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Hello my friends, thanks for reading my weekly write-up unveiling my picks for the next-to-last week of the 2017 NFL regular season.
Let me kick off the article by telling you more about my take on how to handicap games late in the season, and how it changes compared to mid-season weeks, for example. With only two games left, I believe it’s important to put more weight into the mindset of each team, and how motivated they will be for their upcoming game. Of course, whether the game has playoff implications for each team is important, but sometimes you can go beyond that.
Let me give you a few quick examples, and I’ll try not to get ahead of myself too much because I’ll come back to such concepts when presenting my picks later on. The San Francisco 49ers started the season 0-9 and they have therefore been out of playoff contention for a long time. However, I do think they are in a good mood and I would certainly not view them as a team that won’t care too much about the outcome of their final two matches (this one was for you, Fallopian Tuber). They are 3-0 since Jimmy Garoppolo took over as their starting quarterback, and he seems to have given them a boost of confidence and optimism. They feel like they are still playing for something, and I expect them to try to keep Garoppolo’s record intact.
Meanwhile, some teams just lost hope of reaching the postseason, and in some cases it might have happened on a heartbreaking loss. Take the Oakland Raiders, for instance. Their chances of making the playoffs were not very high prior to their meeting with the Cowboys last Sunday night, but they were crippled as soon as Derek Carr fumbled in the opponent’s endzone for a touchback on a late-game drive that appeared to be the winning drive. And that happened a few minutes after the now-infamous piece of paper first down measurement that led to the game-winning field goal for Dallas. Just think for a second about how the Raiders players are feeling right now. Probably not good.
Here is one more underrated reason to consider whether teams are still in the playoff hunt or not: referees. The impact of referees in NFL games is huge, and when a team who is eliminated faces a team fighting for its life, I strongly suspect that referees tend to give a little edge to the latter. They don’t want to be responsible for the exclusion of a team from the playoffs. Accordingly, you can expect a few more critical calls or non-calls to go against the team whose season is already over.
So those are the kind of things that I’m evaluating when handicapping this week’s slate of games. I’m also dropping significantly the importance of other situational factors that I used to talk in more details earlier this year. For example, playing a non-conference road game doesn’t appear like such a critical aspect. If a team is fighting for the playoffs, they will put out a great effort no matter if their opponent is from within their own conference or not. The same could be said of sandwich games. It may or may not matter. You really need to assess each factor on a case-by-case basis, in my humble opinion.
Ok so enough with the introduction, but I felt like it was important for me to expose the general framework that I use under the current conditions. I hope you found this little intro insightful and that it will help you win more money.
We had a second straight perfect record last week, as both picks and both leans hit, just like two weeks ago! So basically the last 8 picks+leans were correct, which is amazing! We are back above 60%, as was my goal, but I’m not necessarily going to play it safe for the rest of the year. Our updated record is 31-20-2 for a 60.8% success rate.
You’ll probably be happy to hear that I’ve got more picks than usual this weekend, as I’ve got four of them, and also two leans. Without further ado, let’s discuss these six games!
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