Angles hits inboxes on Thursday mornings throughout the regular season; you can also find Angles in The Scroll on Thursday afternoons.
OWS Fam!!!
Happy Thursday…and how is it Week 7 already?!
Sixty-seven percent. That’s the number to remember this week. We’ve completed six weeks of NFL football this season, which serves as a mere 33% of the total weeks on the schedule. As much as the injuries are piling up, and the action-packed slates behind us feel like they happened long ago, we are still looking at 67% of the season ahead of us (not counting playoff weeks). Whether you’ve had success, or are still knocking on the door, your best weeks are almost certainly still ahead of you.
Around the Week 5(ish) timeframe is when many DFS players start to fade. When NFL teams played 16 games, it was simple to break the season into quarters. Now that the season consists of 17 games, it’s a bit more difficult, but Week 5 is the historical breakpoint after “quarter 1”, and is a time when we all transition into a new stage of the season. If you think about the variables in each quarter, our motivation and excitement will vary dramatically between each.
Prior to Week 1 kickoff, we typically reach peak excitement for not only watching NFL football again and building lineups, but also for learning about the stories that will greet us for the next four months. We learn, react, decide what to do with small samples of information, and keep on keeping on. Then we get a few more weeks into the season, the sample sizes grow a bit more significant, and we all feel more comfortable with what we are seeing and tracking (e.g., “this team is good,” “this player stinks,” “what this coach is doing,” etc.).
If you’re following along, then Week 7 throws us into roughly the middle of the second quarter of the season. By now, even the best of content providers are facing some attrition. It’s not as exciting as the first few weeks, but these middle quarters are among the weeks (4/5-12) where staying engaged, motivated, and trusting your process takes hold. Depending on what tournaments you play weekly, you’ll always find yourself losing to people who have a little bit of luck, but over a longer sample, we trust in our ability to analyze the games through unique angles, sift through the useless, and non-useless NFL news cycles, navigate the seemingly never-ending injuries (and now trades!), and build lineups that can win.
Translation :: Fight the urge to feel overwhelmed this week. There’s a lot going on in the NFL streets, but staying consistent in your approach, learning more each week, and tinkering with the process will lead to success.
(I wrote a short course on OWS called Predicting the Present, which anchors on navigating this overwhelming feeling by sticking to your current knowledge. It costs just $9 or 19 Edge Points. It takes 30 minutes or less to read. Your move.)
Favorites went 12-2 against the spread in Week 6, with the Browns and Commanders the only underdogs to cover. Of course, the week that I write about visioning a one-game sample through a season-long lens (embracing variance), this is the outcome. However, I don’t bring this up to whine, but rather to mention how important this fact will be for analyzing games this week. Collectively, recency bias will lead us (and most of our competitors) toward a feeling of siding with the dominant, better teams in Week 7.
As for this Week 7 Sunday slate, we have just two teams on bye this week: Chicago and Dallas. Missing either of these teams doesn’t do much for me (does it do anything for you?). Similarly, we have an injury-riddled, non-exciting (sorry!) Denver / New Orleans Thursday night matchup, an early Sunday in London with the Patriots and Jags, the juggernaut of the NFL news cycles, the Jets, and Steelers on Sunday night, and two Monday night matchups which actually do deprive us from some elite offenses in the Ravens and Buccaneers, along with the Chargers and Cardinals. For those tracking at home, this is a slate where you may only feel like you are missing Lamar Jackson, Derrick Henry, Caleb Williams, and Baker Mayfield doubles.
What we do have is a 10-gamer on tap, with as many as five games expected to climb over 47 combined points, and one team in particular, the Washington Commanders, sporting the largest single game implied total on the season at 29.5! This slate also features the Super Bowl LVIII rematch between the undefeated Chiefs and the 49ers, a game which (not as you’d expect) somehow is coming in as the fifth-highest scoring game on the slate. I already love Week 7.
Game totals are not everything, and sometimes can be misleading, but there seems to be a distinct delineation this week on the must-have games and the underwhelming ones, with five games expected above 47, and five games below 43.5. Again, just a data nugget, but an interesting one. Let’s start with the five at the top:
Carolina (21.5) at Washington (29.5): The Panthers have seemingly rolled over in multiple weeks this season, but they did put up 60 points combined in Weeks 3 and 4 against the Raiders’ and Bengals’ defenses. We kind of know what to expect from the Commanders offense this week, as the Carolina defense doesn’t seem to offer much resistance, so the fulcrum here is how the Panthers can do vs. Dan Quinn’s Washington D. They ceded 484 total yards to the Ravens offense just last week and now rank 30th in yards per play (just above Carolina). This game starts with Jayden Daniels, but it may really be about Andy Dalton.
Seattle (24.5) at Atlanta (27): I was close to typing the wrong totals for each team, which tells you that I fully expect both teams to have success on offense in this one. Kirk Cousins has left his Week 1 dud behind, throwing for 725 yards the past two weeks. He had the outlier 58-attempt night two Thursdays ago against Tampa Bay, but he’s been at 35 or less in the other four Falcons games. Seattle’s defense can be had on the ground, ranking fifth worst in rushing yards allowed, and interestingly enough, Seattle’s defense is third overall in pressure rate (barely behind Kansas City and Minnesota). Atlanta should want to run in this game, but if they fall behind in a game script, it could spell bad news for Cousins.
Detroit (24.5) at Minnesota (26): Jared Goff against the blitz. You’ll hear this many times this week…let’s just say it’s not his thing. Minnesota is undefeated and Detroit is riding a three-game winning streak, scoring over 40 points in each of its last two games. The Lions are now down star pass rusher Aidan Hutchinson, which helps Sam Darnold and Justin Jefferson. Jefferson, in particular, has averaged 134 receiving yards and eight catches in his eight career games against Detroit. AVERAGED. The Lions are high-flying at the moment, and the spread is begging us to take them with the points, but understand there’s a wide range of outcomes in this divisional matchup.
Houston (22.5) at Green Bay (25): This game feels the most straightforward of this “top five” so far. Two offenses settled into their schemes, coping with injuries, with quarterbacks who get the ball downfield, with Stroud and Love ranking in the top six in air yards per completion (Love is fourth, Stroud sixth). Tank Dell, Stefon Diggs, and Joe Mixon made up for the void of Nico Collins last week. Can they repeat the performance? The Packers have put up at least 24 points in every Love start this season, and while the Texans’ defense seems strong on paper, they also rank T-2 in the NFL in passing touchdowns allowed through six games.
Kansas City (23) at San Francisco (24.5): The Fighting Patrick Mahomes traveling to Santa Clara in a Super Bowl rematch that will be a great watch. The public wanted to be out on the Chiefs in their Monday Night Football matchup with the Saints, but New Orleans threw a wrench in that. Now the sentiment is yet again, don’t bet against Mahomes and Andy Reid. My bold prediction this week: One of the Chiefs or Vikings will lose. If the 49ers can sustain their health and do so on their seventh-round QB and third-string running back, we’ll all likely be singing their praises as NFC front-runners yet again. Super Bowl 58 ended 25-22 in overtime with muted offensive performances. The Chiefs’ defense has played like a top-three unit all season.
Among the other five games, some wrap-up thoughts…Buffalo will be expected to roll over Tennessee, but the Titans’ defense has been their (only?) strength this season // Cleveland has played Cincinnati well recently, and this version of the Browns doesn’t inspire confidence // Dolphins and Colts would be way more fun with Tua and Richardson, and we may get Richardson back, but it’s tough to expect fireworks // It’s Saquon Barkley revenge week, but if Philadelphia loses to the Giants, IMO they may be looking for a new head coach and that may be the biggest storyline // Do the post-Davante Adams Raiders get a new-WR-room bounce in L.A., and is the Rams’ 25-point implied total an anticipation of getting Cooper Kupp back?
There are always questions. There are always answers. Favorites dominated last week, but this is a fresh slate, with unrelated outcomes on tap.
Get out to the site this weekend, build those lineups in the Bink Machine, jump into Discord if you aren’t there already, and we will see you at the top of the leaderboards on Sunday!
~Larejo
