NFL betting: First look at point spreads for Week 1

Hallelujah! The NFL has a schedule for the 2023 campaign. Thursday night saw various teams release their highly-entertaining season hype videos - from the Chargers' anime masterpiece with different easter eggs to the simple comedy of the Titans' street interview logo quiz. While the Panthers put a ton of work into an elaborate parity, there was no joking around for market-making oddsmakers as they scrambled to populate each game with a point spread and game total.

Let's look at the Week 1 games and how this new market information changes the ratings we started building for each team using the AFC and NFC win total markets.

Week 1 spread and total

What to shop for this summer

Since there are roughly four months before these games kickoff, there's plenty of time to wait for the number you want on one side or the other. While it seems silly sometimes to bet on a contest that isn't played until September, bettors often bet futures markets that take longer to be decided.

The Chiefs open the 2023 campaign on the brink of being a full touchdown favorite to the Lions, whose head coach seems already primed to compete. Kansas City doesn't historically cover these types of big spreads at a profitable rate, so whether it's sooner or later, I'll pounce on the Lions if we see a +7.

The Commanders are under the radar after a competitive season that fell just shy of the playoffs, and the Cardinals could be even worse than their league-low win total suggests. This spread might never get lower than 5.5 points before Sept. 10.

Falcons -2.5 (-115) suggests that Atlanta is the better team in a divisional opener with Carolina. I'm not ready to believe that yet. However, if bettors want to buy into that concept and push the line, I'll scoop up some Panthers +3.

Expectations are high for the second season of the Doug Pederson era in Jacksonville, so 3.5 seems a little short for their opener with the Colts. The Jaguars have largely owned Indianapolis lately in the worst of times and now may face a rookie quarterback. We'll patiently wait for Anthony Richardson to look good against vanilla preseason defenses and hope for a -3 to pop on the Jaguars.

If the Buccaneers couldn't look good with Tom Brady, how will they succeed with Baker Mayfield? If that type of attitude pushes Tampa Bay up to +7, we'll dare the Vikings' defense to help them win by a significant margin - something they couldn't do last year.

Aaron Rodgers is gone, and a lot of bettors will sell the Packers this season. But there's too much talent left for Green Bay to be underdogs to the Bears. This line touched +3, but the market wasn't ready to go that far, with the Packers getting bet at that number.

Sitting on a key number of +3, the Giants are worth taking. There's a better chance the excitement about Daniel Jones' development with new targets in a second offseason with Brian Daboll sees this point spread versus the Cowboys come down versus go up.

League market ratings

Using the advanced point spreads of the early-season games, we continue our educated guess as to how the market ranks each team in the NFL:

Matt Russell is the lead betting analyst for theScore. If there's a bad beat to be had, Matt will find it. Find him on Twitter @mrussauthentic.