Football brings joy to many fans, even over the holiday season! However, it’s not all merry when it comes to supporting your team. Losses, injuries, and fouls can quickly spoil the celebratory mood and turn the holidays into a season of stress.
That’s on top of swimming through Black Friday crowds, hosting your extended family, and making sure your dog doesn’t get into the turkey!
This year is the third in a row in which NFL games will be played on December 25th. To get an insight into your upcoming holiday season, we did the research and found out which supporters are most likely to have the most stressful festive season thanks to the NFL, based on the past five years.
Festive cheer for the Chiefs
First up, we’ll reveal the three least stressful NFL teams to watch and support.
Out of 32 teams, Kansas City Chiefs had the highest percentage of wins (84%) over the past five festive seasons. If you’re a Kansas Citian and NFL fan, you can rest easy knowing that your team has a record of securing wins over the holidays. Despite this, the Chiefs have only won one Super Bowl since 2000, so they need to keep it up once the party’s over!
At least some Midwestern fans from Wisconsin to Iowa will be pleased, as our data revealed that the second-best team was the Green Bay Packers with 72% of wins. Meanwhile, the Baltimore Ravens had 70% of the wins.
These three top teams all had over 80% of wins when it came to playing in their home stadiums. This bodes well for the Chief’s games on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day – though we can’t make any promises!
The Panthers aren’t bringing home presents
With the good news out of the way, we’ve listed below the three most stressful teams to support over the holidays.
The Carolina Panthers, with only 24% of wins, can at least take this trophy home. Runners-up for the most stressful teams to support were the Jacksonville Jaguars (26%) and the Detroit Lions (30%). It’s not a good time to be a big cat, it seems!
The Jaguars improved slightly when it came to home games, with just over 38% of wins at the TIAA Bank Field stadium. Unfortunately, the Panthers only improved by 1% when playing at home, and the Lions didn’t show any signs of catching up to their prey at Ford Field.
Despite hosting their Thanksgiving game for six seasons in a row, the Lions are yet to give their fans a win to be grateful for on the big day! If we were measuring fans’ stress based on Thanksgiving alone, the Lions could have come out on top (for once).
How stressful will your NFL season be?
The other results showed that the LA Rams, Dallas Cowboys, and Philadelphia Eagles were reasonably stress-free teams to get behind. In particular, the Eagles won 83% of the home games they played in the last five festive seasons!
At the stressful end of the scale, the Minnesota Vikings, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Pittsburgh Steelers only just managed to win up to half of the games that we analyzed.
Typically, we expect that teams will perform better when playing in their hometowns. This was the case for most of the teams, except for a curious few. The Dallas Cowboys had the same number of wins at home and away, while these teams actually played worse at home than away:
- Detroit Lions
- New York Giants
- Las Vegas Raiders
- Houston Texans
- Arizona Cardinals
- Tamba Bay Buccaneers
- New Orleans Saints
- Buffalo Bills.
If you’re a fan of any of these teams, you may have to travel to see them succeed over the holidays.
See the full table below to find out whether your team is going to cause more tension than cheer this season!
To reduce the stress of NFL fans this holiday season, ClutchBuzz Sportsbook will be offering its players No Sweat Bets for all three of the NFL’s Christmas Day matchups.
Any registered ClutchBuzz player who places a spread bet on the Packers @ Dolphins, Broncos @ Rams and Buccaneers @ Cardinals games will get up to $50 back in free bets if their wager is unsuccessful (terms and conditions apply).
That means less time stressing about the result of the game, and more time unwrapping presents and enjoying your Christmas ham.
Methodology
To analyze which NFL teams were the most stressful to support, we collected data from various online sources such as Wikipedia, NFL.com, and the individual teams’ websites.
We looked at games between Thanksgiving and New Year over the last five years, from 2017 to 2021. The data collected included the win/loss record and the home vs away statistics.
