Greetings, A2Z Sports readers! Apologies for the no article on Monday, I have been extremely under the weather, and to be honest, I am still feeling a little ill at the moment. For that reason, today’s article may be a little shorter, but I won’t know til I finish writing it, so I guess you’ll have to wait and see.
If you are new here, you should know that I have been making picks on the spreads and point totals (with occasional money lines) for every game this NFL season. Heading into week 10, my record was 144-133-5, netting +0.75 units overall.
In my Week 9 Recap last Wednesday, I showed a graph of my net winnings from week to week, and gave a prediction for how my picks would do in week 10. This season’s data has shown patterns of my picks doing well after poor weeks, and doing terrible after good weeks, so after going 10-17-1 last week, I thought we’d surely be in the green for week 10. In the end I wasn’t wrong, but I wasn’t right either.
As a reminder, here were my picks for week 10 (in red):
In total, I went 14-13-1 on the week. Now, to an inexperienced gambler, that may seem good, or in the “green” that I mentioned earlier, but as good as a positive record is, money/units is all that matters, and I went -0.36 in that department for the week. Now, if you take those -0.36 units and add it to my overall after week nine, it brings my net gain for the season to +0.39. Phew, we’re still positive, folks.
So, where did I go wrong this time? The obvious one, and by far by biggest loser of the year, are my New England Patriots. If you were to ask Chat GPT what betting with bias is, it would show you a photo of me circling the Pats’ spread in my red pen week after week, only to have them fail to cover 80% of the time. That’s right, the Pats are 2-8 against the spread in 2023, yet I still pick them each week in hopes that we’ll be better. We won’t, but I’ll still pick them brainlessly. That’s just how I was raised, I guess.
The next worst loser of the week for me were the New York Football Giants. Some minuscule, idiotic part of me convinced the rest of my brain that their matchup with the Cowboys would be a classic NFC East nailbiter. That was not the case at all, and I should have known after their 40-0 whomping in week one. In this case, I thought David could beat Goliath, but picking New York was like putting drunk goggles on David and still expecting him to put up a fight.
The last big losers of the week were the Bengals and Ravens, who not only failed to cover their spreads, but they also failed to win outright. The funny part about both of these games was that the Bengals and Ravens had their games in the bag, but both found ways to blow it. If Tyler Boyd were able to catch, in any capacity, Cincy would have won, and if the Ravens could’ve gotten one first down to run out the clock, they would’ve won as well. Baltimore was also practically gifted a win when Hopkins missed the extra pointer for the Browns, but somehow the Ravens still found a way to throw a win away. In the end, these losses will make a great hungry-dog matchup for tomorrow’s Thursday Night Football game.
That does it for today’s blog. It wasn’t as short as I thought it would be, but expect Friday’s piece to be a bit longer when I’m healthier. Check out A2ZSportsTakes on Twitter/X for our picks for tomorrow’s TNF matchup, and let me hear your thoughts on today’s article in the comments below!