Our NFL picks against the spread for Week 3

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 using both metrics: (Our highest % at this early stage)

Jacksonville Jaguars +1 vs. Baltimore Ravens

Minnesota Vikings +7 at the Carolina Panthers

Kansas City Chiefs -3 vs. the New York Jets

Our pick of the week using only Expected Win Differential:

Oakland Raiders +1 at the Tennessee Titans

For additional YPP picks tune into the BSN Football Betting Podcast, where we’ll be looking at the YPP lines and providing some additional picks for the week. Below is an explanation of our picks with a full chart containing our suggested spread for each game below.

We’ve gone over our logic and math into getting these numbers previously, we’ve also analyzed how the numbers did in Week 2 and what teams might be overrated and underrated by our win total numbers. With all that in mind here’re our picks for Week 3.

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Our Picks of the week:

Minnesota Vikings +7

Minnesota, along with the New England Patriots, has been a team that beat the spread the last two weeks, which was predicted by this metric. The two teams are united in the common thread of quarterback uncertainty, but while the Patriots issues have only become more pronounced the Vikings got a splendid performance out of Sam Bradford last Sunday.

Minnesota’s defense has been lights out so far, performing at a top five level in the league. Carolina should be favored in this game, but a full touchdown is too much. Our suggested line of 5 points is the same as our YPP suggested line. Given the state of the Minnesota defense and how good their passing game looked, we’re riding the Vikings until they show us otherwise.

Kansas City Chiefs -3

The Chiefs have been disappointing against the spread so far, so making this call isn’t as easy as the Vikings, who’ve been straight up money makers. The matchup against the New York Jets is also a game of 2015 playoff contenders, but both our metrics like the Chiefs by quite a bit more than 3 at home.

Our YPP line is set at 10 in favor of KC, while our Vegas against the spread figures are set at 7.5 points for the Chiefs. Kansas City has been lacking that bite from the pass rush without Justin Houston and their offensive line will get a real test from the Jets’ defensive front. However, we’re counting on them finding their late season form from a season ago and start winning against the spread as well.

Jacksonville Jaguars +1

On paper, you can understand why the 2-0 Baltimore Ravens are slight favorites to the lowly Jaguars. But even with a fairly conservative number of 7.5 wins for the Jags and a rather ambitious 8.5 from Baltimore, the line should still favor the Floridians by 1 at home. YPP likes them even more, having Jacksonville as 4.5 points favorite.

It’s easy to be down on the Jags after a tough away loss in San Diego. But that’s a big thing you see in young teams is a variance in performance home and away. We’re counting on Jacksonville playing at their best back home.

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Explaining our pick using Expected Win Differential:

Oakland Raiders +1

When putting together our numbers for the week, I saw this line and had to do a double-take. Was it just too late Monday night? Is that minus supposed to be a plus? As the dust settled, so has this line with the Tennessee Titans remaining 1-point favorites at home. We’ll talk Thursday about how this is the one line YPP doesn’t agree with, which is why it’s our pick of the week for this metric and not added to the other picks.

That’s what’s nice about this metric; you can simply see how skewed perception is two weeks into the season compared to the preseason win totals. Oakland’s number was set at 8.5 wins for the year, while the Titans had their number set at 6. That’s a 5-point difference on a neutral field with the Raiders being favored by 2 in our suggested spread.

I’m not sure either of these teams has done anything to sway perception this far. This feels like a classic overreaction to the Titans winning late and Oakland falling on its face against the Atlanta Falcons. The Raiders feel like a solid pick this week.

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Worth noting:

Los Angeles Rams +5

This is another line both of our metrics favor. YPP has the Rams as only a half point underdog while our EWD metric has them giving 3-points. The difference isn’t huge but it does seem like Tampa is getting a number that has climbed from 4.5 to 5. This early, it’s still unclear who the Rams are and how much of a crutch their offense truly is. We want to see at least another game from them before we’re comfortable.

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The stay-aways:

It’s time to look beyond the numbers and try to use some sound judgment when analyzing this week’s numbers. We’ve quickly gone from the spread being very much in line with the win total figures to there being massive differentials this week.

In our Week 3 lines, there are four spreads with a slim differential of 0.5 and only one more with a differential of 1. That’s quite a few large differences from our numbers and the previously established win totals by Vegas. But there’s a reason for that, so caution is essential with some of these. Here are three particularly risky teams to gamble on either way.

The Seattle Seahawks are once again getting a large spread (9.5) and our numbers suggest it should be larger, with our line at 13.5. Yet Seattle’s done nothing in the first two weeks to suggest such large differentials are warranted, even against the overmatched San Francisco 49ers, so we suggest caution here.

A team we’ve spoken about quite a bit and not in a positive light is the Indianapolis Colts. Our metric suggests an 8 point advantage against the San Diego Chargers, compared to the 2.5 points given in the actual line. I’m not sure I’d take the 2.5 at this point, as it’s just hard to know what to expect from Indianapolis. That’s not to say we love the Bolts on the road, either. Just avoid this.

Despite surprising everyone and covering their first two lines, the New England Patriots are now down to their third-string quarterback. This line has moved all over; it started off at 2.5 for Houston Monday night, went to even by Tuesday and was at 1 for Houston by Tuesday evening. Vegas doesn’t know what to make of the quarterback situation, and New England’s been so good with Garropolo that it’s hard to go against them. Please stay away.

OUR EWD CHART