Week One NFL Picks Review

Went 10-6 on my picks against the spread for week one, the kind of strong start that one hopes to have for the season. Here were the games I missed: Denver @ St. Louis, New York Jets @ Tennessee, Baltimore @ Tampa, Seattle @ Detroit, New Orleans @ Cleveland, and Minnesota @ Washington. I tend to believe that the Denver and Seattle misses were the result of good teams coming out and laying an egg. It happens. In fact, both of these teams did the same thing last year, Denver getting absolutely destroyed by Miami, and Seattle looking bad in a loss against Jacksonville with Matt Hasselbeck playing poorly.

In the case of Denver, Jake Plummer will have an occasional game like that one, but he's ultimately a pretty solid quarterback to have, and the calls for Jay Cutler are ridiculous. Their run game looked good still, and that's the main thing they need for their offense to be successful.

Seattle had a lot of problems with their o-line, but I don't anticipate that to be an ongoing issue this season. They would have still covered if it wasn't for the two blocked field goals, or if they'd be able to punch it in just once. They beat an improved team on the road in week one; there's really no need to panic.

In the NYJ-Tennessee game I think I underestimated the impact of Tennessee's quarterback issues, and did not expect Chad Pennington to come out and play as well as he did. My opinion of the Jets definitely goes up with a healthy Pennington, but not much. They still beat a poor team that could of easily tied up the game in regulation and won it in overtime.

Baltimore beating Tampa is probably the week one result that is being most blown out of proportion. Yes, Baltimore's defense looked good, but do you really expect them to play that well all season? In addition, Tampa looked horrible on offense. Chris Simms looked like he had regressed after the progress he made last year, and they were playing without their starting guards, which effectively grounded their running game. My opinion of Tampa going into the game was not that high, as I do not expect them to return to the playoffs this year. I still view Baltimore as about a .500 team, give or take a game. I don't think they'll make the playoffs. Their defense will regress to the mean, and the holes in their offense will be exposed.

My opinion of Minnesota definitely increased with their game Monday night. I realize that they are a better team than I anticipated in my preseason review. That said, I still don't think they're great, and I'm willing to stand behind my preseason pick for them to be under 8 wins, based on the fact that there is no way that Brad Johnson stays healthy all season, and once he gets injured they're stuck with Brooks Bollinger or Tavaris Jackson. Not quite sure what to think about Washington. Minnesota didn't vastly outplay them, and they were in the game till the end. Their main issue was their offense; Mark Brunell didn't look very good at all. I think this is the quarterback controversy that the MSM is thus far ignoring. Brunell didn't have a flashy bad game, like Plummer or Drew Bledsoe or Brett Favre had. He just wasn't good. I think Jason Campbell ends up replacing him at some point this season, and that the offense ends up being better off for it.

New Orleans-Cleveland, I don't really have any thoughts on this game. Reggie Bush looked good, but the offense still wasn't good overall. The defense played well, but, well, it was the Cleveland Browns. Joe Jurevicius broke his ribs, and Braylon Edwards stunk, plus Reuben Droughns couldn't get anything going. Charlie Frye looked bad when he wasn't running the ball. Denver, Carolina, Oakland and Tampa were the only offenses worse in week one, according to Football Outsiders'VOA rankings. I'm not too worried about this result. I wasn't real confident going in, and that'll happen when you're picking every game.

I should have my week two picks up soon, either later tonight or sometime tomorrow, based on how much time I have. I'm still working the fair, and this weekend's supposed to be crazy busy. I'm not too worried. This is going to be a funky week for gamblers. Lots of crazy big spreads; I don't think I've ever seen five double-digit spreads in one week before. There were zero last week. I think these could be good games to exploit, just like last week when the two biggest spreads ended up going to the underdogs (Buffalo-NE, and Arizona-SF). Anyway, here's the week one breakdown on home/road, favorites/dogs, and inter-conference games. I'm going to track these through the season, and hopefully I'll be able to find some inefficiencies.

Home vs. Spread: 4-12. Good Lord. Sure looks like Week One home teams might be a little overvalued. Home teams just 5-11 overall!

Favorites vs. Spread: 5-11. This doesn't surprise me; because of the perceived lack of information going into the first week, oddsmakers are going to pad the spreads for the teams that people know, i.e. New England, Carolina, etc., because people are more willing to go with the teams they know. Vegas must make a killing in week one. 8-8 overall. That's a lot of underdogs winning outright. Would have been a good week to bet money lines.

NFC/AFC vs. Spread: 3-3. Sorry if that's a little confusing. This is the NFC record against the AFC against the spread. I'm interested to see how this shapes up throughout the season, because it says a lot about the perceived strength of the two conferences in comparison to each other. 3-3 overall.

In closing, I didn't get a chance to talk about this in this piece, but I told you so on the Raiders. Wow, that team looked bad. I wish I'd been there to laugh it up with Jerry Porter. And the Chargers looked real good. They'd be smart to open it up with Phillip Rivers. He looked ready, and you don't want to risk wearing out LDT by giving him 35 touches a game when you don't have to.