Handicapping games for Week 1 is one of the hardest challenges any football fan has during the season. As the great Bob Seger wrote in his classic song “Night Moves”: “We are working on mysteries without any clues.” We use last season’s finish, the offseason moves the draft and the preseason to update our power rankings, and yet as Steve Markinen wrote this week for VSiN, divisional home underdogs are 16-6-1 SU and 19-4 ATS (82.6%) in Week 1 since '09.
Week 1, along with the entire month of September, is unpredictable because the coaches are dealing with the unknown and the unpredictability of their opponents. Every team plays its cards close to their vest during the summer months, as if they were Doyle Brunson playing no-limit poker.
Still, we must proceed along, using the information we have and applying some basic rules. These rules were first developed when I was working in the NFL trying to correctly evaluate Week 1’s opponent.
Rule No. 1: Then is then, now is now. What happened last year is not relevant.