Last week was better, though the Giants +1.5 wasn’t the ideal close to the slate. I went 3-2 on the Normal entries and 3-1-1 on the Ugly one. I also went 11-5 in my home picking pool.

Here are my lines for this week:

The games I’m farthest apart on guess-wise are the Texans-Falcons (3.5), but you can see that’s around the zero and doesn’t cross the key number of 3, the Saints-Pats (same) and Eagles-Rams (that’s a meaningful difference.) I knew roughly what the Giants-Dolphins would be, but if Andrew Thomas and Saquon Barkley are back, I think that’s my best bet, and I don’t mean to be a homer about it.

The Daniel Jones criticism on Twitter today was just stupid. Patrick Mahomes or peak Tom Brady would have gotten annihilated under those conditions too. Just severe recency bias and vitriol toward a guy who got paid before he’s proved much.

I’m also fading the Dolphins in Survivor, as they’re exactly the type of finesse team you want when the offensive line (even with Thomas back) is so shaky. Then again, I thought that about the Seahawks, who are not exactly the Steel Curtain, last week.

I thought the Chiefs would be bigger favorites, but maybe the market’s right here as the Vikings are desperate and can shoot it out with anyone.

thanks Dan -- appreciate that

Week 4 Observations

It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to

When McCaffrey scores 47, and Kittle not even two.

Wish I could just wake up and it not be true

But it is, oh, it is

Apologies to Oliver Anthony, but I’m annoyed.

Why do the Cowboys have to keep getting defensive touchdowns such that Dak doesn’t need to throw and CeeDee Lamb gets only six targets? Game flow variance is real, but it can’t be game after game. And they didn’t throw to him even when they were losing last week in Arizona. Just play a normal game where your best receiver gets 12 targets, FFS.

I have Prescott and Brock Purdy in the Primetime, and I think I’m now 4-for-4 in starting whichever winds up scoring fewer points.

I could bitch about 100 things here, but I won’t. Maybe 10 or 12 at most.

. . .

One thing I just realized in 2023, 45 years too late, is maybe I should let go of my attachment to outcomes, especially when it comes to all matters NFL. It’s just not a beast you can tame and bend to your will. Why do I watch games for hours on end trying to telekinetically control what’s on my TV screen and feeling enraged upon discovering I in fact do not have this power?

. . .

Like last week, I’m not going over every game — just throwing out some things that occurred to me. I asked the boss of Real Man Sports if it was okay to say whatever I felt like here, and he gave me the green light. (The boss of Real Man Sports don’t say no, he’s too busy sayin’ “Yeah!”)

Tua and the Dolphins remind me a little bit of Kurt Warner and the Greatest Show On Turf Rams. Fast release, accurate throws, quick decisions, and lots of playmakers once the ball is in their hands. But also Mike Martz (the offensive coordinator) didn’t care much for pass protection, which was a problem when the ball didn’t come out right away.

I dropped the Ravens defense for the Texans in one league because I thought the massage guy was playing for the Browns. The Texans did pretty well too, but it cost me five points.

I also wanted to change my Browns pick to the Ravens in the picking pool, but discovered all picks lock five minutes prior to the start of the day’s first game. The stupid London game had already started unfortunately, so the pick was locked. At first I was annoyed by this, but I see the point of the rule — if you didn’t lock all the picks, then everyone would have to hustle to switch them if there were ever breaking news before the late or Sunday night games, and you would never know peace. Some hustle-bitch would always have the edge on you because he remembered mid-day to tweak the picks in your low-stakes pool. So I prefer it this way even though in this instance I was that hustle-bitch.

Speaking of which, the London game is just a Milgram experiment to see whether you’d chain yourself to the sofa for 14 hours because the schedule says so.

Of course when I dropped Richie Grant in my IDP league he gets 11 tackles. Why would he not make all the tackles now that he’s no longer on my roster?

I’ve asked this before, but what is the purpose of this current Patriots roster? They have no playmakers, Mac Jones should probably be a competent backup somewhere, why bother? It’s almost as if Bill Belichick is repaying the devil by having to coach this pointless team in perpetuity.

When Desmond Ridder loses the job, Falcons fans (and Kyle Pitts owners) will say “Good Ridderance.”

I really did start Miles (Kilometers) Sanders over De’Von Achane in a league. I think that was the move that made me realize it was time to stop being attached. Sanders had 13 carries, while Achane had only eight so my process was good, right?

I feel a little cheated in only getting a push on the Bears plus three at home. It took a defensive TD (scored by Jonathan Cooper, the DE I picked up in that same IDP league fortunately) to cap a 21-point comeback.

Jaleel McLaughlin (5-9, 183, 4.43 40) got extra work when Javonte Williams went down and looked like he was shot out of a cannon. He’s yet another of the new breed of small, lightning quick running backs that are taking over the league. Travis Etienne, Kenneth Walker and Bijan Robinson really aren’t that small, but Jahmyr Gibbs, De’Von Achane and even McCaffrey, Tony Pollard, James Cook, Raheem Mostert and Austin Ekeler are all low BMI speed guys. Both wideouts and backs are getting smaller the last five years.

Stefon Diggs got 36 NFFC points on seven targets. Josh Allen got 47.7 on 25 attempts and four rushes.

It’s annoying with Saquon down, I’m forced to use the CEH. My real reserve running backs are Damien Harris (why did they bring in Latavius Murray’s carcass) and Rashaad (“pound foolish”) Penny. Last week it worked out, this week not so much. I might have to plunk down some FAAB on 183-pound McLaughlin.

Isiah Pacheco finally got RB1 work (20 carries three targets) while CEH and Jerick McKinnon barely touched the ball. I didn’t think he had much of a ceiling, but he does if that continues.

QB1 played pretty well, made some nice throws, used his legs. He’s not dead yet, and it was nice to see Garrett Wilson get 14 targets, albeit mostly short ones.

Would it kill the Ravens to let the GOAT attempt a field-goal? I got one point from a Younghoe in two leagues and four from Tucker in my other three. This is the first year I’m regretting paying up for Tucker both because the Ravens go for it on fourth down all the time and also because half the league is drilling 57-yard field goals like they’re PATs.

I doubled my Kyren Williams-Cam Akers bet with Alan Seslowsky since I didn’t think Williams was good or long for the job, and Williams proceeds to score twice in the first quarter and finish with more than 100 years. It was only from $20 to $40 though.

I had Anthony Richardson in over Kirk Cousins the week Cousins went bananas against the Eagles and Richardson got concussed, and I had Cousins this week when Richardson went bananas and Cousins did little. Lineup setting is the worst part of fantasy football, and you either listen to Krishnamurti or wind up in the abyss. I’m spending too much time in the abyss.

Maybe Richardson is just a much faster Josh Allen. (Allen was raw as a rookie too.)

I was on Houston this week. Sometimes you sell high after they crush a team like the Jaguars, as most teams regress to the mean, but other times a surprise upset signals a new baseline, especially when the team got to add the No. 2 and 3 overall picks in this year’s draft. (Not every team drafts like the Chargers, using a first rounder on someone they don’t intend to feature this year even after the guy he’s replacing (Mike Williams) is out for the year.)

I compared Baker Mayfield to Jared Goff — left-for-dead former first overall pick that’s really a solid league-average QB under decent conditions — and so far Mayfield has done his part. People really overrate the importance of the QB position for two reasons: (1) They attribute the conditons under which he plays to the QB himself; and (2) They compare QBs to a very low replacement level backup entering the game without sufficient reps, comfort in the system or display of basic NFL-level competence. That’s why when the QB goes down, the spread moves seven points. But you take a seasoned pro like Mayfield, Goff, Andy Dalton, Derek Carr or Jimmy Garoppolo, put good players and a good system around them, and there’s not a world of difference between them. Hell, the 49ers are making Brock Purdy look like Joe Montana right now.

Maybe I’m just bitter because I didn’t go all-in for Puka Nacua after Week 1. The Red Zone channel displayed a graphic showing he broke the first-four-games record for catches among rookies with 39, but Scott Hanson didn’t really emphasize that No. 2 (Anquan Boldin) had only 30! So Nacua didn’t just break it, he annihilated it. If someone hit 100 home runs next year, you wouldn’t just say he “broke” Barry Bonds’ record and leave it at that. (Not that rookie-receptions-over-the-first-four-games has the same importance as the single season home run record, but you get the point.)

The Football Team always plays the Eagles tough, just like the Bills and Josh Allen own the Dolphins. Some things are reliable — until they’re not.

The Eagles late-game clock management and the Team’s decision to go to OT rather than win it with the two-point conversion have been talked about enough, so I won’t go into detail here. I’ll just say Riverboat Ron has gravitated to the penny slots in his old age.

I didn’t watch much of Bengals-Titans, though I had the Bengals -2.5 in one of my pools (my only loss in that one as I did better this week.) What a disaster if you stacked Bengals this year.

Oh, I know about Donaghy -- I was pulling hard for the Kings and Suns in those series he reffed.

Tua and the Dolphins remind me of Kurt Warner and the GSOT

Khalil Herbert channeling Rambo there

realized today that I should stop expecting things to go right. The NFL is a big jumble of uncertainty and disaster. This expectation that it conform to my will is really taxing.

I post a lot early in the games, then the frustration of what I'm seeing frustrates me and I sour on it.

Total in MIA/BUF should have been 100

Dropped the Ravens defense for the Texans this week in one league because I thought massage dude was playing

Only silver lining of the London game is when you're 2-0 ATS through the Thursday and early game. Now an easy 1 in 2^14 chance of getting the W. (2^14) is about 16K

Tried to change my Browns ATS pick to Ravens in my pool with the massage lover out, but turns out my pool locks before the first game of the day, and that was the London one. Annoying, but at the same time, good the little hustle bitches don't get rewarded and make everyone have to be on alert all day Sunday, even though I was trying to be one of them.

Forget that I had picked up a Younghoe and definitely did not get my money's worth. Damn.

Checked the stats from the game: Had Jax -3, check. Bijan did fine, check. Sat Pitts, check. Ridley did enough, check. None of the guys I don't have like Lawrence or Etienne went off, check.

But there's always something -- just dropped safety Richie Grant in my IDP league, and he had 11 tackes. Very hard to escape with no negatives from a game when you have this much going on.

The London game is just a sadistic test to see whether you're willing to chain yourself to the sofa for 14 hours. It's basically a Milgram experiment.

Relieved Barkley is doubtful. Was going to have to pick up Gary Brightwell or DJ Dallas just in case because I couldn't risk sitting Barkley. I'll be pissed if he gets upgraded after I've already filled his slot and he goes off, though. Monday night games with injured are a bug.

Week 4 ATS Picks

I won’t rehash how terribly I did last week in detail beyond saying I went 1-4 on both sets of picks, and the four losses were by massive margins for each.

It is what it is, but don’t try to fade me this week because I’m liable to go 4-1 if you do. And don’t bet my picks because I’m liable to go 1-4 if you do that. The only way to deal with a capper on a bad streak is to ignore him. In fact, stop reading right now if you know what’s best for you.

For those of you who aren’t betting, but just want to root ghoulishly for my ATS season to implode further, here are this week’s picks:

Normal 1 and 2

I thought the Jaguars should be favored by six, but that’s because I forgot this game was in London. Still London is almost a home game for the Jaguars who are used to the trip, and the Falcons can’t complete a forward pass. I’m buying low on Jacksonville.

I took the Niners almost as an “ugly” play because that line is too big. It’s too big, so I took it. The Cardinals have played everyone tough and could easily be 3-0, but this is a tough matchup for them, and things can get out of hand against the 49ers. It’s too big a line though — there’s something off about it

The Giants are getting points at home, but we still don’t know about Andrew Thomas and Saquon Barkley. I just believe in the team, and this is a winnable game they have to have. I think they’ll get it done.

I took the Bills because they do well against the Dolphins who are a bit of a sell high. I’m not strong on it, but I think it’s the right side.

The Titans are one of my favorite teams to bet because they’re tough, and teams don’t enjoy playing them, but this line is less than three, Burrow seems reasonably healthy, and the Cincy defense looked good against the Rams. Plus, the Bengals need this game too.

Ugly

The Tezans seem roughly equal to the Steelers to me. CJ Stroud is already at least as good as Kenny Pickett, and the Steelers offensive line isn’t good. Maybe the Steelers have a better defense, but Will Anderson looks like a star, and they shut down the Jaguars pretty thoroughly last week.

The Team is terrible, and this is a real nose-holder, but the line looks light which means the market knows they play their division rivals tough, and they have a lot to prove after getting destroyed by the Bills. It’s a buy-lowest.

The Bears are terrible, but three points on the road is a bridge too far for the Broncos. Plus, I still think Justin Fields is a player — he just needs the right situation.

The Raiders are, as usual, a joke, but this line feels light, and the Chargers are coming off a fortunate win. I think Vegas keeps it close.

Finally the ugliest of ugly, QB1 against the Chiefs. I’m doing this purely because no one else in his right mind would, but that’s actually not true. The line is where it is because someone is on the other side of that bet.

https://rumble.com/v3lmq4r-new-breed-of-running-backs.html

Why Blake Snell Deserves The Cy Young Award

https://www.realmansports.com/p/why-blake-snell-should-win-the-nl

There’s a strident (pun intended) debate about who should win the NY Cy Young Award, the Padres’ Blake Snell or the Braves’ Spencer Strider. The reason the debate is so strident has to do with the peculiar contrast between the two players’ seasons.

Both pitchers have thrown roughly the same number of innings, but Strider has struck out many more (274) and walked far fewer (55). In fact Snell leads he majors in walks (99) and is on track to be the only pitcher since 1913 to do so while also leading qualifying pitchers in ERA (2.25).

Now if Strider were second or third in ERA, he’d win the award, hands down. Unfortunately, his ERA is 3.81 — in other words he’s allowed 77 earned runs to score on his watch while Snell has let in only 45.

Those in the Strider camp would never point to his 19 wins (that’s a team stat!), and in fact you hear them dismissing Snell’s ERA similarly as both a team (defense, park) and luck stat (BABIP, HR/FB). They argue that among the things pitchers control — walks, strikeouts and fly balls — Strider was better, and that’s what should matter if we’re trying to determine who should win the award for league’s best pitcher.

Let’s set aside the fact that Snell had a 44.4% ground ball rate to Strider’s 34.3. That would mean fewer chances for home runs, and in fact Snell gave up fewer (15) to Strider’s 22. Snell’s HR/FB rate was slightly higher, but you can chalk that up to their respective home parks (With 100 as the average, Snell’s was 93 (21st) and Strider’s 112 (5th)). And let’s further set aside that Snell gave up hard contact on only 30.9 percent of batted balls, while Strider was ninth overall at 35 percent.

I say “let’s set aside” because while it explains in part why Strider’s ERA was high relative to his underlying metrics, and Snell’s lower, that difference doesn’t nearly do the heavy lifting needed to explain the cavernous gap in runs allowed, especially given Snell’s insanely high number of walks.

The only thing left, according to the Strider backers, is luck. Snell’s .256 BABIP to Strider’s .312 (which is even more pronounced when you factor in the seven extra hits that went out of the park against Strider that don’t count against his BABIP) and Snell’s insane 86.7 left-on-base (LOB) percentage which leads the majors. (Strider’s LOB% is 37th out of 46 qualifying pitchers at 70.4%.)

But as was pointed on in an excellent article by MLB.com’s Brett Maguire, Snell had even better LOB numbers in 2018 (when he won his first CY) too. Moreover, as Maguire points out:

As if a mid-90's heater and elite curveball weren't enough, Snell also mixes in a spectacular changeup and slider. Both pitches are not too far behind in terms of bat-missing ability and overall dominance. Snell's changeup has the ninth-highest whiff rate (47.7%) among individual pitch types (min. 150 swings) and is second only to Shane McClanahan's changeup. His slider, meanwhile, has a 53.6% whiff rate that trails only four pitches, including his own curveball.

When you combine the overall excellence of his non-fastballs, Snell is producing one of the most dominant seasons on breaking balls and offspeed pitches by a starting pitcher in recent memory. He has a combined 51.1% whiff rate on his non-fastballs, the second-best single-season rate by a pitcher behind only Strider, who has a 55.3% whiff rate on his slider and changeup this year.

So Snell’s season is not just unusual cosmetically — leading in walks and ERA — but it’s unusual under the hood too with elite secondary stuff doing so much of the work. That he’s doing it differently — walking people rather than giving in, and punching people out with three elite secondary pitches — and that he had this absurd “luck” over a full season once before starts to sound like maybe Snell, when he’s healthy and right, is an outlier.

As I wrote in the my piece on Outliers:

One of my favorite stats of all time is that Mariano Rivera had a career BABIP of .265 (league average over that span was .298) and a career HR/FB rate of 6.2 percent (league average was around 10.) The BABIP mark was the lowest of any pitcher over that 20-year span (minimum 1000 IP), and the HR/FB was second-lowest. How could anyone get so lucky as to be No. 1 and 2 in two different, “luck-based” metrics:?…

Outliers break models, they ruin the smooth distribution curves that make us feel like we understand what there is to know, they don’t dutifully regress to the mean over time the way to which they’re supposed. But we watch to find the outlier, not the average. We want to witness greatness because it reminds us of what’s possible rather than what’s likely.

When you’re dealing with a skillset so unusual, it’s folly to regress it to the mean and declare how much of it is luck. When we say “BABIP is luck”, or “pitchers don’t control balls in play”, we mean BABIP is usually luck or pitchers don’t usually control balls in play. We mean on average something is the case, and when we say that we mean because it’s this way on average, it’s probably this way in Snell’s particular case.

That’s well and good, but it’s a specious leap to conflate “probably” and “definitely.” And it’s not a matter of saying, “Well, if only 1 in 1000 pitchers are Rivera, then “probably” means 99.9%, and I’ll take that bet.” That’s bad reasoning because we’ve already identified Snell’s profile (leading the majors in walks and ERA, absurd LOB rates twice in his career, dominant on three different secondary pitches) as highly unusual and uncannily successful. You can’t lump him in as one of the 1000 or so garden-variety qualifying pitchers over the decades. He’s already on the short list of candidates for something unlikely to be true about him.

Just as we can feel pretty confident Mariano Rivera didn’t just get insanely lucky over 20 years in two separate metrics (Rivera pitched even better in the postseason, presumably against better competition too), we should be open to the plausibility of Snell’s uncanny “luck” having a skill component to it that defies facile quantification via garden-variety regression. In sum, you don’t know the extent to which Snell was lucky even if you can on average separate luck from skill fairly reliably.

. . .

But let’s set all of that aside for a moment and take a step back. So what if Snell were just insanely lucky? What if his defense helped him a ton, and when he did give up hard-hit balls with men on base, they just disproportionately were hit directly at his fielders? Do you not own your own luck?

Put differently, does a banked-in three-pointer not count on the scoreboard? Should we give extra points in basketball for swishes and fewer when the ball hits the rim and drops in? What does it matter how lucky a pitcher was in preventing runs so long as he prevented runs?

One might be tempted to answer: “Because if it’s luck and not skill based, then it’s not sustainable.” Someone on Twitter put it this way:

To which I responded:

This is a typical point of confusion for people who have mastered the 101 course, the idea that certain stats are more reliable indicators of performance than others, and that many of our traditional measurements of what happened like ERA or Wins are not especially predictive going forward. And that the reason they’re not predictive is that too much of it depends on luck or environment and not the actual skills of the pitcher. Should the environment change, or the luck simply regress to the mean, the pitcher’s performance will also regress. As such, if you sign a pitcher with a great ERA, but mediocre peripherals to a big contract, it’s likely to be a mistake.

But as I posted in my response, none of what you learned in your 101 course (congratulations on getting your diploma, by the way!) is relevant to this discussion. I am not arguing Snell should be paid more than Strider going forward. I am not ranking them for purposes of my 2024 fantasy drafts. I am casting my (virtual) vote for who should win the award for something that happened in 2023, which is in the past.

This is a category error people make time and again: predictive metrics (like strikeout minus walk percentage, e.g.,) are useful only insofar as they help inform you as to likely future outcomes. The outcome (run prevention) is the important thing, but past run prevention (the result) isn’t as predictive of future run prevention (future results) as some other indicators.

Hence, when looking toward the future, you should find the most reliable indicators (salt them with the understanding that all general indicators are imperfect and might not apply entirely to outliers) and act accordingly — that is, if you’re an MLB GM or fantasy baseball drafter.

But do not, under any circumstances, make the category error of substituting the indicator (what’s likely to predict future results) with the results themselves. Just because K%-BB% better predicts ERA than ERA, doesn’t mean that run prevention isn’t the most desirable result for a pitcher, and that when looking backwards, every team would rather its pitcher prevent runs, by hook or crook, rather than have impressive forward-looking metrics.

If you don’t understand the foregoing paragraph, please read it until you do. If you still don’t understand it, that means you’ve likely been indoctrinated into a religion I like to call: But My Process Was Good, and this post is a waste of your time. Stop reading it!

To summarize, for those of you still here, it really doesn’t matter how Snell allowed a whopping 42 percent fewer runs than Strider, but that he actually allowed 42 percent fewer runs on his watch. The only world in which that matters is the future one where considerations of sustainability which necessitate the skill/luck discussion apply. In 2023, where the results are all in, indicators go into the woulda/coulda/shoulda bin with all the other excuses, failed speculations and what ifs. That’s why I made the Jacob deGrom joke on Twitter — but for his bad injury luck, he was the league’s best pitcher!

. . .

There is one final argument for Snell, though the first two are, in my opinion, already more than sufficient: that substituting indicators for results leads to a reductio ad absurdum.

If we argue how a pitcher threw (strikeouts, walks, fly balls) is really the important thing rather than how many runs he gave up, then by that same logic, we can say that strikeouts, walks and fly balls are also results, and what’s really important was the velocity, movement, command and control of his pitches. For who knows whether he got unlucky with bad umpiring, pitch framing, quality of opponents, bad hitters luckily getting the bat on pitches they almost always miss. The pitcher can’t really control the results (strikeouts, walks) but only the location and quality of the pitches.

Let’s then measure the quality of the pitches and award the player who by some chosen metrics made the best pitches. Who cares how many actual Ks he had? Let’s give it to the guy with the most xKs™ and the fewest xBB™.

But even then the pitcher doesn’t really control the xKs and xBBs because how he throws is partly a product of his pitching coaches, his genetics, his trainers, his regimen, his diet, his health, etc. He has a say in it of course, but there’s a lot of noise in what team drafts you or who your high school coach or parents happened to be. We need a luck-neutral metric for accidents of birth! I mean if Strider were born to midgets on the island nation of Palau, it’s highly unlikely he puts up these numbers.

The bottom line is baseball is a game with certain rules and objectives. The primary objective for hitters is to produce runs, for pitchers to prevent them. Those are the results with respect to those players. We can see them on the scoreboard, and we know how they came about.

If you are looking to predict future results, past results, taken at face value, are often poor indicators — or at least poorer than other ones we have since come up with. Only in that context do runs scored and prevented lose signal and contain noise.

But the CY Young isn’t about the future — otherwise give it to the injured guy who projects as healthy next year, or the elite prospect who dominated from July on. It’s only about the past, and the past, unlike the future, does not need to be predicted! Stop using predictive metrics to measure it when the results are in front of your face.

So I lost 6 of my 12 entries in Week 3, and this is going to sound bad, but I’m relieved since all six were from the offshore sportsbook which has a really clunky interface where it’s hard to enter the picks, confirm the picks and see what you have with all 10. Four will be much more manageable, and they were only $10 each. Moreover, I’m still alive in my home pool (only 10 of 21 left for $2100) and the Seslowsky pool.

The teams I lost with were the Cowboys (4) and Jaguars (2). Had I not been such a homer, those Jaguars picks would have gone on the 49ers, but I am constitutionally incapable of picking against my own team in Survivor. ATS, yes, but Survivor, no, though not for the noble reason you might think.

The problem with going against your own team isn’t that you’re rooting for them to lose — that’s not ideal, but you can live with it if they in fact lose. The problem is if they win, and you get knocked out by your own team. Basically you sold your soul to Satan, and he still stiffed you. You betrayed yourself and got nothing.

Let’s take a look at Week 4.

The 49ers are the big favorites — basically 775/100 when you average the moneylines which comes out to 88.6 percent per the market. The Chiefs and Eagles are 385 and 347.5, respectively, or 79.4 and 77.7 percent.

That means the market has the Eagles with roughly twice the risk of losing (22.3%) as the Niners (11.4%.) The Chiefs are close to the Eagles at 20.6%.

In order for the Chiefs or Eagles to be the pick, your reward for taking them over the Niners would have to be nearly 2:1, and it’s not.

Even if 40 percent were on the Niners, in a $10-buy-in, 100-person pool, that would leave 60, plus say 10 more people on other teams, so 50.

But if the Chiefs or Eagles lost, that’s 20 people plus the other 10, leaving 70. And $1000/50 = $20, while $1000/70 = $14.3. So the reward doesn’t quite match the risk, assuming you agree with the market numbers, and assuming your pool more or less tracks the Officefootballpool.com chart above. But it’s not insanely far apart if you don’t agree.

I’ll talk to Seslowsky tomorrow on the pod, but I’m leaning 49ers in all my pools, but his (because we used them last week), in which case I’d pivot to the Chiefs probably. (The Eagles are good, but short week and facing a humiliated division rival that usually plays them tough.)

I also used the Chiefs in those other pools, so they’re not an option for me anyway.