Week 1 is always a tough week to bet because we have zero actual football played to draw any conclusions from so either you bet on the teams perceived are better or bet against those perceptions. For me, Week 1 couldn’t have gone much better and starting off the season winning 5 of 6 is of course reason to celebrate.

Week 1: 5-1

Season ATS: 5-1

Week 1 Results.

What Went Right:

Basically everything.

Starting with Sea @ Stl, this game played out like basically each of the games these 2 teams have played the last 2 years in St. Louis with Rams D dominating the line of scrimmage. The 31 points scored by Seattle is a little misleading as they scored 14 of their points on a punt return and a fumble return,  The Rams Def line led by Donald dominated with 6 sacks, 7 TFL’s and 9 QB hits.

The TB-Ten game was over by the end of the 1Q as Mariotta and Winston had polar opposite starts to their career, Mariotta through 4 TD passes in the 1st half while Winston had his first career pass picked and returned for a TD. The major takeaway from TB might be the play of their pass defense. It certainly didn’t look like their were any improvements for the Bucs as TB gave up 10.3 yards per pass attempt, last season they were 25th in that metric giving up 7.2 per att for the season and were 27th in passer rating against.

The Indy Bills game went exactly the way Bills and Under better would have hoped with the Bills defense dominating the game. The Bills held Luck and the Colts to 4.7 yard/pass att (Indy avgd 7.2 last year) and Luck to a passer rating of 63.6. On offense Tyrod Taylor played an efficient and smart game completing 14 of 19 attempts for 195 yds adding 46 more on the ground. If Taylor can protect the ball and they can be strong team on the ground, with this defense, Bills will be very strong under team going forward.

The NYG-Dal game will be remembered for the incredible lack of clock management by Coughlin and Manning, allowing the Cowboys to come back and win the game. In terms of Giants +7 it was never really in doubt but much of the reason why was turnovers. Dal had 3 turnover which led to 17 Giant points, minus the turnovers Dallas dominated this game outgaining the Giants 436 yards to 289. One place Dallas did not play well was in the run game, in the first game post Demarco Murray, Dallas managed only 3.5 yards per rush.

Mia- Was: Jarvis Landry’s punt return. 2 Kirk Cousin interceptions. That was it for that game.

What went wrong

In the Mia-Was write up I wrote about how I knew this was a bad bet (85% of bets on Mia) and I shouldn’t have made it, well, even though I won the game I know that write up was right. Miami’s issues vs the run from last year certainly continued into this year as Was ran the ball an amazing 37 times for 161 yards and chewed up a lot of clock limiting Mia to only 22 mins of possession. Was outgained Mia 349 to 256 yards and led the 10-7 going into the 4th Q. The Was run game and Run defense looked very good in this game, while Mia should have better days going forward their run D looks to still be an issue even with addition of Suh.

The Jags are still the Jags. In a game that was played as even as you could hope for getting 3 points at home with 265 to 263 yards the Jags were the team that made the crucial mistakes. Jags turned over the ball 3 times vs 1 by the Panthers and one of those was returned for the game deciding TD.

Week 2 Leans

All of these games may not be on the final card but my initial leans are Giants, Bears, Browns, Eagles, Saints and Steelers