- Green Bay Packers (-3) @ Kansas City Chiefs
- San Francisco 49ners (-5) vs. Carolina Panthers (fair value is -4)
(The lines provided above are good as of 11:49pm on Sunday 10/20/2019.)
Welcome back to the MoneyLine Blog! If your back, hopefully you are back with all smiles!
After a fairly successful Week 7, we are back. For entertainment purposes, if you went with any of our picks of the week you went 2 for 3. If you were brave enough to add our honorable mentions picks you had a damn good weekend going adding an extra two wins to your total and went 4 for 5. Hopefully you were also able to get a little something extra on the side with our bonus picks on the Rams winning the first half over the Falcons. In addition to that, we hope you capitalized on the 2nd half total of the Rams vs Falcons being more than the first half total in that game. Now it's all in the past. Lets get down to business for week 8.
The early bird gets the worm and if you have access to early lines, you may be looking for an advantage to start the week. At this point, we have 2 plays that we felt comfortable on.
Green Bay Packers (-3) @ Kansas City Chiefs
The Packers squeaked out a win last week with the help of the refs in the 4th quarter. In the NFL a win is a win. The Packers went into week 7 with a lackluster receiving core as it was basically the Aaron Rodgers show as he blasted through the Raiders tossing 6 TD passes. Remember how the Packers boasted that defense in the first two games and it looked like Green Bay would lean on their D for the season (no pun)? Welp, in the last 3 weeks heading into week 7, Green Bay was the 9th worst defense in the league allowing a startling 26.7 points a game. Luckily for them, over the same period of time, they have averaged 28 points leaving them top 10 in the league in scoring offense (6th ranked). This all helps them as they head to Arrowhead to face the Chiefs.
The Chiefs will be without Pat Mahomes in this matchup. That is a big blow this offense as Mahomes is seen to be worth about 7 points to the spread as reported by The Score. Usually when a team is at home, they play better than on the road. With this being said, it’s a complete surprise that the Chiefs usually win by an average of 15 points on the road over 3 games while they at home by an average of 2.7 points at home over 3 games. Now that they are starting Matt Moore, who was also preparing to be a high school football coach this year as reported by the LA Times we should expect these numbers to drop. Before Moore took over for Mahomes on October 17th, the last NFL action he saw was Week 12 of the 2017 season with the Miami Dolphins. Moore, 35, did not play in the NFL season and when he took over for Mahomes, he led the offense to 10 points while the defense picked up an extra 7 over 2.5 quarters. Although the touchdown pass he threw up was a bit of a fluke, it still counts, but it was clear that the Kansas City offense had stalled without it’s MVP.
The spread opened up on October 18th at -3 with Green Bay as a favorite heading to Arrowhead. For entertainment purposes we liked the -3 on Friday. Although our charts read a fair value of -1, we felt that the value could be inflated if the Packers won and beat the spread against Oakland. Before the game started, some “sharp” folks took action on Kansas City’s +3 and drove the value of the Packers to the fair number of -1. With this being side if we liked -3 on Friday, we loved -1 on Saturday. Sure enough after the big victory against Oakland, the spread is back up to -3. Although we haven’t crunched the new numbers on Green Bay as of yet, we believe that -3 for the Packers is extremely fair and in some cases without Mahomes, a steal.
San Francisco 49ners (-5) vs. Carolina Panthers
After watching San Francisco put up 9 points in a DMV (District/Maryland/Virginia) mini flood against the Redskins, we are left to wonder what may happen when the Panthers come to town, right? Hopefully not. The 49ners gave up 0 points, and although they did not cover the spread, they did assert their dominance in the nastiest of weather that we’ve seen this season. A 1pm start for a west coast team, on the east coast, feels like 10 am. So, between jetlag and a 10am mental start, the argument could be made that the 49ners did a hell of a job in their performance. Whatever the case maybe, lets run some numbers.
At the time of this article, the 49ners are tied at 6-0 for the best record in the league with the Patriots. They usually win their home games on an average of about 16 points a game but they win on the road by an average of 17 points. Clearly the 49ners will take you to the moon and beat you if they needed to. However, Carolina has a winning margin on the road of an average of 11.7 points a game while having a losing average of 2.7 points per game at home, go figure. According to a few of our models, we were getting mixed results, but the fairest of values that we saw for this game was at about 4 to 8 points for the is game in favor of the 49ners.
When this line originally opened up, we bought in at a half a unit at -4.5 points in favor of the 49ners. After this 9-0 victory against Washington, we saw the line move an extra half point towards -5. For entertainment purposes, we believe that -5 is the end of the line for the 49ners and wouldn’t recommend anything higher than this. Since this is week 8, the information that line makers have are strengthened as sample size expands. Since the start of the season, line makers have been giving up more than they would like since the majority of bettors have been hitting their mark this year. Regardless, the 49ners was the 2nd best thing we saw in terms of proper value.
Check back with us midweek for our regular NFL Week 8 analysis. Maybe we will have some first half/second half plays for you as well as an extra game or two that shows some value. Best of luck.
-The MoneyLine Blog