THE BETTING FOOL
By a Man Who Should Know Better
One and four. I'm not going to dress that up for you. $154.13 through the window, $91.70 of it gone for good, and the bankroll falls from $1,069.69 to $977.99 — below the thousand I sat down with in September, first time since opening weekend.
What eats at me is the conditions. Twenty in Orchard Park. Twenty on the lakefront in Cleveland. Seventeen in Pittsburgh, seventeen in the Meadowlands. That is the finest sheet of weather this schedule has handed me all season, the precise circumstance the whole rebuild was designed around, and I got one winner out of four attempts. Buffalo and Tampa Bay put 76 points on the board in a twenty-mile-an-hour wind. Seventy-six. I have been at this long enough to have seen most things twice and I do not have a sentence prepared for that one.
The cruel one was Baltimore at Cleveland: 39 points on a 37.5, a point and a half, one kneel-down anywhere in the fourth quarter and I'm writing a cheerier column. Then Houston went to Nashville on Thursday without C.J. Stroud and without its kicker and won by three while I laid five and a half. Here is where I land, and you can time me: I would place all four of those unders again Thursday morning at the same price for the same money. The reasoning didn't break. The weekend did. Ninety-one dollars insists those are the same thing. Ten years of games say they aren't, and I'm going with the ten years.
Houston plays Thursday night without C.J. Stroud and without Ka'imi Fairbairn, which is no starting quarterback and no kicker, and the model still wants me laying 5.5 on the road. That is what happens when the opponent is Tennessee with Xavier Woods gone from the back end and Bryce Oliver off the receiver list — the arithmetic doesn't care how the roster feels. Eight on the gauge in Nashville, which pays nothing on a side. Number comes back 5.8 against a market 5.5, 50.5 percent, and I run it because I told you in September I'd run one every week.
Twenty miles an hour in Orchard Park in the middle of November is the best set of circumstances anybody has offered me this year. Tampa Bay travels north without Chris Godwin, Bucky Irving and Haason Reddick; Buffalo is without Dalton Kincaid. The board gave the weather a point and a half of respect and quit at 46.5, and I have 44.3 — two full points, 53.3 percent, the biggest ticket on this week's card.
A second twenty on the same afternoon, this one blowing in off Lake Erie. Baltimore makes the drive without Marlon Humphrey, Rashod Bateman and Justice Hill — a corner, a receiver and a running back, which is a decent share of everything that makes a game move quickly. A 37.5 is already one of the smallest numbers you will see all year and I'm under it at 35.5, 53.1 percent. When two of these turn up in one weekend I bet them both and I don't ask permission.
Cincinnati arrives on Sunday night without Joe Burrow and without Trey Hendrickson — the best player it owns on each side of the ball — and somebody still hung a 48.5 on the game. Seventeen at Acrisure. Pittsburgh is short Alex Highsmith and Darius Slay and I am unbothered by it, because a substitute quarterback in that wind is not producing his half of a fifty-point evening against that defense. My sheet reads 46.5, two points under, 53.1 percent.
The Giants' injury page runs six names deep and includes Kayvon Thibodeaux, Darius Slayton and Evan Neal, while Green Bay may be crossing the Hudson without a healthy kicker in Brandon McManus. Monday night in the Meadowlands, wind at 17, market 41.5, model 39.6, 53 percent. That makes four unders in serious weather on a single card, more than this thing has ever asked of me in one week, and I can't find grounds to turn any of them down.
“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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