Week 7 sides and totals
Plus a recap of a tough Week 6
There are always ebbs and flows in betting, and Week 6 was a wild one. At one point in the early Sunday games, I thought it looked like a good shot for a 3-1 start on the four bets. It wound up 1-3, and the one that won was the San Francisco-Atlanta under that I had written off as a loss after those teams scored 35 points in the first half. I wasn’t checking the live lines closely, but all four bets flipped where my mental live lines had moved.
The afternoon miss was similar, where Carolina’s whole offensive plan was ridiculously conservative, and that was a miss by me, but there was still a pretty solid shot for the game to go over until Jacob Eason threw an interception in the end zone on a late first-and-goal to end the last scoring threat. Live to play another down and give yourself a few shots at that garbage time TD, young fella!
The 1-4 week moves us to 18-16-1 for the season in this column. (I previously missed one of my Week 1 bets and have been leaving it off my running total, but finally cross-checked with our official tracker this week to get that lined up, so if you happen to have noticed that, my bad.)
For a season that has been pretty universally regarded as higher variance than anything we’ve seen in a long time, I’m still happy with where we are. Coming into this week, a full three-quarters of the NFL sat between 2-4 and 4-2, with just eight teams outside those marks.
Let’s get to the Week 7 bets. It’s a tough week with a lot of intriguing matchups. I only have three plays here, but might add one or two tomorrow morning in the Discord.
All plus bets are to win one unit and all minus bets are risk to win one unit, unless otherwise stated in the writeup.
Detroit Lions at Dallas Cowboys
Bet: Under 49 (-107, PointsBet)
This game is incredibly intriguing. I really like the way both teams have played, and the Cowboys will welcome Dak Prescott back, while the Lions will get Amon-Ra St. Brown in a full role coming off the bye after he played just 32% of the snaps in Week 5. In something of a surprise, Saturday night reports indicated the Lions won’t have D’Andre Swift. Dallas has performed admirably without Prescott, and their defense is legit, but the Lions are also better than their 1-4 record.
Apart from who is in and who is out, this game is intriguing on the total. Detroit’s first four games this year featured more total points than any other teams’ in NFL history, before they lost 29-0 in New England in Week 5. Dallas meanwhile hadn’t played a game that reached 40 combined points until their loss to the Eagles in Week 6, and that game hit just 43.
As a rule of thumb, the team that wins typically dictates the way the game is played. Dallas has been competitive due to a strong defense, and their -7.2% Pass Rate Over Expected makes them the fifth most run-heavy team in the league. The over/under seems to argue that with Prescott back, Dallas’ pass tendencies will shift substantially. As home favorites of nearly a touchdown, and in Prescott’s first game, that might be a faulty assumption.
Detroit’s pace and fourth-down aggressiveness masks that they, too, can sometimes be very run heavy (-3.3% PROE this season). This matchup, and Dallas’s pass defense, dictates it. I like the under.