Week 7 Reflections

ICYM the first article in this series, this is the loose outline and goal of the Weekly Reflections.

I want to take this space every week to write down my process and reflections for what I call: “Football Profit Process” aka everything I’ve tried to predict and profit from the week prior. But given that I bet futures, spreads, props, and play DFS, I “bet” taking into consideration the prices from all these different markets. And unlike most “reviews” or “reflections” articles that stick to their one aisle, I want to take this space to articulate how my theses and convictions on teams and players manifest in different markets. I hope this will allow me to share my ideas and process so we can all improve and better set ourselves up for “football profit” in the long run.

General Thoughts & Trends:

I’m not so sure we learned that much new this week, so I imagine this will be our shortest reflection piece of the year.

Trends:

LV:

• Derek Carr has always thrown a wonderful deep ball(ADOT of 20+), but only over the last couple of years — and especially this year — have the Raiders let him unleash it.(see below!) And quietly, the Raiders have emerged as one of the league’s best and most explosive offenses, 10th in yds/play and 2nd in explosive plays.

• Despite change in attack and its success, most power rankings have the Raiders as a bottom tier team heading into week 8. And according to Ben Baldwin’s Market Derived Team Tiers, the Raiders are 1 point worse than average on a neutral field, 19th in the NFL. I guess I’m bullish on the Raiders moving forward viewing them in the 10–15 tier.

CAR:

• Key stat: Through week 4, CAR was 3rd in the NFL in ED success rate, they now sit at 25th. Schematically, CAR relies on early success to set up 3rd and short — staying conservative and marching down the field to score points. Without ED success, this team offense is toast. The 3–0 start was fun, and they baited me a few times into betting on them. But I will be staying away for the foreseeable future. Perhaps I will revisit once CMC is back and if he can help CAR re-discover their ED success — so crucial to their offensive success.

NE:

• NE is really starting to creep up in my offensive rankings. They are 7th in ED success rate and 1st in explosive play rate. Not to mention they are PFF’s 6th best offense and Rookie QB’s also tend to get better as the season rolls along. The market ranks the Pats, like the Raiders, as a below average team. I will be buying.

Bets:

1. CIN O 21 +130 (2U)

Who says reflections don’t lead to obvious future profits!?

• For those new to Cover 3, we have been closely watching the Bengals this year. We bet on them in DFS in week 1. In week 2 we spoke about how many criticisms heaped upon Joe Burrow — especially his deep ball — were really an AJ Green issue in disguise. With Chase in the fold, this offense was going to be explosive and far better than last year. This was my strong prior(which of course has only strengthened). But early in the season, I was concerned about their run pass ratios as they adopted an extremely run-heavy approach. In week 5 I wrote this: “After starting the season in weeks 1–3 by running the ball the most in the league in neutral situations, the Bengals the last 2 weeks have begun to throw more often — 7th in the NFL in weeks 4 and 5… But considering how well Burrow has played, should this trend of throwing more often continue, I think CIN will be a good spot to bet in a few weeks time. “

• The trends we’ve been identifying for weeks came together perfectly in this spot. And the Alt Team Total was the perfect market for these trends. Why? This was a narrow bet on trends we’ve just recapped and culminated with: ) 1) the Bengals offense is better than market expectations 2) the Ravens defense being worse than market expectations. And the market had CIN with the 9th lowest team total at 19.75, a tad lower than the NYG who were facing a solid CAR D without any of their skill players. Why bet on any derivative like a game total or ML when you can bet the exact trends straight on and add a little extra juice between key numbers?

• Reflection: It is one thing to identify trends and being right on those is obviously important for betting success. But perhaps as important is knowing 1) The spots to capitalize on long term trends and 2) the market to capitalize. I’m very happy I landed on this spot in this market, and literally, CAPITAL(IZED).

2. KC-4.5–110

• Oh boy. If you want to know why I made this bet, I wrote a whole long thing about it. I still stand by it even though the Chiefs very obviously got dominated. While I’ve been selling the Titans, with convincing wins over KC and BUF, it’s time to take this team seriously.

3. TB ML+Over 47+117

• This bet was working in tandem with my DFS play for the week. I thought this was the spot for the Bears offense to finally break out(I go into more below), and we know TB will score lots and lots of points. If CHI didn’t score 3+Td’s to get me the DFS glory, I thought TB would do its part to carry the total up, and win the game as the far superior team.

  Reflection: I remembered why I don’t like betting game totals very often. Too much variance.

4. IND alt line -2.5+190

• I really wish I had a way to quantify using publicly available data why I think Kyle Shanahan is the most overrated coach in football. Sure, he is a run design genius but that’s about it. And run design doesn’t win football games in 2021…. And that’s likely a reason he’s only 33–40 as a HC.

• Despite SF’s lack of recent success — well probably because of the Shanahan narrative — the market prior is so so high on SF(equally rating SF and CIN as of this writing ) and this drives their price up. But I don’t think SF is better than IND and the Team Tiers below reflects that sentiment. (RBSDM). In a game between teams roughly even(with a slight lean towards IND) I thought IND was great value at +190.

DFS:

• I rolled with 2 lineups this weekend, both game stacks: ATL @ MIA and CHI @ TB. While I thought the stars aligned for Fields, considering he has had no success in the NFL so far, I was not ready to allocate all my bankroll to his lineup. And besides, I thought the ATL/MIA environment was a sneaky great spot. Let’s dive in!

MIA/ATL lineup:

• We had some of the crucial ingredients of a good DFS game environment in this spot: volume, condensed target shares. And I was going to target these passing attacks that have positive pass rates above expected(PROE), and both defenses which have high PROE against.

• On the ATL side, it was fair to assume Pitts+Ridley would combine for close to 50% of the targets in a game Ryan would pass 35+ times. Not only would volume be on their side, but these are two efficient pass-catchers and the Dolphins defense is allowing the 5th most yds/play and highest explosive play rate against. For MIA, the targets would flow through Gesicki and Waddle, and Tua had a decent rushing floor to boast, making him my preferred QB of the 2. While I could have added Waddle to this stack, I preferred getting myself up to the massive upside of Tyreek Hill in what I thought might be his best spot of the season.

• With AB out, we knew Tyler Johnson would see the field a bunch and he’s been a productive WR whenever he has played, and well, he’s catching passes from TB12. At stone minimum I liked his chances of putting a good price-considered score. Not to mention, this left me with exposure to all 3 of the TB WR’s (see next lineup) in a spot where TB would have no issues moving the ball through the air.

• For Henderson, he has elite usage in terms of snaps, redzone opportunities, passing game usage, and this was as good a spot as can be vs DET and their putrid run D as 17 point favorites. And this made Swift the perfect bring back as we knew he would get many targets, with some rushing points sprinkled in and red zone opportunities as well.

CHI/TB lineup:

This is what I wrote last week:

• I think Mooney was my thinnest play of this year in DFS and I knew it coming into the game. This was a game with a low projected score, low play volume, and the Bears have barely thrown the ball. But there was still an angle where the Bears would have to finally unleash Fields — especially if the Packers jumped out to a lead — and Mooney was seeing a 26% target share with a downfield role and ADOT of 10.2. If Fields was forced to throw, Mooney would see high value targets against a bad D. It was still a thin play in my view, since there were too many things that needed to go right for Mooney to see good opportunity.

• Reflection post-facto: I got bailed out by a late TD, but I did not love the play. But sneak peek: I love love this spot for Mooney against TB next week for all the reasons laid out above. Only this time vs TB the Bears will have to throw. Maybe this is the spot for the Fields+Mooney+Arob stack?

• Fields looked fine the past 3 weeks and this was going to be the “make or break’’ game for Fields. With how cheap these 3 guys were they didn’t need so much to go right to put up elite price considered scores. And the spot couldn’t be better. TB forces highest PROE, they score points at will, putting opposing teams in passing game scripts and their secondary isn’t particularly good. I didn’t think it was too far a stretch for Fields to finally connect on some deep balls, to rack up the yds, points, and the DFS glory. W/ AB out, we knew the targets would go to these WR’s. These guys were priced for AB playing, not for the condensed share without him.

• Kelce, like Hill, was in what I thought was an elite spot for the Chiefs offense. Kelce is always in play especially when the Chiefs are in good spots. No need to overthink this one.

• Sanders was cheap, playing a run-funnel defense and was seeing pass game work. With Siriani commenting on needing to#establishit I thought Sanders was going to be fed the rock early and often. It’s too bad he got hurt early. (I think this makes 3/7 weeks I’ve been hurt badly by mid-game injuries in DFS)

• Reflection: I’m not really sure if this lineup was a great or terrible process. Did I pick the right spot here? I don’t know. Sometimes all of the peripheral factors(volume, pace, condensed share) point in one direction, and it is ultimately irrelevant because there is a gap between the underlying numbers and actual production for reasons we can’t necessarily quantify. That was all a fancy way of saying: there’s likely a good reason the Bears are averaging 14 pts a game, and perhaps that should outweigh whatever underlying metrics tend to lead to offensive success. I’m really not sure, but this is why we reflect each week.

Either way, from a results standpoint I’m happy I played 2 lineups and ended the day even in DFS and + in betting markets as well.

Thanks for reading my adventurous thoughts and I look forward to being back in this space next week! We’re so blessed to be able to watch and talk about football, aren’t we?

You can follow my work: @throwthedamball. My DM’s are open — I really love all kinds of suggestions, comments, criticism!