THE BETTING FOOL
By a Man Who Should Know Better
Card of three, and for once every game on it came with weather: 18, 17 and 13 on the wind readings. Went 2-1. Put up $87.00, kept $16.21, and the bankroll moves $1,088.35 to $1,104.56.
The loser was the one I liked best and bet biggest. Miami at Cleveland, total of 34.5, wind at 17, my highest cover number of the week — and the Browns scored 31 all by themselves. Thirty-one points, on the lakefront, in a game the market thought might not reach thirty-five. Some Sundays the whole premise gets up and walks out of the building.
New England covered on Thursday and the Jets and Panthers scraped together 19 points on a 39.5, so I go home with sixteen dollars and my dignity mostly intact. That is what a good week looks like around here now.
Eighteen miles an hour, the loudest reading I have had on any game this year, and I cannot cash a nickel of it: this is a side, and sides in this column are decoration with a price tag. Tennessee will try to throw without Calvin Ridley and Bryce Oliver and will try to rush the passer without Arden Key. That gets me to New England by 6.9 against a board sitting on 6.5, four-tenths, 50.5 percent, same as it ever was.
A number of 34.5 is the house announcing it has already accounted for the weather. Ten years of Sundays say it accounts about a point and a half short every time. Seventeen on the wind in Cleveland, the Browns without David Njoku, and I land at 32.5 — two full points under, 53.1 percent, the strongest read on the sheet and the biggest ticket I write this week. Somebody is wrong about a game priced this small, and I like my side of it.
Thirteen in the Meadowlands, which for that particular wind tunnel counts as a mild afternoon. The Jets have Michael Carter II out and Garrett Wilson listed doubtful, and when the doubtful tag lands on a club's only genuine receiver I take the gloomy reading every time. My total is 38.2 against a 39.5 at 52.4 percent, and the comfort here is that neither of these outfits has shown me it could find forty points with a search party.
“Bet less than you brag, learn more than you lose, and never trust a tout who smiles too much.”
— The Betting Fool
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