The Panthers lost nine times, but the prices attached to their eight victories were enough to put them comfortably ahead.

Jacksonville completes the NFL top three

The Jacksonville Jaguars weren’t far behind New England.

Jacksonville finished 13-4 and generated a hypothetical profit of $732.10 from the $100-per-game strategy, producing an ROI of 43.06%.

One of the most valuable results came in Week 5, when the Jaguars stunned Kansas City 31-28. It was Jacksonville’s first victory over the Chiefs since 2009 and exactly the sort of result that can make a significant difference to a season-long betting return.

Trevor Lawrence enjoyed one of the strongest campaigns of his career, producing a franchise-record 38 touchdowns and emerging as a finalist for both AP NFL MVP and Comeback Player of the Year.

The turnaround under Liam Coen was equally impressive. Jacksonville had won only four games the previous season, but Coen led the Jaguars to 13 victories in his first year as head coach.

Once again, outperforming expectations proved crucial.

The NBA produced even bigger profits

Switch to basketball and the numbers become considerably larger.

An NBA regular season contains 82 games, creating far more opportunities for the hypothetical $100 strategy to generate both wins and losses.

Nobody took advantage of that better than the San Antonio Spurs.

San Antonio finished 62-20 and produced a total profit of $2,352.84, comfortably the highest figure among the NBA teams analyzed. That works out to an ROI of 28.69%.

The Spurs’ position becomes more understandable when you consider where they had come from. San Antonio won just 34 games the previous season. Expectations were rising, particularly with Victor Wembanyama developing into one of basketball’s biggest stars, but few would have anticipated just how quickly the team would progress.

Wembanyama averaged 25 points, 11.5 rebounds and 3.1 blocks per game and became the youngest player to win NBA Defensive Player of the Year. San Antonio eventually reached the NBA Finals for the first time since 2014.

For anyone backing them throughout the regular season, however, the important part was that their improvement repeatedly ran ahead of expectations.

Denver and Detroit rewarded loyalty too

Denver finished second in the NBA profitability ranking.

The Nuggets went 54-28 and generated $1,477.84 in hypothetical profit, equivalent to an 18.02% ROI.

Nikola Jokic remained at the heart of their success, including a remarkable Christmas Day performance in which he recorded 55 points, 15 rebounds and 15 assists in an overtime victory over Minnesota.

Detroit completed the NBA top three with perhaps an even more dramatic turnaround.

The Pistons finished 60-22, generating $1,273.05 in profit and an ROI of 15.53%. Only two seasons earlier, Detroit had lost 68 games.

Cade Cunningham played a central role in that transformation, while J.B. Bickerstaff guided the franchise to its first 60-win season since 2005/06.

As with Carolina, Jacksonville and San Antonio, the profitable part wasn’t simply winning. It was winning more frequently than expectations suggested they would.

Being good and being good value aren’t the same thing

That’s probably the biggest takeaway from the numbers.

If the hypothetical experiment had simply rewarded the teams with the best records, there wouldn’t be much of a story. The standings could tell us that.

Instead, an 8-9 Carolina team produced a better NFL return than a New England side that won 14 games. San Antonio’s rapid transformation produced more than $2,300 in hypothetical profit after the Spurs had managed only 34 victories the season before.

The $100 strategy used in the research isn’t necessarily how someone would approach betting in the real world. It deliberately removes selection and simply backs the same team every game to measure how the market valued it across an entire season.

And that’s exactly what makes the results interesting.

Winning matters, of course. But when money and odds enter the equation, being underestimated can sometimes be worth considerably more.