Three gift-wrapped picks for the NFL’s Week 16

For those of you who don’t care how we come to our predictions, you will find the picks at the top of these posts for the rest of the season. The explanations for them are below. Enjoy!

The BSN picks of the week:

Chicago Bears +3.5 vs. Washington Redskins

New Orleans -3 vs. Tampa Bay Buccaneers

Jacksonville Jaguars +5 vs. Tennessee Titans

It’s time to get back to it in another jam-packed week of NFL action. The suggested spreads from our two metrics – YPP and EW – this week are, as usual, full of surprises.

First and foremost EW has continued to be right on top of the Vegas line makers with an amazing 10 spreads within less than 2 points and 14 out of 16 spreads within 2 points or less.

While YPP offers up four games with differentials of 5 points or more. As EW’s slim margins have been hard to go off of we’re sticking with our bread and butter, letting YPP make our three selections all with differentials over 5 points.

Since it’s Christmas every week here at BSN ATS, this week is extra special, so without further ado here’s our gift to you in the form of three picks.

BSN ATS’ picks of the week

Chicago Bears +3.5

We’re back at it again betting on the Bears after they mustered the magnificent comeback to cover against the Green Bay Packers this past week.

In truth, the Bears have been highly ranked in YPP for quite a while and with an uptick in play defensively and Matt Barkley’s steady presence at quarterback things have begun to turn around in Chicago. That’s not to say that this Bears team is anything special as their 3-11 record shows, but they’re 7-7 against the spread on the year and they’re tied for third with the Redskins in YPP.

This will be a tough game, Chicago keeps playing hard while the Skins just had a dud of a game against the Carolina Panthers and are now on the outside looking in with slim hopes remaining for a playoff berth. How they react psychologically will be very important.

From an X’s and O’s standpoint, the Redskins second-ranked passing attack will have a tough test from the Bears sixth-ranked pass defense, which should prove crucial as Washington’s struggled to run the ball recently.

The Redskins are also trending downward something that gets lost in the shuffle behind their prolific passing totals. They’ve lost three of their last four games and have only won three games in the last eight played, far from impressive.

We’re banking on these two teams trending in opposite directions to continue.

New Orleans Saints -3

Speaking of trending, what direction are the Saints trending in now? they’ve come off two terrible losses in which they combined for 24 points and then lit up the scoreboard this past Sunday in Arizona against the Cardinals to the tune of 48 points.

Drew Brees and the passing game got their groove back looking like themselves and reminding us that they’re still the second highest scoring offense in football and third-ranked per YPP – where they rank ninth overall.

New Orleans will face off against a Buccaneers team that finally lost after having won five in a row, in a tough six-point defeat to the Dallas Cowboys. The Bucs showed some impressive defensive chops this past Sunday and throughout their run but offensively they’ve been maddeningly inconsistent and impossible to predict.

Which will give us a nice matchup of offense vs defense. Two weeks ago in Tampa, the Bucs were able to win an ugly defensive battle 16-11. With the Saints on their home turf now we expect things to play out closer to what the numbers predict. Our suggested spread in this game has the Saints as 8 point favorites with the Bucs still ranking in the bottom half per YPP – 29th in the NFL – despite their recent surge in play.

In New Orleans, we expect things to be different and for the offensive inconsistency from Tampa to affect them too much to overcome the Saints prolific offense.

Jacksonville Jaguars +5

Yes, I’m aware this seems crazy, especially against a Tennessee Titans team that appears to have figured things out and has been on a really nice run lately. But we have to as our YPP suggested spread is all-in on the Jaguars having them as outright favorites in this game by 1 point for a full 6 point differential from the actual spread.

Mind you these teams haven’t performed all that differently against the spread this year as both are 6-8 a huge contrast from their vastly dissimilar records.

The Titans have won very few games by large margins, in fact, they’ve won by an average of just over 3 points in this most recent three-game win streak. They’ve only won three games all year by more than a touchdown and are exactly the type of ground and pound, meat and potatoes, team that the Jaguars have been able to play tight this season – Jacksonville’s matched up well against run first defensive minded teams like the Houston Texans, Buffalo Bills, and Kansas City Chiefs among others.

There are however two big concerns; first and foremost is how the Jacksonville locker room will react to the firing of Gus Bradley, will it be a weight lifted off their shoulders? will it be deflating? will they lose interest now? it’s hard to say. But given the pressure of fighting for your coaches job during a losing season, I’m guessing it’s a relief and Doug Marrone is a solid interim coach. The other concern is that last time around when these two teams played the Titans won 36-22. A game that wasn’t even that close as Tennessee was up 36-8 to start the fourth quarter, with the Jags coming out absolutely flat.

With their pride on the line and at home we expect Jacksonville to put up a fight and try to spoil the Titans playoff hopes – another phycological factor worth considering is how tight the Titans young team gets considering the pressure of trying to win a divisional title.

Numbers, news, and notes

As mentioned in the intro we had four games this week with YPP differentials over 5 points and we picked three of those, the fourth was the New England Patriots -16.5 vs the New York Jets. Incredibly the numbers are in disagreement despite the massive spread. I was shocked to compile the numbers and find that EW actually has the Patriots as the preferred bet with a suggested spread of 18.5 a huge figure that we rarely see from these numbers. YPP, on the other hand, has the Pats as only 8.5 point favorites. It’s hard to say either way especially with Bryce Petty’s sample size at quarterback being very limited.

Another interesting note that you’ll observe below in our chart is that we have two games with EW and YPP in complete agreement on the suggested spreads; the Atlanta Falcons and Sand Diego Chargers lines. The Falcons are right on the spread so that’s not all that noteworthy aside from it showing that two completely different metrics based off of independent statistics agree 100-percent. The Chargers line of -6 is too high for both our numbers, with the Cleveland Browns being only 2 point underdogs. But with the return of Robert Griffin III it’s hard to project an accurate number for the Browns in this one, also with only a 4 point differential there’s just barely not enough there for us to pull the trigger or going to consider it.

As we do every week, below you’ll find our metrics with all our suggested spreads for Week 16. Enjoy.