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| Jay Cutler's Bears and Aaron Rodgers' Packers are two of the three teams in the NFC North sitting at 2-2. Furthermore, 12 Teams have .500 records league-wide. Basically, we have no idea who's good yet. |
Well, that didn't exactly go well.
Last week, we noted how the lines appeared to be shrinking, and posited that lower lines would help favorites cover easier. This did not turn out to be entirely true. The lines were lower, yes, and favorites did win the week 7-5-1, but two of those wins and the push came from lines that were at least five points. The small lines favored the underdogs, as all five dogs that won against the spread ended up winning outright (New York Giants, Tampa Bay, Minnesota, Dallas, and Kansas City). Both of us picked all five of those teams to lose against the spread.
This week is back to big lines. Nine of the fifteen games this weekend have spreads of a touchdown or higher, including one road favorite giving 7.5 points (Seattle on Monday night against Washington).
The lesson we've learned so far this year is parity. The only undefeated teams through four weeks don't even have four wins - it's the 3-0 Bengals and the 3-0 Cardinals - thanks to a bye week. 12 of the 32 teams are exactly 2-2 (four more are either 2-1 or 1-2 following byes this past week), and only Jacksonville and Oakland have yet to win a game. If anybody can beat anybody, that seems to reinforce the idea of "when in doubt, take the points" which we both stupidly went away from last week and paid the price (see the bottom of the post for last week's records).
Underdog Update:
Last Week: 5-7-1
Season: 33-27-1
Home Dogs Last Week: 3-1
Home Dogs; Season: 8-7
Game(s) of The Week:
Houston @ Dallas (1 p.m. Sunday, CBS)
The matchup of surprise 3-1 teams in Texas! Chances are one of these teams secretly sucks and it's our hope that we'll figure out who that is this week so we can start betting against them with more confidence.
