The NFL season is a beautiful thing. You hear all the time that it's a week-to-week league and anything can happen on any given Sunday (they did make a movie about it, after all). With the nature of the seven-day turnaround, which can vary due to primetime games, every week offers us lessons to learn about individual players, each team and sometimes, the state of the league as a whole.
With any luck, these lessons offer us true insight while other times they can leave us scratching our heads. All we can do as fans and bettors of the game is absorb all the information and use it to shape our decisions in our own week-to-week entertainment when putting together our best NFL bets.
Here are five takeaways, lessons and questions from Week 9:
When you can sit back, let your QB throw for less than 200 yards, not score a TD via the air or the ground, and still blow out a likely playoff team by 30 points, you've got something dangerous come the postseason. The Baltimore Ravens did just that this past week against the Seahawks, before destroying the Lions just two weeks prior. The current top-seeded Chiefs haven't looked as good as Baltimore has all year, save for a 41-10 drubbing of the Chicago Bears, which isn't exactly a litmus test for playoff competition.
Baltimore is allowing the fewest points per game (13.8!!!), scoring 26.6 points per game (sixth-best in the NFL) while manufacturing one of the league's top rushing offenses across the board. It's your grandpa's football baby, using the run to open up the pass and it's working like a charm. The Ravens' remaining schedule isn't kind, with two upcoming back-to-back AFC North games, which is as competitive as it's ever been this year, before road games against the 49ers and Jaguars in Weeks 15+16. Our model projects the Ravens with a 17.5% probability to win the AFC, which actually comes with a slim edge against their +500 odds. Bet 'em now.
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