Spread & Circuses

 After last week’s 12-4 record, I’m basically in Bruce Cockburn territory here, wondering where the lions are. (I know they’re in Chicago, but I mean the figurative lions that can wreck your parlay). I’m at 34-14 for the year, and that feels unsustainable.  There’s not a lot of guidance from the markets on tonight’s Thursday night clash, likely because betting interest may be low. The Bengals and Jaguars are not exactly dominant franchises or big markets, although there is the appeal of seeing the last two #1 pucks go head to head. Joe Burrow looked solid in getting a win over the fading Steelers, and Trevor Lawrence made some big league throws and some bush league mistakes, scaring Arizona for a half before giving the Cards the late cover. The line moved from 7 to 7.5 for Cindy, likely driven by some public reaction to finally besting their divisional bullies from Pittsburgh. The sharps are pretty split, so we are on our own to bet…. CINCINNATI -7.5 over Jacksonville Sooner o...

  As the sample size gets bigger, the house gets better.  A lot of this week’s lines are tough plays, because they look pretty darn close to the likely result.  As always, I’m going to try to make sense of line movements, fade the public and trust the house. There are a few places where the public is overreacting and that’s where we will focus our best bets to build on a solid 23-10 start (including my correct calls on Carolina and the Under on Thursday). BEST BETS — I will play at least one unit here and maybe more.  MIAMI +3.5 over Las Vegas Blowouts are almost always an outlier. In reality, even the lowliest team has elite athletes and the league is structured to entertain, which means competitive games. Teams coming off 3TD losses cover the spread the next week over 60% of the time because the public reacts to what they just saw.  The public clearly reacted to the Dolphins losing 35-0 and having to start backup Jacoby Brissett in this one.  But Brissett...

  So far, so good….I went 12-4 with my picks against the spread last week, so I’m 22-10 on the year. That includes a nice 4-2 on my premium picks. I hurt myself by betting two units on the Cards, so when they couldn’t punch it in on 3rd down I lost that cover. Happily, I bet Dallas on the Money Line and they came in.  That, along with my suggestion to bet the old-school Pro-Line tie on Thursday’s WFT-NYG match at 3.20 gave me a nice week.  I’m up three units on the season, so using a $100 standard bet I’m up $300.  Two end zone incompletions by KC in week 1 and AZ in week 2 were all that kept me from a monster $900 advantage, but that’s why they call it gambling.  That bit of accountability out of the way, let’s look at tonight’s early game.  It features the Carolina Panthers against a banged-up Houston Texans team, which in the words of the late, great Norm MacDonald could be given the same title he proposed for Carrot Top’s one feature film — “Box Office ...

 In contrarian betting, we are always looking for places where the collective rush to judgement is wrong.  Just as every Gen X sports fan remembers Howie Meeker exhorting us to play the puck and not the man, we don’t play against the house but the general public. Recency bias is a promising area for the contrarian better. The public often puts too much emphasis on last week’s games, especially blowouts.  Blowouts are often less instructive than we think. Pro sports place the very top of the best 1% of athletes against each other, and very small variances are magnified.  In NFL world, the best quarterback in the world taking on the 55th best is a big margin.  If Patrick Mahimes and Blake Bortles showed up to your beer league game, they’d both look equally amazing. The NFL a turns on very small differences, and a blowout often just means there was a small, transient advantage that one team exploited in a one-game sample size.   The result is that the public o...

 These things are almost never right. Let’s start with that.  Season predictions often go wrong, because there’s always going to be some bias towards what we just saw.  The 2020 NFL season ended with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on a tear, with the Bills, Browns and Packers ascendant.  So most predictions are going to start with those teams. Except….. Things change. They change for reasons that aren’t obvious to you and me.  I don’t know why the Buccaneers started 6-5 and the Steelers started 11-0, and by the start of the playoffs one of them looked great and the other appeared completely discombobulated. I don’t know why the Jets could go from looking like historic doormats to winning two of their last three. I mean, I can guess…and some of the trends might carry over.  Others may not.  More often, things just change.  A mediocre team can hit a statistical run during a 17-game sample.  An invincible favourite can be swarmed by the injury bug. An...