Your weekly dose of sports betting tips, analytics and humor, every Saturday at 10am Eastern.
NFL player prop – Once the top pick in the NFL draft, Baker Mayfield has played for four teams since the start of the 2021 season. The journeyman did land the starting QB role in Tampa Bay though.
Mayfield led Tampa Bay to a week 1 win over Minnesota, and he threw no interceptions. However, he often puts the ball in dangerous situations, a key predictor for future interceptions.
Bad ball rate is the sum of interceptions and passes defended divided by pass attempts, and Mayfield’s 13.3% rate since the start of the 2020 season is worse than the NFL average of 11.6%.
Despite no interceptions against Minnesota, he had a 14.7% bad ball rate. My model gives a 58% chance he throws an interception against Chicago, which suggests value in over 0.5 interceptions (+105 at DraftKings, although the price was +135 when members of The Power Rank received it on Friday).
New Orleans at Carolina, Monday Night Football – On The Pat Mayo Experience, professional bettor Rob Pizzola notes that Carolina’s 24-10 loss to Atlanta last week was deceiving. Carolina had more yards and better success rate but could not overcome -3 in turnover margin.
In addition, Rob does not like the offensive line of New Orleans, as Brian Burns and the Carolina defense will get pressure on QB Derek Carr. The spread favors the road team too much, and Rob likes Carolina +3 in the early Monday night game.
Follow Rob on Twitter for all of his insights and media appearances.
Miami (OH) at Cincinnati, College Football Week 3 – Bill Connelly of ESPN writes about five bets in his weekly college football column. This week, he wondered why Cincinnati went from -17 to -14 against Miami (OH). QB Emory Jones hurt? No.
Jones and RB Corey Kiner have been excellent this season, and Cincinnati has covered the spread by an average of 22 points this season. Bill’s numbers predict a 26.4 point win, and he likes Cincinnati -14.
For early quantitative college football predictions, Bill posts his numbers in this Google Sheet on Sunday for the next week’s games.
Unabated line – Based on polling sharp bettors, Unabated has determined the sharpest sports books in each sport. The Unabated line is a weighted average of these sharp books that seems to project market movement (see below).
Here are some interesting games for this week.
- Dallas -8.5 vs New York Jets. DraftKings has Dallas -9 as of Saturday morning, and other books were at -9.5 on Friday morning.
- Los Angeles Chargers -2.5 at Tennessee. Most sports books moved from -3 on Friday to -2.5 on Saturday morning. Sharp book Pinnacle is still at -3.
- Tennessee -5 at Florida. DraftKings and FanDuel still have -6.5 on Saturday morning.
Unabated has a host of software tools to help you win at sports betting.
College football humor – “This is his sixth season.” Teams knock on death’s door in a hilarious episode of SEC Shorts.
Smarter sports betting in less than 5 minutes
These nuggets were sent to The Power Rank’s email newsletter. This is a free service that strives to be:
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Other emails offer analysis of college football and NFL games that founder Ed Feng has bet.
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