Ravens vs. Cowboys in Rio: What the data says about betting NFL's newest road trip

Sean McVay is still finding new ways to laugh at himself over Week 1. Eleven days after the Los Angeles Rams flew into Melbourne, got blown out by the 49ers 27-7, and flew back out again, the coach owned the travel plan that put his team there in the first place, joking about having "a dumbass coach that makes travel plans that put you in a bad spot."

It's a good line. It's also, according to the numbers, not really the reason the Rams lost.

The NFL's international expansion

Week 1 in Melbourne handed NFL bettors and analysts a rare side-by-side test case. Both teams made the same 15-plus-hour trip to the same continent for the same game, and picked opposite strategies for handling it. As we reported at the time, the Rams tried to stay on Pacific time, bracketing the trip with long flights immediately before and after the game. The 49ers did the opposite, flying in early and spending the week in Australia to acclimate. San Francisco won by 20.

That's a tidy story about travel prep mattering.

It's also a sample size of one game, and the data on NFL international games as a whole tells a messier, more useful story for bettors: Australia aside, it's not the travel that decides these games nearly as much as it's just... the better team showing up.

What the numbers actually say

Multiple betting-data outlets tracking the full history of the NFL's International Series arrive at strikingly similar conclusions. One source has favorites in these games going 47-16 straight-up (a 74.6% clip) and 39-23-1 against the spread, a 62.7% cover rate, well above the roughly two-thirds favorites hit domestically. Another's independent tracking of the same data put favorites at a similar 73.3% straight-up and 63.3% against the spread. A third pegged the numbers slightly lower but in the same range: favorites winning outright over 70% of the time and covering more than 60% of international matchups.

Three different data sets, three slightly different sample cutoffs, the same conclusion: international games are not the equalizer the neutral-site, long-flight narrative suggests. If anything, they tilt harder toward the favorite than a normal week does. The Week 1 underdog 49ers being one of the very few exceptions to that rule, aided by their opponents "dumbass coach."

The scoring angle holds up too, though it's a softer trend than the ATS one. The data shows unders hitting a bit more than half the time in these games historically, while noting last season's international slate actually finished 4-3 to the over, a reminder that "games abroad go under" is a lean, not a lock.

This week's test case: Ravens -3 in Rio

Week 3 gives that trend a live subject. The Ravens and Cowboys play Sunday at Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, the first regular-season NFL game in that city, and the second international game of the 2026 slate. Baltimore has settled at Ravens -2.5 favorites, with the total sitting at one of the highest marks of the week, 52.5. Dimers' pre-game NFL predictions model lines up with the market: it projects a 27-24 Ravens win, gives Baltimore a 61.5% moneyline probability and a 54.7% chance to cover at -2.5, and has the 52.5 total split almost down the middle, 51.8% under, 48.2% over.

Both teams are 1-1 and both are banged up in ways that matter here. Baltimore blew a fourth-quarter home lead to New Orleans last week, and Dallas's pass rush has managed only two sacks through two games. If the historical favorite-and-under split holds, backed up by a model that already sees it the same way, that points to Baltimore covering a short number while the total plays out closer to a coin flip than a lock either direction. Book it as a lean, not a certainty, the whole point of a 63% cover rate is that more than a third of the time, it doesn't hold.

Why this matters for the rest of the NFL season

This isn't a one-off angle. The 2026 season features a record nine international games spread across seven countries, Melbourne, Rio, three games in London, Paris, Madrid, Munich and Mexico City, running from Week 1 through Week 11. That's essentially a new data point on this exact trend every couple of weeks between now and late November.

McVay's flight plan makes for a great quote and a fun explanation for a bad Week 1 loss. But if the betting data on international games is right, the story bettors should actually be tracking isn't which team handled the jet lag better, it's whether the number on the board already has the better team baked in. Right now, in Rio, that's Baltimore.