Week 7 sides and totals
Plus this week's Underdog winner, and a Week 6 recap
Let’s start with this week’s $100 Underdog winner, and that goes to Sam Wagman. Congrats! That will be deposited directly into your UD account.
For anyone who hasn’t signed up yet, sign up at this form one time this season and you’ll be entered into our weekly $100 giveaways all year long. And we’ll definitely keep the Underdog Pick ‘Ems coming; we’ve had several near misses lately, but me and the guys hit big on Ship Chasing this week. Partnership with Underdog aside, the pick ‘ems are an absolute blast.
(I suppose I should mention if you’re signing up for the first time, we do have a promo code “STEALINGLINES” for a deposit match, but truly I’m talking these up more as a degenerate who really enjoys them than a promoter.)
Week 6 recap
It was a boring Week 6 on sides and totals, going 3-3 on the six picks. I went with only one over/under, but that did miss, because I’ll never win another of those again. The Commanders and Falcons had 27 first-half points, and were up to 40 by the early part of the fourth quarter (when a failed 2-point conversion would have put us in position for a push at worst), but Atlanta took a later delay of game penalty at the 2-yard line, and threw an interception in the end zone, helping to keep the game under the 42 to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Similarly, the Chargers’ moneyline pick for Monday Night Football was an annoying late sweat, where Justin Herbert missed some huge opportunities in a game some observers called his worst ever, and L.A. still very much had a chance to win but couldn’t get it done in a 3-point loss.
The week brought us to 13-25 on the season, and 12-8 on sides and moneylines versus 1-17 on totals. It’s almost comical to write that out. My favorite part is the last couple totals I’ve been close to pulling the trigger on but not made official picks have been hits. Because of course.
I recently wrote a bit about this in an introduction to one of my Stealing Signals fantasy writeups, but it’s sort of hilarious in a dark way that my read to hammer unders in Week 2 has actually proven to be pretty accurate, with Week 2 and it’s 4-12 record on unders being the main exception. Even with Week 2’s scoring outburst, to this point in the season the average team is scoring slightly fewer points per game than 2022’s offensive apocalypse. I’ve unfortunately been chasing my tail on those trends after getting snakebitten Week 2, and spent the ensuing weeks with a bias toward overs that wasn’t correct, either. Here’s how I wrote that up in Signals while talking about how you can get yourself in and — in this case — out of position analytically.
One of the ways this has manifested is with over/under picks I’ve made over at Stealing Lines. After the scoring issues in Week 1, I took a bunch of unders in Week 2, and then overs went like 12-4 that week and I got wrecked. And I legitimately bought into Week 2 as the rebound, so in the time since, I’ve had a bias toward picking overs, as I’ve seen the scoring environment more favorably. But I was late to that trend, such that it was a thing at all — people getting into overs for Week 2, after the average game total dropped by almost two full points from Week 1 to Week 2, would have been ahead of the curve, and then perhaps able to recognize when it was time to get back onto a bias to the under.
I know this because I’ve been there before — I recognized the elevated scoring environment early in 2020, and did very well betting overs that year. And last year, I pivoted to a bias to unders at an early juncture to some success (although the market always pivots, as well, and over/unders fell quickly last year; the key is you have to be ahead of the trend and not behind it).
This isn’t to say I should have dug my heels in on my initial analysis, or even that my initial analysis was correct, because at this point I do not have a high degree of confidence in where we’re at with the scoring environment. We have some real QB issues around the league. I do think some scheme things have shifted, where it’s felt like offenses have been able to adjust to the rolling coverages and post-snap defensive changes, but I don’t really know the specifics well enough to comment, and it’s clear in some cases the answers aren’t all there (Derek Carr for example highlighted miscommunication in reacting to post-snap defensive adjustments for some of the Saints’ issues in his presser this week).
The broader point is a lesson in how reactionary analysis often makes you wrong regardless. What I don’t want to do now is start hammering unders again, like I did in Week 2.
The broader idea of that introduction was how being ahead of trends also puts you in position to be ahead of the next shift, because you’re seeing things clearly from a value perspective. With perfect hindsight, my response to Week 2’s debacle should have been to keep hammering unders, trusting my initial analysis. But man is that difficult when you run as terrible as we did that week. It feels impossible to have expected that, and at the time would have surely felt like the ultimate martingale.
And yet, as it turns out, the worse response was to chase the trends. After Week 1’s debacle, if you chased unders, you got wrecked in Week 2. After Week 2’s overs smashed, if you chased overs, you’ve gotten wrecked since.
At the same time, an analysis that claims this is as simple as “you gotta zig when others zag” is definitely faulty. There’s a clear trend here overall; unders have been hitting, and scoring is down again. In 2022, the average team scored 21.9 points per game, after that number was at 23.0 in 2021, and 24.8 in 2020. It had been between 22.0 and 23.5 in 9 of the 10 years between 2010-2019, and there’s a general trend of scoring rising over time in the NFL, so dropping down below 22.0 was very notable.
This year, in Week 1, the average team scored 20.5 points. That skyrocketed to 24.9 in Week 2. But then it was back to 22.1 in Week 3, and 21.8 in Week 4, and 22.5 in Week 5. If the takeaway is always to zig when trends zag, the move would have been to have a bias toward the over after the Week 3-5 stretch, during which teams averaged 22.1 points per game, only 0.2 higher than 2022’s debacle. And yet, in the face of that, Week 6 did what I’d hoped Week 2 would, which was take that trend even further — last week’s scoring environment was one of the worst in years, with teams averaging just 18.4 points per game.
I think the correct hindsight analysis is first that we don’t usually get such clear shifts in league-wide scoring from week to week, and second that it’s made for a tough environment on overs and unders here early in 2023, particularly for someone like me who is keeping an eye on macro trends to determine whether to be biased toward overs or unders. Over the past couple years, I’ve found success studying leaguewide trends and getting ahead of what the scoring environment is in a macro sense. This year, I’ve had to question that theory, even though — it’s worth noting — my takeaway after Week 1 that there was truly a scoring issue that was going to last well into the season, did prove accurate. Ultimately, there’s just too much potential for weekly variance on these things, and like I wrote in the quoted piece above, it can throw you off and get you out of position analytically in a way that can carry over across weeks.
Here in Week 7, the lines are down again across the board, and while I want nothing to do with overs and unders, I do have a couple to play, though I don’t in any way feel confident in that market. But there are key offensive injuries in several spots, and we have some very questionable QB matchups with backups taking over.
There’s also a big-picture trend with spreads, where they are a lot closer than usual, with a few nice matchups of the league’s better teams, and then a lot of matchups of teams that we’re still kind of unsure who they even are. With six teams on bye and a short slate, it’s a light card this week.
Let’s get to the Week 7 picks. As always, all minus bets are bet to win 1 unit, all plus bets are risk 1 unit.
Washington Commanders at New York Giants
Pick: WAS -2.5, -118 (FanDuel)
Pick: Over 37.5, +100 (Caesars)
Hopefully you got the -2.5 number at -110 over at PointsBet when I put this in Discord yesterday, but I wanted to throw it in the writeup today because you can still get it over at FanDuel at -118, while it’s at -3 basically everywhere else. That’s obviously a huge half point in a game with a low total that could come down to a field goal.
I like Washington in this one because of the Giants’ offensive line injuries up front. It’s not yet clear who will be under center for the Giants, but both Daniel Jones and Tyrod Taylor take a lot of sacks traditionally, and Washington’s front should be able to take advantage of a Giants’ offensive line that has already ruled out its starting LT and C, as well as a depth tackle, and then starting RT Evan Neal is questionable and I’ve seen stuff from beats that has suggested he’s not a good bet to go. In other words, the Giants could be without three tackles, and are without two for sure, where the third one might not be 100% if he does play.
The reason this line hasn’t shifted massively is concerns about Washington, and to be fair Sam Howell is eating more sacks than any QB in the league, so it’s a little odd to be wary of that specific point just on New York’s side. But Howell plays a high-variance style and Washington’s offense has found more success than the Giants’ overall this year, averaging 4.9 yards per play despite the high Howell sack rate (New York is last in the league at 4.1).
Taylor might actually be a positive jolt for the Giants — their offense finished with its second-strongest total yardage output in the loss at Buffalo he quarterbacked last week, and he pushed the ball down the field way more than Jones has, which could be a problem for this Washington secondary — but I generally think Washington is just the better team in this matchup, and then think the massive line advantage they’ll have when New York has the ball will ultimately decide the game. Taylor might hit for a few deep shots, but Washington’s front should help the secondary, and stifle drives. And I like backing the erratic Howell experience here, both for points overall, and for Washington to cover.