Best Championship Week Bets
Last week was my worst week since we’ve put out picks in Stealing Lines. Losing over nine units in one week is never fun, but that’s part of the game.
What felt like a very unique edge in betting heavy on the Chiefs last week completely flipped on its head when Mahomes left the game briefly with a high ankle sprain. Not only did that completely mess up the following bets:
Mahomes most passing yards
Chiefs most points scored
Chiefs -20.5
But when the Jaguars elected to kick a FG with 30 seconds left to cut the lead to seven, it shredded our spread as well. It was one of those things where you’re already down badly because of the injury and just hoping to escape with a moral victory of beating the spread, but Doug Pederson had it out for us.
Going heavy on the Eagles weirdly proved to not be the move. In a blowout fashion, Sanders got benched and Gainwell ended up outrushing him to become the leader of the week. Because of the one-sided game, Hurts wasn’t asked to throw or run much so we lost those. Just to add on to it, AJ Brown got hurt and didn’t play much in the second half.
It was one of those weeks where it actually felt a lot better than what the results were and the process did feel strong going into the game I can pretty confidently say we had some bad runouts in these scenarios.
Hopefully, this is a great reminder of why bankroll management and risk tolerance are very important in betting. These weeks WILL happen over the course of a year regardless of how confident we are heading into a specific week. At the end of the day, we’re just making educated guesses on what we believe certain results will be.
The only thing we can do is bounce back and continue to place bets where we feel we have an edge.
So with that being said let’s have a bounce-back
week!
Bets for the Week
Christian McCaffery over 13.5 rushing attempts -109 (Betrivers/Barstool)
-105 if you have PointsBet.
This was the first time I think all year in which we had bet against a player and then completely flipped the stance in the same week.
We had hit CMC under 14.5 rushing attempts at -105 back when Shanahan proclaimed both CMC and Elijah Mitchell were playing.
Since then Mitchell has not practiced once and the 49ers brought up Tevin Coleman up off the practice squad - a big indicator Mitchell will be out.
Here are some interesting McCaffery rushing splits with/without Elijah Mitchell this year:
This is the main reason why I completely flipped stance. We also technically have an opportunity to win both bets if he ends with exactly 14 carries.
The Eagles are 21st in Rush D DVOA this year while being 1st in Pass D DVOA so assuming that game script doesn’t get completely out of control that McCaffery gets the work needed to hit this over.
Risk 1.09 units to win 1 unit
Play to -120