Jimmy Boyd in 
NFL closing lines this season price home field at 1.5 points. Through Week 9, home teams are 66-62-1 straight up and 56-68-5 against the spread, they’ve outscored the visitors by half a point a game, and when you fit the final scores the same way the lines are fit, home field comes out at 0.0.
Nine weeks is not enough to trust on its own, so I’m setting this season against every one since 2010. The seven international games this season are neutral sites and left out of every home and road number here, same as in every other season.
1.5 Points on the Line, Zero on the Scoreboard
The market and the results are telling two different stories right now. Oddsmakers still hang 1.5 points for home field, but home teams have won 51.6% of their games and covered 45.2% of them, and the final scores put their edge at nothing.
Half a season of games can swing a lot. In 2019 the final scores also put home field at 0.1 points, and two years later the results had it back over a point. So I’m not calling home field dead. I’m saying the 1.5 the books charge hasn’t shown up on the field yet this year.
Where Three Points Came From, and Where It Went
For decades, Vegas oddsmakers said home field was worth about 2.8 points, and a book would round that up and hang the home team as a 3-point favorite over an equal opponent. That’s where the three points everybody still quotes came from. By 2021, a sportsbook trading director was putting the baseline at about 1.5 to 2 points.
Go five seasons at a time and you can watch it come down. From 2010 to 2014, closing lines priced home field at 2.4 points. From 2015 to 2019 it was 2.1. From 2021 to 2025 it was 1.6. This season it’s 1.5, level with 2024 and 2025, and only 2020 was lower.
2020 was the low point at 1.1, with the average home margin at 0.1 points. But the slide started before that: 2019’s final scores put home field at 0.1, and home teams went 104-137-10 against the spread.
Why the Home Edge Keeps Shrinking
2020 is the cleanest test the league has given us. With few or no fans in the stands, home teams finished 127-128-1, below .500 for the first time in NFL history, and road teams outgained home teams by 7.7 yards per game, the most since the 1970 merger.
Researchers point to the crowd’s pull on the officials as a big piece of home field. Yale’s Tobias Moskowitz, who co-wrote Scorecasting, has argued the referees may be the biggest contributor of all. Instant replay and coaches’ challenges took some of that away, and better travel and recovery for road teams took away more.
More Home Teams Landing as Small Dogs
When home field is worth less, the line moves toward the road team, and more home teams get priced as small underdogs instead of small favorites.
You can see it in the teaser window for dogs, +1 to +2.5. From 2010 to 2014, an average of 24.6 home teams a season closed in that window. From 2015 to 2019 it was 27.6. From 2021 to 2025 it was 31. There are more home dogs to tease than there used to be.
What the Teaser Math Says Now
A two-team, 6-point teaser at -120 needs each leg to win 73.9% of the time just to break even. That’s the bar for every teased leg, favorite or dog, home or road.
Teased home favorites in the -7 to -8.5 window cleared it in the first two stretches (74.1% from 2010 to 2014, 74.6% from 2015 to 2019), then fell to 67.9% from 2021 to 2025, well short. Dogs have held up better. Road dogs teased up from +1 to +2.5 went 74.5%, 76.8% and 76.6% across the three stretches. Home dogs went 74.6%, then 71.2%, which is under the bar, then 77.1%.
This season points the same way on a small sample: teased home dogs are 13-3 and teased home favorites are 10-5-1. Our Teaser of the Week has used only underdogs teased to +7.5, +8 or +8.5 this season and stands 4-5, down 2 units. Since 2021, the teased home favorite is the leg in the window that has fallen furthest short of 73.9%, so it’s the leg I want the best reason to play.
