Nurse the Hate: NFL 2015 Season Win Totals

 
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The German idea of schadenfreude is to take pleasure in other’s misfortune.  Our German tour manger and driver extraordinaire has demonstrated this idea in action as he takes so much more pleasure in terrible gig situations we find ourselves in than in triumphant ones.  He loves to see disaster and thanks to his influence, now so do I.  It is like a true gift from The Old Country, like a Swiss watch. It is for this reason that I enjoy betting against win totals in the NFL season.

The concept of the bet is simple.  Vegas sets an over/under total number of wins for a team.  All I need to do is correctly predict if the team will actually win more or les than that number.  With the NFL being a savage and violent game, it’s often prudent to bet against a team with thin depth as it can only help your chances as players are hauled away on gurneys.  While it might seem ghoulish at first to relish in a star running back losing all mobility in his legs, the feeling passes quickly when you realize a tidy profit.

The Buffalo Bills made headlines when they hired Rex Ryan.  It is odd for Buffalo to make headlines as most people only think of Buffalo when brutal snowstorms snuff the life out of the region or when a national news service pops in to get a comment from an ugly out of work laborer that is somehow convinced that his job that went to China will one day come back.  “Though he hasn’t worked for two years, he still has hope the plant will open up again one day soon… Back to you Connie.”

This is also the same guy that has season tickets to the Bills, a team that will reliably rip his heart out.  Vegas has the win total set at 8.5 for some unknown reason.  Most teams that are going to have winning records have two things.  1) A good quarterback and 2) a good coach.  The Bills have neither.  While Rex Ryan is entertaining as hell in a press conference, he doesn’t actually coach football very well.  As far as I can tell, the only difference between the shitty Jets teams he failed to win with and the shitty Bills teams he won’t win with are the uniforms.  He still doesn’t have a quarterback.  Go ahead and tell me what the difference is between Geno Smith and Ryan Fitzpatrick, or Eli Manual and Matt Cassel. I’ll take under .500 all day long…

Buffalo UNDER 8.5

I had to look twice when I saw the San Francisco 49ers at 7.5.  The only thing the 49ers of 2015 have in common with the team of two years ago is the gear and Colin Kaepernick, who may be suffering from blunt head trauma in deciding to stay.  From my vantage point, the owners ran off coach Jim Harbaugh for being far too successful and then proceeded to watch every quality player they had on defense do anything they had to do to get out of there.  They had three guys retire rather than have to play on the team this year.  Three of their five offensive linemen bailed out.  “Hey, do you want to make $1,000,000 playing football this year?”  Here?  Umm… No thanks.  I think I will try something else.  Is Amazon hiring?

The 49ers have to play Seattle/Arizona/St Louis twice next year.  They go 0-6 or at best 1-5 when Carson Palmer departs for his annual season ending injury.  So they go 8-2 on the rest of their schedule?  Against the AFC and NFC North?  I think the phrase “no fucking way” fits here, no matter how bluntly.  The 49ers will be a team that won’t even have their games televised by the end of November.  This is a team that should consider forfeiting 2015 and coming back in 2016 when they’ve had a chance to really think long and hard about what they’ve done.

San Francisco UNDER 7.5

I knew I was getting old not when I hurt my Achilles tendon doing nothing in particular.  It also wasn’t when I realized that in the same space of time as when Nirvana’s “Nevermind” album came out to today is the same as when Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” came out as to when I was a high school senior.  Ye Gods.  No, I realized I was old when I was the only one in a room that remembered the Washington Redskins being a reliably good football team. 

Robert Griffin III has a Gatorade commercial and a bunch of other endorsements, which is odd because he is one of the worst quarterbacks in professional sports.  It’s like me having a deal shucking The Apple Watch.  The Redskins have no chance to win with Griffin, as he has reliably proven over the last few years.  The team management runs player acquisition like ten year olds in a playground fantasy football league.  The only chance the Redskins appear to have this season is if they could play the 49ers and Giants every week. 

The win total in Washington is 6.5, which is preposterous.  The Redskins have won seven or more games once in the last six years.  They have won more than six games four times in the last 13 years.  The Redskins being crappy is something to depend on in Washington like corruption and white-collar crime.  Everything turns to dogshit as soon as it hits the nation’s capital.  Normal people immediately become pathological liars after spending more than 15 minutes in town.  Savvy gamblers will want to pray like hell that Griffin stays healthy for at least 10 games so they can settle in at a comfortable 3-7 for the stretch run with the illusionary Kirk Cousins at QB.

Washington UNDER 6.5