Conference Championships

Looking back at my posts I had:
Wild Card: SEA (-3) over WAS
Divisional: GB (-8) over SEA and SD (+10.5) over IND
THIS WEEK'S SPREAD PICK: Conference: 1 pick this week
Perfect Record in the 2007 playoffs so far...



NYG @ Green Bay Packers

This Sunday, the favorite (by -7) young guys at Green Bay face a hopeful Giants team for the NFC Championship. The Vegas line posted on Monday has remained steady at -7, although some sites have raised the odds from 110 to up to 130. Many bettors (about 65% according to covers.com) are favoring the Packers and some sites predict that the line will move half a point before Sunday.

What will the Giants have to do to beat the Packers? Stop Ryan Grant, pressure Favre all day, and get a great game from all its key players including: Manning, Jacobs, and Burress. The weather will be close to 5 degrees fahrenheit which might favor the Giants to cover, still the odds of keeping the Packers withing 7 points are small. In cold it is easier to run, so keeping Grant from running more than 100 yards will be key, can they do that? They have to stop the fast offense. Green Bay can go so fast from one side of the field to the other it's scary. The Packers have scored more than 30 points in 10 games this season, that's 59% of the games.

In the past 4 weeks, my model has predicted the opposite of what has seemed to be the favorite bet. In the wild card, the model went against the majority of the experts by picking San Diego over Washington and San Diego's cover over the Colts. Now, the most popular bet is Green Bay. Against a team with the Giants' strength, my predictive model predicts:

Packers -7 but unfortunately, it goes along with a big trend, so I would think about this pick twice.

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Be careful with this game, it seems to be very volatile meaning luck will play a bigger role than past performance. Many players are injured and it is very hard to predict the influence this will have on the San Diego offense. Be even more careful of people using "trends" to predict this game. For example, New England's ATS mark in the past 8 games or San Diego's perfect ATS record in the past 8 games. There is little statistical (but some authors claim they have) evidence that once a team covers many games in a row, it is least likely it will again. Therefore if anything, these trends would lead me to conclude that it is time San Diego will fail to cover and the Patriots' will.

My NFL predictor has New England falling a bit short of 14, but this uses data from the past 10 weeks. This data is useless since it would assume all players, or at least key players, will play this week. Not bet this week: if I were investing in NFL spreads, I would put my money on Green Bay and keep this game out.

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