How often does the favourite win? A league-by-league look
Published October 19, 2026
Before judging any prediction, it helps to know how often the obvious answer — the team the market favours — actually wins. The answer depends a great deal on the sport.
The numbers, league by league
Across recent seasons, the betting favourite has won roughly this often:
- College football (NCAAF): about 73% to 75% of games — regular-season favourites have won 74.7% since 2005 (BetMGM).
- NBA: about 68%, and NFL about 67% (Covers).
- WNBA: about 67% in the 2026 season to date — one partial season, so a rough figure (Covers).
- NHL: about 58.6% to 58.8% over several seasons, almost exactly what the prices implied (Hockey-Statistics).
- MLB: about 57% to 58.5% (Covers).
These sources count slightly different seasons and do not always say whether they used opening or closing prices, so read them as a range, not as exact values.
Why baseball and hockey are so close to a coin flip
In baseball and hockey, few runs or goals decide a game, and a single bounce, a hot goalie or one bad inning can overturn it. The better team wins more often, but not by much. A study of how often the best team wins found that to match the NBA's rate of the better team winning a series, baseball would need a best-of-75 and hockey a best-of-51 (Lopez, Matthews & Baumer).
Basketball is the opposite: about 100 possessions a game let the stronger team's edge show. College football adds huge mismatches between programs of very different size, which is why its favourites win so often.
What this means for a prediction
A model that picks every winner in baseball is impossible; one that picks 60% of them is already doing about as well as the market does. In college football, 75% is roughly the market's level, so 75% is not special there.
This is why a single number like “we hit 66%” means little without saying which sports, and compared with what. iPick's own record, over 432 games where both could be compared in September and October 2026, was 67.1% for iPick's pick and 67.4% for the sportsbook favourite: the same, within one game.
The useful comparison is always on the same games. The Track record page keeps iPick's figures up to date, league by league.
In short
- The favourite wins from about 57% (MLB) to about 75% (college football) of the time.
- The closer a sport is to a coin flip, the more often good picks lose — by the nature of the sport, not by mistake.
- Judge any prediction against the favourite on the same games, not against 100%.