Although I didn’t make it to Vegas to sign up for the Circa pool, I’m doing a bunch of lower-stakes ones and will write about it here, so long as I’m still alive. (Unlike when I wrote for RotoWire, and I had to finish the season even if personally I were dead, I’m not gonna play out the string like some kind of zombie here.)

Let’s just hope I make it longer than last year, when I lost my Circa entry in Week 1, after making an embarrassing production about buying in.

For this week, it looks like I’m probably going chalk with most of my entries. Here’s the distribution of picks from Officefootballpools.com:

The Ravens are the most popular team, but 35.4 percent isn’t that high, given their status as 10-point favorites in a field of 7-point (or less) alternatives. Only the Football Team is remotely close (7), and 24.7 isn’t that much different. This isn’t close enough to do the math — if these percentages and the market’s numbers hold, the Ravens are the easy call.

Don’t confuse that for the notion that the Ravens are somehow a lock — they are not. There is roughly a 19 percent chance they lose per the Vegas numbers, and you don’t get your money back just because you took the team with the best risk/reward profile.

I’ll get deeper into this with Alan Seslowsky on tomorrow’s podcast.