Enter the terror zone, analyzing our Week 15 picks

Winter is here, with all the dark and cold that comes with it. Christmas week doesn’t feel so warm and fuzzy in Denver, Colorado as the streets are icy with temperatures dipping below zero overnight. All this is felt that much more for football fans in the Mile High City as the Denver Broncos’ season is in trouble and our picks were affected by a dud of a loss to the New England Patriots.

On top of the local loss, our picks fell flat going 1-2-1 despite a 4-and-3 week from YPP – in our key 4 point or more differentials. Simply put it was a dark and cold weekend for your dedicated narrator.

From a numerical standpoint, things didn’t go much better with YPP going  5-8-1 overall in differentials of 1 point or more, and our EW metric went 3-7-1 with differentials of 1 points or more and 1-1-1 in games that the metric favored by more than 3 points.

The opportunities to have a winning week were there but we just couldn’t get it done. One silver lining is that we’re still in the winning on the year at 28-27-3. Below are our usual breakdowns of what happened to get us here an important exercise to get back on track.

The Rams interim’s aggressiveness ruins our bet

On a week in which we lost a few games by slim margins, sour grapes can be found everywhere, but no game was a bigger disappointment than this one.

The Los Angeles Rams had every chance to cover the 15.5 point spread in spite of it all playing with an interim head coach on a short week against the Seahawks in Seattle.

Forget that the Rams had an interception in the endzone that wasn’t called as such and lead to a wide open touchdown on the very next play, or that they had a wide open touchdown on 4th-and-goal that they couldn’t execute. What really hurts is that the Rams twice got into the red zone and decided to go for it on fourth down as opposed to taking the field goal. A key number because with those added six points the Seahawks would have won by 15, giving us the cover.

The Rams started off great driving down and looking poised to score a touchdown. Once they didn’t convert, the game was an uphill battle from there. There were so many chances for LA to keep it closer than this.

The Bears get the rollercoaster cover

This was a hard game to watch, particularly being invested in the Chicago Bears. They played so well early on and deserved better than a 10-10 tie at halftime. That wasn’t the case in the second half as they started off in the worst possible way with two consecutive turnovers and the Green Bay Packers capitalizing both times.

Furthermore, Aaron Rodgers’ calf injury didn’t seem to matter as he was making plays all over the field and even took off and ran on a few occasions. In truth if not for a few costly drops from Green Bay’s wideouts things could have gotten worse.

As the Packers found a rare long score from the running game – a 42-yard touchdown from Christine Michael – to put them up 27-10, things looked to have gone horribly wrong. But all was not lost as Chicago put together a fourth quarter for the ages and one of their best quarters of the season, scoring 17 unanswered to tie things up.

With 1:19 remaining Rodgers managed to get Green Bay downfield for a 32-yard field goal for the win with our +6.5 point cover in the money. The football gods smiled on us in this one and the Bears are finally looking like a competitive team in accordance with their YPP standings.

Denver’s lost the magic

In 2015 when they needed to make a play, the Broncos did. When their backs were against the wall, they found ways to pull off the win. When they faced the Patriots in the AFC Championship, they found a way to start fast the one time they truly needed to.

In 2016 it’s been a struggle to make those plays and that all came to a hedge this week as the Broncos had two costly turnovers that the Patriots capitalized on for 10 points.

When they got into the red zone they threw picks instead of crucial touchdowns. On big third downs they dropped the big pass instead of making the crucial play and in the trenches, they got out-muscled.

This wasn’t the 2015 battle of Tom Brady against the NFL’s best defense, this was a matchup of a complete team against a one-dimensional unit. Brady wasn’t his best but it didn’t matter as Denver was unable to make crucial plays on offense. The Broncos YPP score isn’t matching their actual production due to them losing the turnover battle and failing in the red zone.

Another tough game to swallow.

The Chargers can’t get over the hump 

As we predicted the Oakland Raiders continued to struggle offensively and given their identity as a high scoring explosive team, that seemed to be a major issue. Sunday despite scoring only 19 points they found a way to get the win on the road in San Diego.

The Chargers on their side played well defensively but didn’t have the great offensive output that we’ve come to expect from them this season.

The Bolts played some tough red zone defense managing to keep the score this close and had the lead by 6:14 in the third (16-13) and made a crucial goal line stop to keep things tied up with 8:38 remaining in the fourth quarter.

It should be said that the Chargers didn’t play well or deserve to still be this close in the game with Philip Rivers looking inaccurate and Oakland letting them hang around. But the Raiders defense, to their credit, played tough limiting the Chargers offense to less than 300 total yards and 14 first downs.

This comes out to a push for us so it’s not a loss but the disappointment and “what could have been” still remains.

YPP’s other two good calls

As we said YPP did well in differentials of 4 points or more (4-3-1), which means we left some good games on the table, though we did mention them in last week’s piece.

The one added loss was the Cincinnati Bengals who looked poised to upset the Pittsburgh Steelers. Ultimately the Pitt scored 15 unanswered to win by 4 points – the line was Pittsburgh by 3.

On the winning side, the Tennesee Titans pulled off a huge last second magical win in Arrowhead against the Kansas City Chiefs, while the Jacksonville Jaguars and Philadelphia Eagles both covered in close 1 point losses.

Below are our early suggested spreads for Week 16 using our original EW metric. Last week the numbers went 7-and-7 against the spread, we’ll have updated picks and all our other suggested spreads for you following soon.