It’s official. I’m crowning Ezekiel Elliott as the 2022 King of First Touchdowns. He scored first AGAIN in Week 17 (+350 at DraftKings), upping his totals to eight team-firsts and five game-firsts. Not only that, he’s also scored first for Dallas in three straight and five of their last seven games. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if sportsbooks made him even money to score first this week when the Cowboys take on the Commanders with a lot on the line for Big D. They still have a chance to win the NFC East and should not be taking it easy against a division foe. They gotta feed Zeke!
Unfortunately for us first-TD bettors though, outside of Elliott and a few others, we had lots of longshots scoring first this week. At DraftKings, only four players had odds shorter than +1300 actually find the end zone first. But we did see our system of sticking to the better team at scoring first stay true for the most part. Only five games saw major upsets where the significantly worse team at scoring first did so. I’ll get to some Week 18 mismatches in a moment.
A few other observations from Week 17:
Despite a somewhat slow start to the season (by his standards), Najee Harris has been coming on strong in the back half of the season. It wasn’t the first of the game this week when the Steelers faced the Ravens, but he scored the first Pittsburgh TD, and he’s now found the end zone first for his team in five of their last seven games, upping his season total to seven team-firsts. I hope they sneak into the playoffs so we can keep betting on Najee.
The Ravens still have not scored their first touchdown with the same person more than twice. This past week, Isaiah Likely (+3000) added his name to their list of two-time scorers as they played the Steelers. As I suggested last week, if you want to bet a Raven, just look at the tracker and pick somebody they haven’t gone to twice before. Although we may be running out of players soon! I was able to cash in on him last week because my book offered “any other Raven,” and luckily, Likely wasn’t among the field of specific player options.