Underdog Moneyline Parlays: 11 Years of Real Results

Two-leg NFL underdog moneyline parlays have lost money over the last eleven seasons, and they lost more per dollar than betting the same underdogs one at a time. From 2015 through 2025, plus-money underdogs won outright in 33.12 percent of 2,793 regular-season games and returned -4.64 percent per dollar at closing prices. Pairing every two of those underdogs playing in the same week produced 19,067 tickets that hit 10.95 percent of the time, at a median payout near +771, for a return of -7.58 percent. The long price did not create value. It multiplied the cost. The Best Bet on Sports has built a verified $367,520+ in profit across all sportsbooks over more than twenty years, and we test a ticket like this before we call anything an edge.

The underdog moneyline parlay has a simple appeal. Upsets happen every Sunday. Two of them on one ticket pays like a lottery hit, and you only need to be right twice. Social media is full of screenshots of two-dog tickets paying 8-to-1 or better.

What those screenshots never show is the denominator. This post counts every ticket, not just the ones that cashed.

How Did We Test Underdog Moneyline Parlays?

We used every NFL regular-season game from 2015 through 2025 in the nflverse game file, which records closing moneylines for both teams and the final score.

We kept only games with a true plus-money underdog, priced at +100 or longer, and dropped ties. That left 2,793 games. Each underdog was graded at its own closing moneyline, so a +250 dog that won paid $250 on a $100 bet, and a loser cost $100.

For the parlays, we built every possible two-leg ticket from underdogs playing in the same season and week. A week with 13 underdogs produces 78 pairings. Across 192 weeks that came to 19,067 tickets, each paid at the product of the two closing prices, the same way a sportsbook pays a standard parlay.

That design matters. It does not pick the "best" dogs after the fact. It answers a cleaner question: if you had paired two underdogs at random every week, what would you have earned?

How Often Do NFL Underdogs Win Outright?

About one game in three, and almost exactly as often as the closing price said they would.

The overall win rate of 33.12 percent sat within a quarter of a point of what the closing moneylines implied once the bookmaker's margin was removed. The market priced upsets correctly on average. A bettor taking every underdog paid the margin and got nothing back for it.

The biggest underdogs were the worst bet. Teams priced at +450 or longer won 11.17 percent of the time, well short of the 13.49 percent their prices implied, and lost almost 22 cents per dollar. That is the favorite-longshot bias, and it shows up in nearly every betting market studied: the longest prices tend to be the most overpriced, because they are the ones bettors want to buy.

Home underdogs did slightly worse than road underdogs, at -7.14 percent per dollar against -3.13 percent. Neither group made money.

What Happens When You Parlay Two Underdogs?

The loss gets bigger.

Two things drive that bottom line.

The first is arithmetic. A parlay multiplies the house margin on each leg. If a single underdog bet returns about 95 cents per dollar, a two-leg parlay of similar dogs returns roughly 95 percent of 95 percent, about 91 cents. Nothing about the long payout changes that. The number just looks bigger.

The second is that the longest pairings stacked the most overpriced legs. When both underdogs were +250 or longer, the tickets hit 3.53 percent of the time against 4.43 percent implied, and lost more than 20 cents per dollar. The ticket people screenshot is the ticket that cost the most to play.

We resampled the 192 weeks 3,000 times to put a range around the -7.58 percent. The middle 95 percent of outcomes ran from -18.2 percent to +4.1 percent. A small profit is not ruled out by the data, but the center of the range is a clear loss, and nothing in eleven years points the other way.

Did Underdog Parlays Ever Have a Good Year?

Three times in eleven. Pairing every underdog each week returned +20.8 percent in 2015, +7.9 percent in 2019 and +19.4 percent in 2021. In the other eight seasons it lost money, and in 2024, when underdogs won only 70 of 260 games outright, it lost 38.5 percent.

Notice the pattern in that table. The parlay amplified whatever the underdogs did. In a good upset year, it beat the straight bets. In a bad one, it lost far more. That is exactly what a parlay is: a leveraged position on its legs. It does not add an edge the legs lack.

Is There a Price Range That Worked?

One band looked good, and it is worth explaining why we would not bet it.

Underdogs priced +150 to +199 won 38.62 percent of the time against 36.03 percent implied, a return of +3.88 percent across 624 games. Two-leg tickets built only from that band returned +13.3 percent across 966 pairings.

Now the caveats. The 95 percent range on the single-bet return runs from -6.1 percent to +14.5 percent, which comfortably includes losing money. The band lost 51.4 percent as single bets in 2024 and 89.4 percent as two-leg parlays the same year. And we found it by cutting the data into five price bands and looking for the one that was green. Cut any random set of results five ways and one band will usually look profitable.

That is how most published "angles" get built. A real edge should have a reason to exist and should hold up in seasons it was not found in. This one does not yet meet either test.

What About 2026?

Through Week 5 and Thursday night's Week 6 game, plus-money underdogs are 27-47 outright, up 3.88 units at closing prices. Thursday's game was an upset of the small kind: Denver closed +130 at home against Seattle and won 17-14.

This Sunday's board has the usual mix. Using the nflverse closing prices posted Saturday morning, the plus-money underdogs include Arizona +550 at the Rams, the Chargers +340 at Kansas City, Tennessee +270 at Indianapolis, the Jets +270 at New England, Las Vegas +190 against Buffalo, Cleveland and Philadelphia +140, and Houston and Tampa Bay +124. Monday night adds Washington +330 at San Francisco.

Pair Arizona with the Chargers and the ticket pays about +2,760. That is the bucket that lost 20 cents per dollar over eleven years. Pair Houston with Tampa Bay and it pays about +402, in the short-dog bucket that lost almost 14 cents. We are not recommending any of these. If you like an underdog on Sunday, the data says bet it by itself.

To be precise about that callout: this study uses closing pregame moneylines and final scores. It has no in-game prices, so it cannot measure whether live underdog prices are easier to beat. That is our structural view, not a result from these 2,793 games.

How Should You Use This?

Treat an underdog parlay as two bets you would have to like on their own. If you would not bet either dog straight, putting them on one ticket does not make either one better. And if you do like both, betting them separately costs less: across eleven seasons the straight bets lost 4.64 percent per dollar, while the same dogs on parlays lost 7.58 percent.

That matches what we found in our other real-results studies on heavy-favorite moneyline parlays, divisional underdog parlays and favorite-and-over parlays. Parlays multiply the edge in their legs, and when the legs have none, they multiply the loss. The theory is laid out in our older guide to favorites versus underdogs in parlays.

If you want multi-leg tickets built around legs we actually like, our parlay picks page explains when we think one earns its place. For the weekly NFL board, start with our NFL picks against the spread and football betting picks. Every graded play is on our results page.

Where This Analysis Stops

Four limits.

This is NFL regular season only, 2015 through 2025, graded at closing moneylines. Bettors who bet underdogs earlier in the week faced different prices, sometimes better and sometimes worse.

The parlay test pairs every underdog with every other underdog in the same week. Real bettors choose, and a skilled bettor choosing well could do better than random pairings. That is the point: the edge has to come from the choosing, not from the parlay.

We graded standard two-leg parlays. Sportsbooks sometimes offer boosts and insurance on underdog parlays, which change the math on individual tickets.

And the price-band results describe what happened. They do not promise it will repeat.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Are underdog moneyline parlays profitable in the NFL?

Not historically. From 2015 through 2025, every possible two-leg pairing of plus-money NFL underdogs in the same week, 19,067 tickets in all, hit 10.95 percent of the time and returned -7.58 percent per dollar at closing prices. That is a bigger loss than betting the same underdogs one at a time, which returned -4.64 percent.

How often do NFL underdogs win outright?

Plus-money NFL underdogs won 33.12 percent of 2,793 regular-season games from 2015 through 2025. The closing moneylines implied 33.33 percent once the bookmaker's margin was removed, so the market priced upsets accurately on average. Underdogs of +100 to +149 won 42.71 percent; dogs of +450 or longer won 11.17 percent.

Why does a parlay lose more than straight bets?

A parlay multiplies the bookmaker's margin on every leg. If each underdog returns about 95 cents per dollar on its own, two of them on one ticket return roughly 95 percent of 95 percent. The bigger payout reflects the lower chance of winning, not extra value.

Are big underdogs a better parlay leg?

No, they were the worst. Underdogs priced +450 or longer won 11.17 percent of the time against 13.49 percent implied and lost about 22 cents per dollar. Two-leg tickets where both dogs were +250 or longer hit 3.53 percent of the time against 4.43 percent implied and lost more than 20 cents per dollar.

Did any underdog price range make money?

Dogs priced +150 to +199 returned +3.88 percent as single bets and +13.3 percent as two-leg parlays from 2015 through 2025. The range on the single-bet return runs from -6.1 to +14.5 percent, the band lost 51.4 percent in 2024, and it was found by testing five bands. We treat it as noise until it holds up out of sample.

How have NFL underdogs done in 2026?

Through Week 5 and the Thursday night Week 6 game, plus-money underdogs are 27-47 outright, up 3.88 units at closing prices. That is a strong start, but 74 games is a small sample. Underdogs have ranged from -24 percent to +11 percent per dollar in full seasons since 2015.

What is the payout on a two-team underdog moneyline parlay?

Multiply the decimal odds of each leg. Two +124 underdogs pay about +402, two +270 underdogs pay about +1,269, and a +550 dog paired with a +340 dog pays about +2,760. Across eleven seasons the median two-dog ticket paid about +771, and it needed both teams to win outright.