Three underdogs highlight our Week 14 NFL picks

For those of you who don’t care how we come to our predictions, and trust us with our 26-23-2 record on the year, 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:

New Orleans Saints +2.5 at Tampa Bay Buccaneers

New York Giants +3 vs. Dallas Cowboys

Buffalo Bills +2 vs. Pittsburgh Steelers

We’re back at it again for another week of NFL games after a fantastic Week 13 that took us to 26-23-2 on the year against the spread. Week 13 was an important turning point as our metrics lead us to a true revelation as EW has been exactly in line with the actual Vegas spreads. After having only two games with differentials over 1.5 last week we have only two games this week with differentials over 2 points and only four with differentials over 1.5. That’s nothing folks, in football betting that’s the slimmest of margins.

So with that in mind, we’ve used EW to find out what’s out of whack and use it as a tool to advise us on which YPP games to pick and which be weary of.

With all that we offer up three picks this week, two based off of our YPP suggested spread with differentials in the 5 point range – we again dipped into the pool of 4.5 point differentials – staying with our preferred differentials there. While we’re also offering up an EW pick of the week something we couldn’t do in Week 13 but can  now with a consensus pick that finds the numbers in agreement, for once.

As the season’s heated up and the sample size of data has become more reliable we also have an extensive notes section below explaining and looking at some of the interesting outliers that we’ve found this week, beyond our three picks.

BSN ATS’ picks of the week

New Orleans Saints +2.5

Talk about two teams who’ve gone in absolutely opposite directions the last few weeks. A month ago this line might have been Saints -7, but with the Bucs winning four games in a row as Jameis Winston and Mike Evans coming alive with the defense playing much better, its Tampa who’s the favorite in this one at their house.

This is why YPP is great, because even though we’re fully aware of how good Tampa’s played lately – especially defensively -we’re able to look at it from a more holistic view, one in which New Orleans is the seventh best team per YPP and Tampa is still only 29th. This is in large part because the offense for the Bucs isn’t consistently putting up points, while the Saints keep losing close games.

This 2.5 point spread seems heavily influenced by the Saints poor showing this past week against the Detroit Lions a game in which they put up yards but lost the turnover battle and couldn’t get into the end zone. So we’re expecting a bounce back from the black and gold who have the league’s most prolific passing attack and the second highest scoring offense in the NFL.

Also, the Saints have just lost too many close affairs and are bound to bounce back some, this is a better team than their 5-7 record would suggest and we like them to stop the Bucs momentum in this divisional battle.

Even if on the road our YPP suggested spread of -2 per the Saints is telling for a full 4.5 point differential from the actual line.

This is a show-me game for the Bucs to see if this trend is real and how much we should truly adjust our metrics for them. The Saints are a tough out for anyone and have proved it all year long. We trust Drew Brees and crew to pull this one off.

New York Giants +3

Yes, we’re going against the Cowboys once again, as we won our bet last week going against the Boys in another divisional battle it’s time to give this another try. The Minnesota Vikings tough defense kept Dallas in check last week holding them to only 17 points, while this week it’ll be the Giants offense who need to leave their mark in this one for our pick to work out.

YPP has this spread as Giants -2 for a full 5 point differential from the actual spread. New York holds a positive YPP number at 0.2, good for 12th in the NFL, while the Cowboys are tenth.

Meaning that even though the Cowboys record gives them a three-game lead on the G-men the differences between these two opponents isn’t so noticeable when we dig deeper into the stats

This matchup could play out similarly to the Washington Redskins game against the Cowboys two weeks ago on thanksgiving, a game in which the Skins struggled to run vs Dallas’ fine run defense but did throw it for over 400 yards. Eli Manning and Big Blue’s passing attack will need to have a similar type of output. While defensively New York’s fifth-ranked run defense will have to show up big and a front line group that’s been productive with 27 sacks on the year – 13th best in the NFL – will also have to make an impact.

So in the spirit of “styles make fights” we like how New York matches up in this game, it’s also a hugely important game for the Giants in this final stretch and they’re divisional rivals who actually beat Dallas Week 1.

With the spread so small we’ll need an outright win by the Giants barring any missed extra points or safeties that’ll skew the final score. We believe enough in this underdog Giants team even when considering that.

Our EW pick of the week

Buffalo Bills +2

Just thinking about Buffalo in December should give you chills, as that’s simply not the type of road game you look forward to. Cold weather aside, this is a game of strength against strength, with the Bills top ten passing defense against the Steelers vaunted passing attack, and a Pitt run ‘D’ that’s sixth in the NFL against the Bills league-leading ground game. One way or another something will have to give in this one no matter what.

What’s interesting, from an analytics standpoint is that EW favors Buffalo in this game by a point for a 3 point differential which is much more significant to us than it would be up YPP where we try to go after 5 points or higher. That’s telling considering that Buffalo isn’t a big dog per EW despite having a 6-6 record to the Steelers 7-5. Per EW both these teams are good units and this should be a great game.

Ideally, we’d like for this line to jump to -3 for the Steelers before we jump on it, but you can’t have everything in life. With EW being so close to the actual spreads these past two weeks and having such good results even with slim differentials we‘re riding with those numbers and seeing where they take us.

The Bills looked poised for a big upset last week in Oakland and then allowed the late comeback to win big. With them playing every game they’ve been in extremely close this season we like the home team.

Numbers, news, and notes

As teased in the intro, at times the numbers are most useful in correcting each other, something we saw last week when EW avoided us from making two bad picks that YPP was in favor of.

This week there’s even less consensus amongst our two metrics with the Bills pick being the only truly consensus pick in the week, which is part of why we made them our selection for EW.

But there are some interesting cases where the numbers diverge. One particularly interesting cases is the Washington Redskins and Philadelphia Eagles who are a pick’ em game. EW really likes the home team Eagles with a 5 point differential, while YPP is all in on the Redskins having them -2.5 on the road. That’s a significant divergence that we rarely see, which would explain why the line is even in the actual spread as well. The eye test would suggest the Redskins on the road but we’re far from confident. Though that’s certainly an anomaly for us this season.

As far as news on the week goes, one consensus pick that we don’t feel confident pulling the trigger on is the New York Jets as +2.5 dogs on the road at the San Francisco 49ers. Forget that they’re traveling all the way out west, but they’ll be playing with Bryce Petty as their quarterback. If we take the Jets performance last time when Petty started their offensive output drops them from 20th per YPP to tied for 30th. That’s too much of a drop off offensively, though with the 9ers in free fall that Jets ‘D’ might just have enough juice to get it done. But with all that uncertainty we’re staying put.

As we do every week below you’ll find our metrics with all our suggested spreads for Week 14. Notice again the staggering similarity between our EW suggested spreads and the actual lines.