Nurse the Hate: 2017 NFL Win Total Bets

It’s time to get the old gambling machine running with the NFL season ready to start on Thursday.  This leads to one of my favorite bets of the year, the NFL annual win totals.  This bet is all about trying to figure out not necessarily what team is going to perform well/poorly.  It is really about trying to figure out who The Public has too much/too little faith in.  There is a large part of this country that thinks mainstream country music is kick ass, Outback Steakhouse is good food, and America Is being Made Great Again.  These same people also bet on football and move betting lines.  Let’s take advantage of this situation and Make America Great Again in our own little way, shall we?  Every time you win one of these bets, just think that you are probably getting paid directly from that guy in the Chevy ad in the man bun that refers to some display model as “a bad mama jamma”.  Fuck that guy.  Let’s take his money.

 

The Buffalo Bills are a team that gets about 46 seconds of national media coverage each season.  Most members of the NFL media probably have no idea how to get to Buffalo, so rely on wild rumors and popular opinion about the team.  The current line of thinking about the Bills is that they are tanking the season because they traded Sammie Watkins, their first round receiver pick a few years ago.  Sammie Watkins, who might have just hurt his foot stepping on a Lego and will be out 6-8 weeks, is one of those players that fans nationally think is really good but turns out is pretty average.  The Bills also have a very unsexy QB in Tyrod Taylor, who they thought about cutting loose but then kept because it turns out only 24 guys on the planet are good at playing QB in the NFL.  This has resulted in The Public believing that the Bills are fucking awful.  They aren’t.  They are OK.  They’re not good.  They’re OK.  And OK means you win more than six games.  Bills OVER SIX.

I picked the Bills over six in part because they get to play the New York Jets twice a year.  The Jets should be awe inspiringly bad this year.  McCown is going to start this year as the “Poor Man’s Ryan Fitzpatrick” because, as usual, the Jets blew their draft picks on terrible QBs.  McCown has no one to throw to, and no one will be blocking for him to give him time anyway.  He should be in traction by October.  That means Christian Hackenberg will show the entire world how badly he sucks.  By mid-November all the late night TV shows will have the word “Jets” as a substitute for “loser”.  I would imagine New York sports talk radio will be discussing cutting people’s heads off and putting them on stakes.  I already put money on the Browns over the Jets as a pick ‘em in week 5.  Old Chinese proverb:  If you can’t beat the Browns, who do you beat?  Jets UNDER 4.5 wins.

The Raiders were a team that was poised to make a run at the Super Bowl until Carr broke his leg at the end of the year.  They just seemed to always pull games out of their ass.  I looked it up, and it turns out they went 8-1 in one possession games.  The NFL is very cruel in this regard.  Things regress back to the mean with bone chilling regularity.  If a team gets really lucky one year, the worm will turn on them the next.  Toss in the fun of playing a lame duck season prior to moving to Vegas in front of angry people dressed like skeletons, and that is a big distraction.  The Vegas line has these guys at 10 wins.  I am strongly advising Raiders UNDER 10 wins.