2016 continued… You can’t win all the time but!
Week 9
We found two games this week: Dallas Cowboys vs Cleveland Browns and Kansas City Chiefs vs Jacksonville Jaguars. This could have been such a short paragraph. We loved the Cowboys over Cleveland as they were on a roll and what could you say about them that hadn’t been said already last year. We also loved the Kansas City Chiefs at home (6-2) against the Jacksonville Jaguars (2-6). We watched the week before on Thursday night football when the Tennessee Titans destroyed the Jaguars at home (36-22) and saw how dreadful they really looked. We also watched Kansas City beat Indy on the road (30-14) with Nick Foles in as quarterback as Andy Reid had the Chiefs rocking. Going into the KC/Jacksonville game, KC was 7 point favorites and had four significant players missing due to injuries but we still loved KC at home. The first time KC had the ball, WR Jeremy Macklin suffered a groin injury and was out for the game. In the third quarter, their TE got suspended and they even managed to fumble on the goal line going in for a score. It was agony watching both games in Vegas and seeing the Cowboys coast to an easy win and KC winning by 5. We should have had this game on the money line or simply go with the Cowboys! No one is perfect but very few admit it. We are at 4-1.
Week 10
We thought we found the game. It was one of those games where you sit back and think that this will be a walk in the park. New England coming off a bye week was at home vs the Seattle Seahawks. The team was well rested, on a roll and should have no problem with the Seahawks. It was one of those games where you think how much rather than if. I compare this game to the lyrics of a famous Billy Joel songs “even the good die young”. It was a bad night for NE. Bad match up, bad game plan… just a bad day. It does happen in the NFL. A final thought on this game will always be that on any given day one team can beat another. However, over the course of a 16 week season in which we only consider the last 12 games at the end of the day, given all the information that we have, the laws of average say that the best team will win. We are now 4-2.
Week 11
We loved this game a month ago. The Houston Texans were playing in Mexico City against the Oakland Raiders on a Monday night. Oakland were on a roll. Thousands of fans were flying from the coast and at 8-2 Oakland was certainly a better team and our choice to win. We liked this game so much that we made the wager Monday the week before when the opening odds came out. With Houston having no QB but a solid defense it turned out to be a good game with a final score being 27-20 to Oakland. We had the money line and game outright. We’re 5-2.
Week 12
A great week in pro football. A week when we have teams fighting for a playoff, looking down the road at the rest of the season and a bunch of teams floundering. We saw Jacksonville throughout the year and at 2-9 they were traveling up to Buffalo to play the Bills who were at 6-5. Their RB for the Bills, LeSean McCoy, was back and knew by watching both teams and listening Rex Ryan all year long praising his injured team, that this would be an easy game for the Bills who were still in at home and Jacksonville was simply a lost team at the time playing out the schedule as early as this weekend. We took the money line as we had Buffalo as the far better team but not by two touchdowns better as indicated by the spread. It is just as important to know how to place a wager on a team as it is to pick winners. 6-2 – quite happy. Next up: The last four weeks of the regular season.