Urban Meyer weighs in on position battles, Hawaii, and short weeks
September 10, 2015The League, Friendship Preservation, and Fantasy Football
September 10, 2015Football is back, and has been for some time, but not in full force. It returns in phases, easing us back into it. First camp opens, treating fans to some sweet simulated action and tasty Vines, followed by the charade that’s preseason pro football, then high school football, the first college football Saturday, Ohio State debuting its wet dream video game offense two days later, then the NFL opener on Thursday night, and finally a full-blown nonstop binge weekend of football this Saturday and Sunday. It’s a good thing there’s a gradual conditioning process — we wouldn’t be able to handle a full weekend dose of football Saturday morning through Sunday at the beginning of August without OD’ing on pigskin. We need to build a tolerance, here. Besides, Skynyrd didn’t open with “Freebird.”
Though the Cleveland Browns are “My Sun and Stars” in the football sky,1 they’re still a small part of the football universe — but three-and-a-half hours worth of roughly 450 hours of football programming in any weekend. What to make of the remaining 446.5 hours (all numbers approximate) in the weekend?
Because the NFL has worked so hard to alienate fans, watching it has become somewhat of a chore of late, like reading Moby-Dick. For every flawless Peyton Manning two-minute drill and passage on man’s futility in the face of nature and God is a game ruined by a roughing the passer penalty and a chapter on whale guts. It’s there and it’s football, so I watch — but I’m not always happy about it. Add the fact that the Cleveland Browns have played about ten meaningful games since Sega Saturn was popular, and I need to invent other ways to entertain myself.
One of the ways I make the drudgery of the NFL more interesting is through predictions and wagers, both real and imaginary. Before the last three seasons, I’ve picked my five favorite bets for NFL over/under season wins. For the vice-less folks out there: Vegas and bookmakers give you a win total: if you think the team will win more games, you take the over; if fewer, the under.2 My record so far has been a commendable 13-1-1, with my one loss being … the 2013 Browns — can’t make this stuff up, folks (hint: the correct bet was not the over).3
But this isn’t about being correct, it’s about making the NFL interesting to me between DraftKings and Viagra commercials. It’s an inexact science here, folks, unless you count “disregarding my brain to listen to the rumblings emanating from my digestive system” as “science,” though I reckon it’s not. I’ll give a bonus Browns prediction at the end, though if there’s any way to put less than zero dollars on that prediction, I would do that. Share your favorite NFL over/unders with us in the comments and on Twitter.
Washington Nicknames under 6.5 wins
Did you know Daniel Snyder’s team — which mortgaged its future to draft RG3 — is benching the former Rookie of the Year to play Kirk Cousins … again! Nobody’s perfected the art of taking three steps sideways with every quarterback change like the Browns, but Washington is just standing still, trotting out Cousins, Colt McCoy, and RG3 again.
Kirk Cousins has a 2-7 career record as a starter and has demonstrated that his only elite skill is throwing interceptions. Grantland’s Andrew Sharp wrote a column calling Washington “The Dumbest Team in Football,” and did a fairly convincing job of it. If the Browns are the Titanic, then Washington is the Hindenburg. They won three games in 2013 and four in 2014 after the “upgrade” from the Shanahan Family to Jay Gruden. Now their offensive line is collapsing in the preseason and the team is jettisoning its most valuable asset and I’m being asked to bet on them to win two-and-a-half more games this season in a decent division? Anyway, while we’re here, Washington, can I interest you in a McCown? Are you sure? Fine. Your loss.
Houston Texans over 8.5 wins
Did Vegas and the betting public forget that the Texans were over .500 last year? I see a better version of a team that beat this over/under total last season. J.J. Watt is already a force of nature who’s batting down balls and scoring touchdowns when he’s not devouring quarterbacks like a great white shark with legs and shoulder pads.
Throw Watt in the same defensive front seven as Jadaveon Clowney and Brian Cushing, and you have a quarterback terrorist organization. If Clowney is even 40 percent of what was advertised in college, quarterbacks will spend most of their games against the Texans running for their lives. They have a reliable running game even without Arian Foster. They won’t win more than 8.5 games if Hoyer plays like he did in the second half of the season for the Browns, but if I’ve learned anything about how God operates (and I’d like to think I have), He’ll make sure Brian Hoyer gets this team to nine wins just to spite Cleveland.
New York Jets under 7.5 wins
Any gambler whose brain is worth half-a-point will tell you not to look for the best team or best player but the best value. Everyone knows that as long as Peyton Manning can stand upright and sell me a satellite dish, the Denver Broncos are good for 9-to-12 wins — but they might not be the best value at an over/under of 10.5 wins.
Meanwhile, certain teams are prone to have inflated totals because they have big and irrational fan bases. As a corollary to that, the New York Jets usually have an over/under that’s one-to-two wins too high because they have an especially obnoxious fan base. They went 4-12 last year, and their starting quarterback is out for much of the season because he got punched in the face. On my exhaustive list of levels for team dysfunction, “QB getting cold-cocked by a teammate” is one notch above “GM suspended for texting coach” and one notch below “disgruntled WR burns practice facility to the ground.” And here I thought Jay Cutler would be the quarterback to miss games for being the recipient of a sucker punch.
New head coach Todd Bowles may be a good one, but I think Rex Ryan overachieved with this defense over the last several years, and he still doesn’t have a quarterback and accompanying offense to carry the Jets to .500 in a division in which they might be the weakest team, and one of the other teams has them changing their Facebook passwords every week and struggling to remember which of their fake hand signals are the real hand signals. The Jets acquired Browns cornerback Buster Skrine in the offseason at a hefty price tag, but they still have problems at safety and linebacker and have no skill position players of interest. Also, when in doubt, bet against the team with Ryan Fitzpatrick. As luck would have it, the Cleveland Browns open against the Jets on Sunday, with a golden opportunity to break their unfathomable streak of losing 10 straight season openers.
Philadelphia Eagles over 9.5 wins
In case you don’t have a feel for my general approach, it’s actually relatively straight-forward: Elite quarterbacks and good coaches make me skew toward the over, and horrendous quarterback situations and dysfunction make me skew toward the under, with wiggle room granted for other factors which I arbitrarily take into account or ignore. For instance, I like the Arizona Cardinals’ defense, but there’s no way I trust a team that just traded for Matt Barkley to back up Carson Palmer and Drew Stanton with so much as five dollars’ worth of my money.
So here’s my case for the Eagles: they have won 10 games in each season Chip Kelly’s been leading the team, and he has a vision — even if it’s the vision of a madman — to build a better team than the one that started 9-3 last season. The Eagles added Kiko Alonso on defense (who had 87 tackles in 2013), Nelson Agholor to their receiver crew (who might be one of the sneaky-best picks from the first round out of USC and has the name of a Mandalorian Warrior), and DeMarco Murray (who led the league in rushing yards last season) to a potent group of running backs.
Kelly seems immune to average quarterbacking so far, and Sam Bradford might be good, though we’ve never seen him play enough games in a row to confirm that. Like him or not, Chip Kelly is one of the smartest guys in football and has just enough of that sociopathic edge to keep the Eagles competitive for a few years before it fizzles out. This is where you say the following (warning for adult language in that clip):
Indianapolis Colts over 10.5 wins
This looks risky in light of what I’ve already said about the Texans, and it might be. But it’s less a bet against the Texans as one against the Tennessee Titans and Jacksonville Jaguars. If you follow the NFL, the one sure thing over the last 15 years has been betting on the great quarterbacks. Tom Brady and Peyton Manning are two of a handful of quarterbacks who routinely exceed their expected wins year after year.4 Andrew Luck has entered this category of guys who win more games than he should normally win.
I felt I needed one of the top-tier quarterbacks on this list. The Packers are tied with the highest over/under in the NFL with the Seattle Seahawks at 11 wins, and I don’t feel comfortable asking the Packers to win 12 games without Aaron Rodgers’ security blanket, Jordy Nelson (who was lost for the season). This might be the year that Peyton Manning and Drew Brees stiffen up and don’t carry their teams to the playoffs with ease (It has to happen eventually, right? Right???), I think the New England Patriots will cruise to 11 wins but am so sick of them and Tom Brady’s face (both real and animated) that I can’t bring myself to pick them, and the remaining elite quarterback Andy Dalton is … kidding, kidding.
The Colts plunged a ton of money in this team to make it better, and I think this might be the year that Andrew Luck explodes for 45+ touchdowns (he led the league with 40 last season). They have a strong home field advantage, and the Colts start the season with a Bill-Jets-Titans-Jaguars cupcake platter topped with pink icing gifting them a 3-1 or 4-0 start. Most of all, if the Colts can limp to 11 wins with Trent Richardson having an average yards per carry lower than my high school GPA, then they should be able to muster 11 wins with the steady Frank Gore. Maybe this commercial with Andrew Luck meow-ing is the end of his promising career, but Browns fans and Paul Kruger already know how the NFL overprotects its money-making mugs.
Bonus Pick: Browns over 6.5 wins
The Browns have been locked at a preseason over/under win total of 5.5 or 6.5 for several years now. Which feels … about right. I’ve long been a bad judge of season results for the Brown and Orange (now Orangier than ever!) because my evaluation of them alternates between too emotional and too callous based on barometric pressure and where Jupiter sits in my third house of Aquarius.5 I think the Browns feel like a five-to-eight win team.
Going from Brian Hoyer to Josh McCown feels like the lateral-est of lateral moves, but there are still plenty of reasons to be optimistic. It’s a solid defensive team that was excellent against the pass last season and will hopefully be buoyed by the arrival of Danny Shelton. I don’t know what’s going on at the running back position, but it’s a solid offensive line that looked fantastic when anyone but Nick McDonald got in a three-point stance last season.
I don’t know if the team can overcome its debilitating case of the fails, but I’m hoping the combo of great offensive line play and a top-ten defense can lift them to eight or nine wins. I wouldn’t bet a cup of soup on it, let alone a full steak dinner. But I’m a Browns fan: always cautiously optimistic and full of self-loathing … until next Sunday, anyway.
- Or to the native Dothraki speakers, “Shekh Ma Shieraki Anni.” No, I didn’t go out with a lot of girls in high school, why do you ask? [↩]
- All over/under totals courtesy Sportsbook, and are current as of Monday, September 8. [↩]
- For those interested, my previous over/under been as follows: (2012) New York Jets under 8.5 (W); New York Giants over (push); Jacksonville Jaguars under 5 (W); Arizona Cardinals under 6.5 (W); Houston Texans over 9.5 (W); (2013) Indianapolis Colts over 8.5 (W); Seattle Seahawks over 10.5 (W); Jacksonville Jaguars under 5 (W); Cleveland Browns over 6.5 (L); New Orleans Saints over 9.5 (W); (2014) Philadelphia Eagles over 9.5 (W); Seattle Seahawks over 11.5 (W); San Diego Chargers over 8.5 (W); Oakland Raiders under 4.5 (W); New England Patriots over 10.5 (W). [↩]
- The Pythagorean win expectation is the expected number of wins based on the points scored and points allowed. It fluctuates for nearly all teams (meaning one year a team wins more games than it “should,” and the next it usually loses more than it “should”). [↩]
- I think those words make sense. I don’t follow horoscopes all that closely. [↩]
15 Comments
~1,500 died (out of ~2,200 on board) when the Titanic sank.
For the Hindenburg, 35 people died (out of 97).
I get so mad every time I see that Kruger-Luck gif. Not Hulk-level, wife-considered-divorcing-me mad like I did when it actually happened, but still blood near-boiling-level.
Thank you for invoking Geno Smith. Brady Quinn might be many things, but he at least didn’t miss any games when a teammate punched him (allegedly…).
Under 6.5 wins all night long! 5-11 up one from my original 4-12 ‘cuz I’m feeling the optimism today!
I know that most of the pessimistic predictions for the Browns center on a perceived difficult schedule, but I think it’s silly to predict wins based mostly on the schedule. Players get injured, teams under-perform, and by the end of the season the strength of schedule numbers look entirely different.
I think there are plenty of reasons to put money on the Browns winning more than 6 games.
1) At which positions did the Browns get worse between last season and this season? I would say “none”, but if you wanted to say OLB for swapping Jabaal Sheard for Scott Solomon, I would certainly listen to that. Tramon Williams is an upgrade over Buster Skrine at CB2. Danny Shelton is an upgrade over last season’s mess at nose tackle. This year’s WR group is clearly an upgrade over virtually the same group last season. I’ll take the Crow/Johnson pairing at RB over the Crow/West pairing any day. Cleveland made a huge upgrade at punter when they signed Andy Lee.
2) Year 2 in Pettine’s defense.
3) If the backup QB needs to play, he should be much more prepared than last season’s debacle.
Because there’s something wrong with me when I hit the Oxygen in Vegas, I took the over on the Browns and Bears. May God have mercy on my soul
Three times last year Terrance West rushed for 94+ yards. Are we confident that Crowell or Johnson will be able to do that? (WITHOUT fumbling the ball away at a key point in the game). Maybe, but wouldn’t be sanguine about it. There’s a reason the FO is still searching the waiver wire for RBs.
Shelton is presumably an upgrade and that’s an awfully important position. But I don’t remember Skrine or the secondary costing us a single game last year. The probs were the run defense which gave the opponents an endless stream of second down and 4, the implosion of the o-line after the loss of Alex Mack and Hoyer’s deteriorating fundamentals/poor accuracy when the lack of an effective running game got him out of that wide open play fake comfort zone.
I do agree about predicting based on schedules. Last year we looked at the Falcons and Indy and said “no way.” They beat one, almost beat the other. If the Browns play clean and hard they can upset teams because at this point in Browns history they are a trap game for just about everybody.
I seem to remember Skrine was abused several times in the red zone last year. Unfortunately would take too long to research, so you may well be right. I always liked him much better as the nickel back. Looking back through the box scores from last year, it looks like Crow typically averaged a better yards-per-carry when he was given the lion’s share of the carries (none of those games were with Alex Mack at center). Same was true for West when he was given more carries, but West had 2 or 3x more games where he was given the lead back carries. I think Crow will be able to rack up the yards… what I’m not sure about is whether he’s been able to get over his fumbling problem.
I”m afraid but I believe you are overstating the importance of Danny Shelton. Phil Taylor he is not. The kid manhandled college boys but I have yet to see his strength dominate so easily at the pro level. I hope I’m wrong.
5-11. of course, they’ll go 6-10 and snag the 9th pick while 4-12 would be good for #2.
but there was fire though!!!
And then trade down from the #9 pick.
Probably to #22, lol.
It was a penalty though, by the book. Whether said book should be soaked in kerosene and lit with a burning Terrelle Pryor jersey is certainly open to debate, however.
What sort of monster would dare strike such a magnificent creature?
http://celebrityfitness.menshealth.com/celebrity-fitness/uploads/brady-quinn-rain-480×415.jpg
You go ask Shaun Smith. I heard he just wanted to destroy something beautiful.
excellent article … loved the browns snippet. since i don’t know what i’m talking about , i’m still predicting a 9-7 finish & a division championship.