It was a good weekend for the underdogs in the NFL, meaning a good Sunday for online sportsbooks, as well as Vegas and Delaware.  But favorites are still slightly profitable after juice just betting them blindly.  But it was another bad week for competitive football.  There just haven’t been a lot of close NFL games.  Even when the dogs cover, they’re not dramatic games.   This weekend underdogs like the Vikings won by 12, the Panthers won by 13, and the Eagles cruised by 23.  Only 46 of 116 games this season have been decided by 7 points or less.   With over 60% of the games being decided by more than a TD, there’s far less drama in our lives on Sunday afternoons.

The Bills, called by one headline entering Sunday’s games the “Surging Bills”, had their two-game winning streak broken by the Texans on Sunday.   But the only they had done positively in their previous two games was cause turnovers.  The Bills have now been outgained 1278-667 in their last three games.  They’d been living on borrowed time and it caught up with them against Houston.   The Texans played a price, however.  Tight end Owen Daniels is out for the season with a torn ACL suffered in the second quarter. 

It is conceivable that a team has scored 30 points with only 104 yards of total offense at some point in the history of the NFL, but it’s possible that the Dolphins broke new ground on Sunday.  When a TD put Miami up 30-19 with 8:48 to go, coach Tony Sparano elected to go for 2 to make it a 13-point lead instead of 12.   Putting it at 12 eliminates a TD, two point conversion, and field goal tying you up.   Instead of admitting a boneheaded mistake, Sparano offered a non-explanation explanation that didn’t make an ounce of sense.   You have to figure that Bill Parcells, a master of in-game strategy, has a little talk about the issue with his underling this week.

This week’s Monday Night game between the Steelers and Broncos in Denver had an opening total of 38.5.   Every other game opened with a total in the 40’s or 50’s.   Looking at different metrics involving scoring, there’s not a huge explosion in scoring this season, with the exception of the Saints pushing 40 points per game.  There just aren’t any low scoring vs. low scoring matchups this week.

Nearly 68% of the offensive production in one game this weekend took place on the ground. The Jaguars/Titans game had 770 yards of total offense with 522 of those yards earned on running plays.    Maurice Jones-Drew had 80 and 79 yard TD runs for the Jags before Chris Johnson responded with 52 and 89 yard TD runs.   The 89 yard TD run was a backbreaker, breaking open the game on the first play of the fourth quarter.  It’s amazing how many of these long runs occur after a tackle is missed in the backfield.  The natural inclination of the defender is to ease up when they see a play being made and that is frequently their downfall. 

It’s valuable to know what bad teams will be trying down the stretch.   If the coaching staff looks on the way out things can get dicey, so keep an eye on the Raiders, Browns, and Bucs.  Other bad teams are building for the future with potentially good coaches, like the Lions and Rams, and effort is more likely.  Other teams you just don’t know.   Jim Mora doesn’t appear to trust his 2-5 team down the stretch, and is letting his charges know that positions are up for grabs.   Mora, the ultimate player’s coach (read: enabler) in Atlanta, lost his jobs after the Falcons went 2-7 both straight up and against the spread to close the 2006 season.

There’s a lot of talk about the dominance of favorites and the damage being done to the (poor) sportsbooks.  We’ll take a hard look at that later this week.   Thanks for reading this today.