Thirteen games in one Sunday is a lot to hold in your head, so let’s just go through it the way it actually broke: the underdogs that hit, the favorites that rolled, and the ones that “won” while quietly burning anyone who had them on the spread.
The upset that actually mattered most wasn’t even the day’s biggest score. Dallas closed as a 2.5-point road favorite over the Giants for Sunday Night Football, and New York didn’t just cover — they won outright, 28-20, behind three touchdown passes from Jaxson Dart and a Giants defense that turned Dak Prescott over at exactly the moment it mattered, right before halftime. John Harbaugh’s debut as Giants head coach ended with New York controlling the clock so thoroughly that Dallas only had seven possessions all game. If you took the Cowboys because “it’s Week 1 and Dallas is just better on paper,” you learned the same lesson the league hands out every September: paper doesn’t tackle anybody.
Arizona was the other real upset, and arguably the bigger one against the number. The Cardinals were priced as one of the least respected home teams on the board heading in — the kind of spread that reflects a preseason forecast, not a Week 1 matchup — and they beat the Chargers 26-14 anyway, giving new head coach a win in his very first game in charge. When a team gets treated like a bottom-five roster by the market and then wins by two scores, that’s not just a backdoor cover. That’s the book being wrong about the whole team.
Minnesota is the game I think deserves more attention than it’s getting. The Vikings closed as 1.5-point home favorites over Green Bay — practically a coin flip — and found themselves down 22-10 with a backup quarterback in the game after Kyler Murray went out early. Carson Wentz then led 29 unanswered points for a 39-22 final. That’s not just covering a small number, that’s covering it by 15-plus points after trailing by 12. If you bet the Vikings moneyline and walked away at halftime, you missed one of the better second-half turnarounds Week 1 had to offer.
On the other side of the ledger, Philadelphia is the closest thing to a “bet that didn’t land” moneyline winner from the entire slate. The Eagles opened as roughly 5-point favorites over Washington and had to survive a blocked two-point try with a minute left just to escape 24-22. Philadelphia’s moneyline cashed. Philadelphia’s spread did not. That’s the exact gap I wrote about heading into the weekend — the difference between a team winning and a team winning the way the number needs it to.
The favorites who did exactly what they were supposed to do: Chicago was never seriously threatened in a 59-37 track meet against Carolina, a final margin that made backing the Bears as short favorites look conservative in hindsight. Baltimore beat Indianapolis 41-23, comfortably clearing whatever number the market had attached to a Colts team that had been getting some respect from bettors after a strong 2025 season — respect that didn’t hold up for four quarters. Jacksonville’s 34-10 win over Cleveland was similarly one-sided from early in the second quarter on.
Detroit’s the game I’d flag as a warning for anyone who bets favorites blind. The Lions were treated as one of the safer home plays of the week against a rebuilding Saints team, and still needed overtime to escape with a 31-30 win. A cover is a cover, technically, but if your Sunday plan was “take Detroit and go do something else,” you had a rough few hours.
Add in Buffalo grinding out a 36-31 shootout against Houston in a game with real playoff-seeding stakes down the line, Cincinnati holding off Tampa Bay 33-27, and the Jets handling Tennessee 23-10 in the kind of workmanlike divisional-adjacent win that never makes a highlight reel but pays out the same as a blowout — and you’ve got a Sunday that, on the whole, treated favorites reasonably well everywhere except the two games with the most storyline attached to them.
That’s the throughline for Week 1 as a whole, not just Sunday: Wednesday’s Super Bowl rematch didn’t play like one, Thursday’s Aaron Donald hype didn’t survive contact with San Francisco, and now Sunday’s most heavily bet primetime game turned into the week’s biggest outright upset. If there’s one lesson from the league’s opening week, it’s the same one every year — the games people talk about the most are, so far, the ones the market has gotten the most wrong.
