 This is Covering the Spread. Here are your hosts, Jim Saunas and Dr. Ed Fang. What is going on everybody? Welcome on in to Covering the Spread. That's right here on the FanDuel Podcast Network and NumberFire.com as we are taking a look at week number 14 across the NFL and breaking down the best bets with Whale Capper, which should be a pretty fun week in the NFL. My name is Jim Saunas. I am a senior writer and analyst for NumberFire.com. Joined here as always by Ed Fang. You can find his work over at thepowerrank.com and on Twitter at thepowerranked. This week 14 NFL Slade is looking awesome. How are you doing today? I'm doing pretty good. Looking forward to some great games, you know, Niners at Saints and Chiefs at Pats and it's going to be some good stuff. And it's all staggered too, which is great. Like there's not a lot of overlap in like the most exciting games. I believe Pats Chiefs is an afternoon game. Yes, afternoon. Right. We got Bills, Ravens at one o'clock, also Saints and 49ers at one and then the night game is pretty fun too because that's Seahawks Rams. So they staggered them enough where we can actually like watch all these games too. It's not just that they're all happening, they're happening at different times, which is awesome. Yep. Absolutely. So we're going to bring Whale Capper in. Yeah. Go ahead Ed. Oh, no, no. I was done. We're going to bring Whale Capper in and we're going to talk NFL with him of course because we got to cover all these big NFL games, but because we haven't had a lot of time to talk about the NBA recently, we're also going to talk NBA with Whale, get his thoughts on the early season NBA stuff and talk about abandoning his priors very quickly on some teams across the NBA this year. He's a host of the deep dive podcast. You can find Whale Capper on Twitter at Whale underscore capper to get his thoughts across the NFL and the NBA. Yesterday we had Bob Stoll on of DrBobSports.com, talked some college football championship week. It was a lot of fun talking to Bob and I just think this is a great week in a football, whether it be Saturday or Sunday. So hopefully you have your chores done. You can sit back, relax and enjoy some good football. It's a great weekend. Yeah. Sounds good. To get Bob's thoughts on a college football championship week, make sure you search for covering the spread wherever you get your podcast. You can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, wherever you get your podcast you can find covering the spread. Just search for it there and while you're there, please do the rating and review as well because those do help us out a ton. We thank those of you who have done so already. Before we get to Whale Capper though, we got to look back at last week and talk about our Thanksgiving bets across the NFL and I made a really bad futures bet in the preseason which is already dust. We're going to go through that in just one second. All right, we'll start here with the week 13 NFL bets starting off with Thanksgiving. I had the over on 45 and a half for the Cowboys and the Bills. There was actually some good movement. My favorite there got a point and a half of closing line value but that does not translate to money in my pocket. It went under at 41 points. The Cowboys had like a bunch of yards, not a lot of points. That one was disappointing. The Cowboys continue to make me very mad. I don't know why I keep trusting them. I should not at this point like Whale Capper had him on, talked about efficient coaching. I should know by now. I'm not going to get that. Yeah, I mean they do throw the ball well, but they don't do it when it's easiest on early downs and situations. So you can imagine how much better they would be with Dak in the passing offense if they just made their lives a little bit easier. If you reduce Dak's number of throws on like third and seven, we'd be great. He's already great. We'd be even better. And also just we're sitting here really late in the season and Ball Flow has a better record than Kansas City. Oh gosh. Let's just chill on that for a sec. I'd really rather not. Like oh jeez. Yeah, it is true. The bills make me so mad. I watch them a lot live in Syracuse and like I see a lot of Josh Allen in the dudes the most like erratic person like I've watched in the very maybe Daniel Jones. I don't know. But like he's unpredictable in sometimes a good way, sometimes in a very bad way. I don't think he's kicked those old habits yet, but hey, you know, kudos to them. They're doing well. They're actually in contention in the AFC East weirdly. So good for the bills. I'm not benefiting from it. I have the under here on 40 and a half for the Saints and the Falcons. That game did go under a 44 points, even with like 16 onside kicks like watching that game. I was like, okay, they'll kick it. They'll try an onside kick. Saints get the ball back. They drain the clock. Nope. 15 times onside kick successful. It still went under, but it was not good for my blood pressure at all. And say, you had the Falcons plus six and a half in that one. And yeah, you kind of got some bad luck there because they were driving. They were down 10, which meant that they needed a field goal and a touchdown and they did the right thing. They did kick the field goal first to get that out of the way. And that was smart. But had they gone for the touchdown, you may have gotten the cover there. Sure. They hadn't won. So it was objectively smart, but Dan Quinn's got to have your back, man. Oh, well, it's all I got to say with that team. Yeah. I've had to give it a well about them too. We'll circle back to them in a bit, don't you? Don't you think we won't? We also talked Texans Patriots. You said you leaned to Texans plus three and a half. I had the over on 44 and a half points. The total close here at 47 points. So big movement there. You also got a half a point of closing line of value on your end. We didn't need those though because both had both bets hit really saw a week for you in the NFL with getting the Texans as an outright winner. And then the total there went over too. So they made a pretty good read on that game. I wish I'd felt better about it. Like it was kind of more like, I feel okay about this, but you know, it's kind of how we thought it would go. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and you know, I mean, the Texans got out pretty fast and it was playing catch-up for the Patriots. So probably the right situation for you to get that over with the Patriots throwing the ball a lot late. Right. Like it was a lot of garbage time, but garbage time still counts and I will happily take it. Let's go back though to the preseason because I had a very bad futures bet then. It was the Falcons to make the playoffs. It is week 14. They have already been mathematically eliminated. They were plus 138 and my thought process was it's hard for a quarterback as efficient as Matt Ryan to not make the playoffs. And you mentioned when I made that bet that their defense scared you even with the young Jones and Keanu Neal being back and shocker. You were right there. Not a shocker to people who've listened to this long enough, but they proved you right there. That one was bad. I still have one out there, including this team, too. I had the over on Devante Freeman's rushing yard total. He did average 109.5 rushing yards per game the rest of the way. That's not going to happen. I was way too overconfident in the Falcons and it bit me twice. So kudos to you on knowing the defense. That was a bad miss on my part. Yeah. I mean, it was, you know, the thing that really scared me off about that team was, you know, last year, their passing success rate wasn't good when everyone thought they were, well, when everyone knew they were bad. But two years ago, when they had Deon Jones and Keanu Neal, their passing success rate on defense was still in the 20s somewhere. So it's not me. It's just it's just the numbers. So, yeah, I it's good to look at the success rates. And I think we're starting to see that as we've been looking at that over the course of the season. So trust the numbers. Don't trust the Falcons. Lessons learned. And we are all good there. We're going to talk about week 14 and just one second. But one game we didn't really like fully commit to last week was the Ravens versus the 49ers. And the reason that I didn't have a read on either the spread or the total is I didn't know how that game was going to go. And then the weather wound up being really sloppy. But it wound up being a fun game and the 49ers covered. What did you see in that one? Yeah, you know, I mean, my numbers like the game, but I was completely off of it based on what the Ravens had done to whoever they had decimated the week before the Rams. Yeah. I was blown away with how bad the Niners very talented defensive line defended the read option. They went and crushed the running back every single time. And Lamar Jackson is like, sweet. Fifty eight percent rushing success rate in that game for Baltimore. I feel like it was a little bit more lopsided and Baltimore favor. Yeah, then the final score suggested. I feel like Baltimore was doing what they wanted, staying ahead of the chains. A lot of that was was was this running game. A lot of that was just, you know, their defensive ends just killing the running back every single time. It's like you guys, you guys have seen a college football game, right? Right. And the thing too about that is like the guys who are crushing the running backs, their assignment was probably the running back. And like when you're doing a read option, well, you have an end assigned to the running back and one guy assigned to the quarterback. But where was the dude assigned to Lamar Jackson? Like they were completely absent. I mean, I'm not. I think sometimes you just have that defensive end unblocked. And I think a lot of colleges, they have that guy that like they have to make the read, they stop there, don't commit to the running back and then see who has the ball before going after. That's that's how I've seen a lot of college defenses defend that. Yeah, that was not an option with the Niners defense. They clearly were coached to just go kill the to go kill the running back, which they did. But unfortunately, Lamar Jackson had the ball and ran a lot. So it wasn't it didn't work out well for the Niners. The clear solution is to get Aaron Donald, because I remember my favorite college football play of all time was Pitt against Duke. It might have been Daniel Jones, but now it wouldn't have been too long ago. But Aaron Donald, it was a read option. And Aaron Donald decided, I don't know, as a ball, I'm tackling both of you. He brought down the running back and the quarterback at the exact same time. So the clear key to stopping Lamar Jackson is cloning Aaron Donald. I think that's the one the one thing we can count on here. Yeah, except they just completely blocked Aaron Donald and they came against the Rams. That's a fair point, a fair rebuttal. No, no, no, no, I'm not I'm I agree with you. The one play that really stands out in my mind was Nick Fairley, when he played at Auburn in the championship against Oregon. Like he would just he would come in and blocked and like destroy both of them. Like you would get there at the mesh point and blow up the play. So yeah, I mean, I think that is a good idea. I think that's going to be hard for an NFL defensive tackle to do against Lamar Jackson. I mean, it's been it's been surprising to me just how much Jackson's athleticism has manifest in the NFL. You see a lot of athletic guys in college that don't make it look like that and run with the efficiency that he has. And we always hear about wanting to duplicate success. And people want to hire Greg Roman and run a system with a running quarterback. But there aren't a lot of Lamar Jackson's out there. Like he's kind of special. And I think we should like like it's good to try to expand our the way we view quarterbacks position, you know, try to, you know, you know, try to duplicate success. But that relies on having someone as good as Lamar Jackson. And he's just he's pretty special. Yeah, no, he is for sure. But I'm going to be interested to see when he takes it, when he makes a wrong move and takes a pretty big hit, yeah, how that affects him, like for the rest of the game, you know, I mean, Cam Cam Newton was pretty reckless in the beginning of his career, just, you know, basically taking guys head on. So we'll, you know, and that's not Lamar's game, but right. He's going to get hit hard at some point. I really wanted to take the Kyler Murray route and start running out of bounds more often. Like I think long term, that'd probably be smart for him. Kyler is amazing at it when he hits. I hope Lamar Jackson like he doesn't get hit hard a lot, but he gets hit up, hit hard more often than Kyler does. And I wanted to go more conservative in that perspective because I really want him to stay healthy. We'll talk more about that Ravens team in a little bit with Whale Cap before we do so. If you want to get in on the action, check out the Vandal Sportsbook and place your first bet today. If you lose, Fandall will give you a refund to $500 in psych credit. Visit sportsbook.vandal.com for more details. Terms and conditions apply, must be 21 plus and physically present in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia or Indiana. Gambling problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER. Let's bring on Whale Capper now. Find him on Twitter, at Whale underscore Capper. He is the host of the Deep Dive podcast. We're going to break down week 14 across the NFL and talk a little NBA as well in teams that have deviated from his expectations so far this year. Let's bring Whale Capper back in here to covering the spread. Well, it's been a bit. I think we had you on back in September. So it's been a while. How are you doing? Yeah, that's a great call. It has been a while. It's been a very fun fall. The NFL season has been a little bit of a roller coaster, but still sitting in the black, which is huge. Always tough to kind of do better than break even in the NFL. So I'm happy about that. NBA is off to a cracking start. So it's been a good end to 2019. We were telling you before we started recording, we're very jealous because you have leaves and something called the sun behind you. So I haven't seen those in months, it feels like. So little jealous. If you have that profitable NFL and a good NBA start, you're living a decent life. And let's talk about that NBA because we've gotten to talk a whole lot of NBA here because we've been crushed with college football and the NFL, but we're almost a quarter of the way through the season already for 2019, 2020. It's a good amount of data. So when you're looking at your model, how much are you leaning on what we've seen so far this year versus your priors entering the season? Yeah, this is, I have to say that in years past, I just used the standard function of, okay, how many games we got and I'll just do a standard decay for all teams. But this year, because of so much turnover in the off season and because of specific teams doing well, adjusting to their new rosters and other teams not, and some massive injuries, specifically in the Western Conference. I've had to do team by team specific decisions on this, which is tough because there's a lot of qualitative, a lot of qualitative decision-making goes into that. But like, great example, like a team like the Warriors, I had to throw their priors out on game two. Like there's no way you can in any way, shape or form from a team level, expect that you have some understanding of what they're gonna be when you don't know half the players on the team. And the guys you were expecting to get, the Lions chair, the Usager are on the sidelines. And again, I've noticed with across the league, coaching is pretty broad spectrum. Some teams, like the coaching, they're doing a fantastic job of adjusting and adapting and finding rotations that are working well. And so I've had to kind of update those priors a lot more aggressively than some other teams, which are just kind of mired in sort of the mess of what they've created as far as putting together a roster. And how often do you have to do that? Where you find yourself having to go in and manually change the inputs for various teams? Because it seems like it's a lot of work obviously, but the upsides of it are clearly big and it does kind of go by a case by case basis. How often do you have to do that? Where you individualize things by team? Yeah, I have to, so I take a pretty good chunk of my Monday every week to do a couple of things. I update all my databases, bring in the full weeks, you know, new data. And then I also take a pretty close look at what's going on with the market over the last week. Where's the market overreacting, underreacting? Because it's important to kind of know not just what's going on with any given team, but how is the betting market capturing that? And it's been interesting to kind of take that approach this year. This is the first year that I've really done a more sophisticated breakdown of what the market is saying about these teams in order to kind of capture, okay, they are stuck thinking that this team is good. I've adjusted and I'm seeing value, you know, betting against this team or vice versa, or betting overs or betting unders, like that's been pretty clear with a couple of teams where the market has just been stubborn, sticking to some priors. And I've, you know, I'm long, long past that. So basically like my process is more week in, week out. I take a look at, okay, this team underperformed all week last week. Let me look through my notes. Was it because of some key injuries? Was it because they were traveling, especially, you know, bad road trip or they were just in a bad schedule spot or they played the, you know, the toughest five teams in the league and in seven games. So, you know, those kind of decision-makings, I have to go through pretty carefully team by team and adjust things manually. But I'm getting to the point where I'm seeing enough, you know, seeing enough feedback that I think I can automate some of this stuff for at least the rest of the season and for sure for future seasons. Hey, well, so that's great. I know we had talked about that golden state of futures to win the NBA title way back on one of our first shows that has unfortunately not worked out, but you obviously understand this. As one of those teams where you're, you deviated almost immediately from your prior. Can you give us another example? Yeah, I think, I mean, the Warriors are pretty clearly the number one biggest difference. Another one that I would say that I have down, there's basically, I think there's really been two teams that have surprised me positively. I had anticipated the Raptors being about a 500-ish team, but by all metrics, by all accounts, they have done a fantastic job of finding new roles and responsibilities. They give a ton of credit to the coaching staff and the general management there for what they've done assembling a team there. They are legitimately contenders in the Eastern Conference when I had expected them to come in in around 42 or so wins this season. So that's a huge, that was a huge surprise and a lot of credit to those guys up in Toronto. Similarly, the Mavericks are out of this world. You know, and again, I think you can probably put a lot of both of these teams exceeding expectations on the key players they're counting on, making enormous leaps in their progression. You know, a standard player development curve doesn't really fit what you've seen from Pascal Siakam or Luca Dantzic at all from last season to this season. They are accelerating their development and their growth at a rate that, you know, may seem impossible to keep up through the rest of the season, but at least for now, you can't deny it. You have to count for what they're doing, which is extremely impressive. So the Mavs and the Raptors really, I think are the real deal. And on the other side of the spectrum, I've been pretty disappointed besides the, I've been disappointed in a number of teams, but the Jazz really are letting me down. The Nuggets have been underwhelming, even though their wins are, their standing looks like they are doing well. The fact that they have had humongous schedule advantages to this point and haven't really taken advantage of that is concerning because they're gonna go through some of these stretches where they don't have those advantages and they're gonna come back to earth. And if they're sitting in the, you know, at the bottom of the Western Conference, as far as seating goes, and they're in deep trouble. So those, they have been disappointing. And of course, the Spurs too. The Spurs I expected to be about a 45, 46 win team. And right now they're playing like they're gonna be on the outside looking in the playoffs. And, you know, Pop is a good enough coach that I think they can salvage this if they don't blow it up. But you're hearing a lot of whispers around the league that they're shopping some of their players with experience who they might need to be counting on if they're actually gonna make some attempt to make the playoffs this year. So Spurs have been a disappointment. All the Western Conference teams really. Actually, it's weird. Like, you know, we come into the season, I thought the West was gonna be this, you know, wide open, you know, who knows, eight teams maybe can make the finals. And now it's like, no, it's the Lakers or the Clippers. Like really no one, you know, no one really matches up in any way, shape, or form with those two teams the way we've, you know, at least through 20 games this season. And, you know, that could change the clip. You know, the Lakers for sure have had one of the easiest schedules so far. And the Clippers, you know, they, I don't know if we really know what their ceiling is just because they have, you know, they have a lot to learn and grow and figure out who's, you know, roles and responsibilities. And I am conscientious of both teams from a depth standpoint. I mean, clearly the Clippers have been burning a lot of their bench early in the season and that may come back to haunt them. And the Lakers, you know, are relying on a couple of players, pretty high usage, who are pretty fragile. So things can change pretty quick, pretty dramatically there. But as we sit here through 20 games, it's, it looks like a two horse race in the, in the Western Conference. Whereas the East, where I thought it was the Bucks and no one, it looks like pretty, pretty obviously like the Raptors, the Celtics, even the Pacers, when they get Oledipo back, they have a nice nucleus there. And of course the Sixers. So there's about, you know, about five or six teams that I think are going to challenge the Bucks in the East. And I would still expect the Bucks to come out on top, but it's going to be a hell of a lot tougher than what I would have guessed when we, when we talked in before the season started. I want to go back here to Luca and Siakum, because like you mentioned that they're kind of outliers in terms of their progression year over year. Luca's obviously very young. So like you can kind of understand that. But Siakum's like 25, you know, he's not like the youngest dude. Do you expect those outliers performances to continue now that we are like, we have a pretty decent sample on both guys, or are you expecting the Raptors and Mavs to come back down to earth a bit as we get further into the year? Oh boy. If I had to say right now, I would say Raptors more likely to come back to earth and Mavericks more likely to continue to progress. And I would look beyond just the star performances so far for that reasoning. I think that the supporting cast in Toronto around Siakum has overperformed, whereas the supporting cast around Donchich has a lot of room to get better. I think you saw it last night even. The Mavericks were on the ropes against the Timberwolves in a bad spot last night and they come out in the fourth quarter and they're just getting, you know, Jalen Brunson is drilling threes and, you know, no one can miss. It was, you know, Finney Smith is making some of the most impressive, you know, singular defensive performance plays I've seen against Wiggins who's been on fire this season. It was impressive to see those world players step up last night for the Mavericks. And, you know, I think that just the fact that Donchich has the ball in his hands on so many plays, you can, it wasn't totally shocking that he is taking this enormous leap offensively. It's a lot tougher for a guy like Siakum to make the leap that he's made. And so if one of those two players comes back to earth at all between now and April, I would lean more on Siakum and Toronto coming back to earth, whereas the Mavericks, they might be the real deal. Yeah, all right. Well, I'll have to give more NBA thoughts for you as we go along into the season. It should be a lot of fun. Been an interesting season so far for sure. But let's shift our focus to the NFL and week 14. We've got a lot of really fun games coming up in week 14. And it does start out in Buffalo with the Ravens and the Bills. Ravens, five and a half point favorites here. The total is 44. And, you know, the Ravens are actually now the Super Bowl favorites at Fandola Sportsbook. They're plus 240. Do you think that number is fair or has the Lamar hype, you know, gotten a little bit too much out of hand? I think that number is probably, to a degree, is fatable. I think it's totally fair to say that they are the best team playing right now in the NFL. And it's not particularly close. You look over the last five weeks, you look at who they played, you look at how well they performed, and you can't, you really can't deny it. What, you got an opinion on the side or total of this game? I would, my numbers would say Baltimore, but I'm staying off of this one. The Buffalo Bills are as difficult a team to prepare for, in my opinion, as the Ravens. Just because of their, you know, their scheme, their sequencing of play calls has been great. Strom McDermott and the coaching staff in Buffalo deserve a ton more credit than they're getting. You saw, after Buffalo beat Dallas in prime time and everyone was watching, there was kind of a flurry in the last week to kind of recalibrate expectations for Josh Allen, which I found to be a little undeserving, I guess. He had one good game in a big spot and everybody saw it. And now they're looking back at his win-loss record and saying, oh yeah, no, now he's good. And I would say, no, this is much more about like, Baltimore is basically, I mean, Buffalo is basically Baltimore light. Like they're not like, he's not as dynamic an athlete as Lamar Jackson. He's not quite as good a thrower, but the way that they run their offense, the way that they can attack you with multiple looks on any given play, the way they can confuse your defenses, you know, not unlike what Baltimore is doing. And I think it'll be interesting to see if Baltimore can stop themselves effectively. And it's, this is not a great spot for them. I don't know how you keep your motivation up if you're Baltimore when you've been playing some of the absolute top tier competition across the league over the last six games they've played. You throw out the Cincinnati game where they just detonated them and you're talking about five teams that are absolutely in the mix to win a Super Bowl this year. Maybe the Rams are out of it now, but at the time they were, you know, very much in it. And, you know, they performed way above expectation in all of those games. And to a degree, if you think of, you know, the Ravens can perform on a spectrum and they've been consistently hitting above one standard deviation week in week out against some of the toughest teams in the league, at some point they're gonna play an average game. You know, and I don't think it was last week, even though they didn't cover, I thought they played really well last week, but at some point they're gonna play average. And they have a short week next week before they play the Jets on Thursday night. Football, this is, you know, tough atmosphere, potentially some cold weather, potentially some wind. I think there's enough factors at play here that could keep Baltimore, you know, this could be a little bit of a low spot for them, but I would still expect them to get the win being, you know, being the superior team. Yeah, and with Josh Allen, the Bills offensively and defensively look very different when you adjust for schedule. I think that's a good thing to keep in mind too. Both sides of the football because they've played a very soft schedule. So far the Ravens are not bad. Let's move on now to the 49ers at the Saints. Saints, favorite by two and a half here. We've seen some movement towards the 49ers. Total is 44 and a half. When we talked to you in the off season, you said that you were worried about Drew Brees's arm. And since they're bi-week, his average at the target is like 6.6, which is like a little bit better than Derek Carr. Derek Carr is, he's not checking it deep. Have those preseason concerns creep back in for you or does Brees's efficiency overcome that in your mind? Yeah, in the entire roller coaster of being an NFL handicapper can be captured by my feelings about the Saints over the course of the season. I feel like we identified pretty early on that Drew Brees was not his old self and he was gonna have difficulty being as dynamic or running a dynamic offense at least given that he wasn't able to throw accurate passes deeper than 10 yards down the field. And he knows that. This is not a great matchup for them. And there are some pretty specific issues with how they line up against the San Francisco defense that I would have very significant concerns if I was running to the window of the back of the Saints this week. Despite set aside the fact that the market is ready to sell this team, like I haven't seen in a long time from a contender, I would say that the injuries on the offensive line set up for a perfect matchup against the pass rush for the San Francisco 49ers. I think you're gonna see Brees under duress for a lot of this game. And I think as you flip the script here, San Francisco's running some creative offense right now. They're leaning pretty heavily on their running attack, but some of their passing scheme, some of the creative ways that Kyle Shanahan gets his guys open will be there against the very depleted defense missing a number of linebackers and Lattimore not at full strength. This sets up pretty well for San Francisco, I think, to get a statement wins. But this particular spot, I think they're the right side. They're the healthier team. They have matchup advantages on both sides of the ball. I think San Francisco gets it done. Sounds good. Let's move on to Chiefs at Patriots. Patriots are a three point favorite. Totals at 48 and a half. Tell us what your take on the Patriots offense. You told us a little bit about Brady and you still think he's got some zip on the ball. Any other reasons you expect them to bounce back from what's been a pretty poor showing so far this year? There's a couple. I try not to lean too heavily on look who they're going against as a defense, but this is one case where they do match up perfectly. I wouldn't be surprised at all if you see more 20 targets to James White and Julian Edelman on Sunday and a heavy dose of the running game for the Patriots offense as they play keep away basically, keep Pat Mahomes on the sidelines, force Pat Mahomes to make plays from the pocket. They have a defense that can contain him fairly well. They that worked quite well at times in the AFC championship game last year and they have coverage that has speed. So they can go speed on speed with their defensive backs, which is supremely important when you're facing the Chiefs. So I think this sets up well for the Patriots to get right. And I'm interested in this Patriots minus three as one of my better looks on Sunday. Given that you think that the Patriots may go more run heavy here, do you ever read on the total? It's a 48 and a half. It's a pretty high number, but it's also two of the faster teams in the league. Is that enough to push you towards the under or are you staying away from that? I looked real hard at the under. Especially before the Sunday night game, it was at like, I don't know, about 50-ish. And I was like, oh man, if that ends up being the total they hang after the Sunday night game as limits go up, I'm all over that under. But then they reopen, it's 48 and a half. Now that's getting a little tighter. I think there's a reasonable possibility that the Chiefs could score some garbage time points. If the Patriots are up by more than two scores here, you could see the Chiefs go to a more aggressive, pass-heavy approach and put up a couple of points late here. That sets up then for crossing your fingers that the Patriots can consistently run the clock out in the fourth quarter and keep the garbage time points to a minimum. So that being a little tight at 48 and a half is a stay away, but all of my feelings about game state and how these teams will attack each other does kind of lean to the under. Great. Any other games that you would like on the board for week 14 in the NFL? Well, you guys hit the three best. It's a great week. This might be the best week of the season. And I don't wanna throw any cold water on week 15, 16, 17 because there's gonna be some great playoff places here, but we're being treated by some of these matchups week 14, I'd say. I think the Seahawks are ripe to be faded in the prime time spot. I think the Rams get right in that one. Obviously the Rams got right last week against the Cardinals. That was an incredibly impressive performance by them, but the Rams are legit. They have talent across both sides of the ball and they're finally getting right. They're finally getting healthy. They fixed a couple of the major issues that were kind of glaring as they went through that sort of swoon in the middle of their schedule. So yeah, I think they get the win on Sunday Night Football against the Seahawks. Couple things with that one that are interesting is that the Seahawks have one of the lowest sacrates in football on defense and Jared Goff this year has been great when he's been given time. He hasn't been given time ever, basically, but when he's gotten time, he's been fine still. And I think that lends itself well for the Rams, but also as Tyler Lockett has been not fully healthy, we've seen Russell Lawson's passing efficiency take a pretty major dip, which makes sense because Russ targeting Lockett is like, it's insane how efficient he is and with Lockett not being fully healthy and maybe seeing Jalen Ramsey in this game, that's a couple of pretty tough scenarios for the Seahawks to overcome, especially being on the road. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. Those are really strong points. The Seahawks defense is exploitable. Going up against a fully healthy passing attack from the Rams is a bad spot for them. I think they're still value embedding them even as a small favorite in this one. And they've been overall underwhelming, disappointing over the course of the season and I think you nailed it. A lot of that is because their offensive line went through so many changes and got disrupted so significantly, but they're starting to perform a hell of a lot better. They went up against the tough pass rush last week with Chandler Jones and Arizona Cardinals and they acquitted themselves quite well. They gave, they're adjusting the routes and the offensive approach overall in a way that I think lends itself to more success in the passing game. Odd Gurley's got some relatively fresh legs. All of this I think plays pretty well for the Rams to do some damage on Sunday night. Now, whether they have any hope of kind of stealing that sixth spot in the playoffs is a different conversation. They have a very tough schedule down the home stretch here, but I do think that the urgency is more, if you want to go into X factors and motivations and narratives and stuff like that, the urgency is really more there for the Rams in this game than it is for the Seahawks who just got gifted at the top of the NFC West. And that'll be a fun game and a fun way to top off which should be an awesome day of football. That is Whale Capper. Find him on Twitter at whale underscore capper. Really appreciate you stopping by once again today, talking some NBA and NFL. Appreciate it. Good luck with your bets across both sports and hopefully we'll talk to you about some more NBA and NFL soon. Awesome, that was fantastic guys. Always fun beyond. Covering the future. One final thank you goes out to Whale Capper for swinging on by and talking about the NFL and the NBA. Again, follow him on Twitter at whale underscore capper. Make sure to check out the deep dive podcast, pretty much available wherever you get your podcasts and check that out for all of your gambling needs as well. And I thought it was good to get some NBA talk on here because it's been an interesting season so far. Do you do work with the NBA at the power rank or do you mostly stick to the college side? I do, I do some NBA stuff for a client. I calculate team rankings, I accumulate market data. But during the middle of football season, I don't get a chance to look at it much. So it was great talking to Whale. I was actually looking at my team rankings while he was talking. Definitely agreed with a lot of the things that he said. Miami was surprisingly high up there. But you can check it out at thepowerrank.com. It's not the most sophisticated thing in 2019 for the NBA because I'm just looking at all games and adjusting for strength schedule, obviously to get something that you want to bet on. You want to be a little bit more precise in that and know exactly who's playing in games. But yeah, I do a little bit. And it's been interesting over the last couple of years. By the time I'm really thinking about NBA, it's the playoffs. And it turns out like playoffs is not really a time where people are starting to bet on games. So there hasn't been a huge interest in what I've been doing. So I've actually kind of cut back and just treated the NBA just as a fan during the playoffs. Like I actually didn't run any numbers at all last year. No one complained, which was nice. Just enjoyed great NBA playoffs as a fan. What it allows you to focus on your strengths too. And clearly like the NFL stuff has done so well. The college football stuff and the college basketball stuff has done so well. Lean on your strengths. I think that's just a good thing to know is like a better in general too is knowing where you want to go. It's a big thank you to WAO for allowing us to catch up on the NBA a little bit here today. Ed and I always preach searching for the best value and betting on games. Look no further than the new odds comparison our engineers have developed over at numberfire.com. It's called odds fire. It's the premier odds comparison experience across major bookmakers in the regulated US market. Compare odds, quickly identify the best value and even examine first party fan dual data all in one place. Never settle, always get the best odds. Check out the experience for free. Now on numberfire or at oddsfire.com gambling problem call 1-800-GAMBLER. Let's dive in now to our cover in the future here for this week starting off with that New Orleans versus San Francisco game. Ed, what do you see with this one between the Saints and the 49ers? Yeah, I mean, I really like this New Orleans team. You know the franchise has been known for offense and the offense has been really good this year. They're fourth when I look at success rate adjusted for strength schedule that obviously includes six games started by Teddy Bridgewater. Drew Brees is back and on PFF, he actually has the second highest passer rating behind Russell Wilson and the gap is pretty tight. So I actually really trust him on that side of the ball. We had talked a little bit about his short average depth of target. I think that's the benefit in this game where he's gonna see a significant pass rush. I don't see Brees going deep a lot. Even if he did have arm strength of what he had a couple of years ago. I see him going short, going to Michael Thomas, avoiding that pass rush. And New Orleans is pretty good running the ball as well. This also might be New Orleans' best defense by the numbers. They're seventh in passing success rate on defense, seventh in rushing success rate as well. I just see a pretty solid team on both sides of the ball. And I think they just have fewer question marks than San Francisco. We talked a lot about how good their defense was. Something I'm pretty proud of noticing in the numbers like the first couple of weeks of the season. Still have a lot of questions about their offense. Jimmy G. hasn't been great. Their pass offense is 20th in looking at just success rate. They have been running the ball, but surprisingly like their rushing success rate is 28th after I just for shrink the schedule as well. So when I look at this game, New Orleans is at home. They have fewer questions than I have about the opposing Niners. I think the Niners are a very good team, but I do see value New Orleans minus two and a half points. Yeah, I think the thing that's pushed me off of New Orleans is I think the 49ers may be getting better as season goes along offensively. And that's so hard to quantify. And that's why it's hard for me to feel confident enough in it to bet the 49ers plus two and a half, but like Garoppolo throughout the year, at least like you see a lot of bad throws. Like he's made some hideous throws, but I think the body of work overall recently has impressed me. He's, he went on the road against Baltimore in really bad conditions. His passing efficiency there was significantly better than any quarterback who has faced the Ravens since the Marcus Peters trade. Everyone's been negative except for Garoppolo. And that was again in bad conditions that they're getting healthier. George Kittle's back, Emmanuel Sanders is healthier now that he was. They got Mike Mclinchy, the right tackle back. I don't think Joe Staley's back for this game. I haven't sure about that. He came back for one game. Yeah, he broke his finger and then he had surgery. So I think he's still out for this week, but, and that could be an issue against, you know, the Saints defensive line, but he's the way that I view this is Garoppolo has exceeded my expectations several times recently and it's enough where I don't want to bet against them, but it's also a small sample, small enough sample where I don't want to bet in favor of them. So I think for me, this one's kind of a stay away, but I get the reasoning on both sides of it for sure. Yeah, I mean, I need to see more from Jimmy G before I'm fully invested in them as playoff contenders. I was very off of him earlier this year. I thought he was terrible. I thought he was hideous. Like he was making his terrible throws, benefiting from Kyle Shanahan. I have slowly been changing my tune recently, and I think that I want to use this game as a really good barometer because he's not dealing with crazy weather and facing a top five pass defense. He's facing a very good pass defense as you mentioned, but indoors, I want to see how he does here. So I'm still kind of, which stinks. It's week 14. I shouldn't be in evaluation mode, but I kind of am specifically with Garoppolo. Now the defense just with Garoppolo himself. Yeah, I actually misspoke a little bit earlier. Their pass offense is ninth in adjusted success rate. The offense overall is 20th, actually being brought down by a rushing attack. That looked good last week, but I think that was more facing a Ravens front seven that I'm not too high on. Tevin Coleman has, I think, one of the worst success rates in football. I was looking at number fires numbers earlier. Like he's been really bad. Like they benched him. Maybe that's why they were finally good. But I think that I respect Kyle Shanahan's run schemes a lot, haven't been that good so far. I mean, the skee's been fine, but the efficiency hasn't been that good. So we talked about all these great games that talked about 49ers saints. We talked about chiefs Patriots. We got some bills Ravens, Seahawks Rams. Let's bring things down a couple notches, several notches. And let's talk some Browns and Bengals. The total here is 41 and a half points. And I love the over on this game. And the Bengals offense is a big part of the reasoning why, which is wild given how bad they've been this year, but they've been getting a lot healthier recently. And that's the opposite direction of most teams. When you see teams getting pieces back, I think that's very impactful at this point in the year. Specifically for the Bengals, they got their left tackle, Cordy Glenn back two weeks ago. They had been starting their fourth or fifth string left tackle for most of the year. Cordy Glenn is their second string left tackle. You know, they lost Jonah Williams back in July, but having your second string left tackle is a lot better than having your fourth stringer. So that's a positive. They got Andy Dalton back last week, unbenched for Ryan Finley. And now this week, they get John Ross back from injured reserve. And I think we've seen this year the effects of having a lidlifter, the Eagles specifically has really struggled without that. They're getting John Ross back. And Ross has been a pretty big key to this passing offense so far this year. When Ross has been on the field, Andy Dalton has averaged 6.9 yards per attempt according to the quant edge. When Ross is off Dalton's yards per attempt drops to 6.0, 6.9 is still not good, but it's a whole heck of a lot better than 6.0. So getting Ross back is a good thing for a Bengals offense that is facing the Browns with no Miles Garrett and no Morgan Burnett. And I think that bookmakers are kind of undervaluing or they're overvaluing the Browns defense with these guys being out. I think the Browns should score points too. They are facing the leaks 29th ranked past defense. They are ranked 15th in passing offense on number fire once you adjust for schedule. And they've been good when they've had plus matchups this year. We just haven't seen them in those plus matchups all that often. Now one thing I would note here is that there is some wind. It's currently at 16 miles per hour in Cleveland. That's pretty high, but there was also heavy wind when they played that Dolphins game. And one of their old kickers, Phil Dawson said that it depends on their direction of the wind. If it's coming from a certain direction, it'll be bad. If it's coming from another direction, it won't matter at all. So I don't worry as much about wind in Cleveland as I do some other spots. Right now 79% of the money at Fandall Sportsbook is on the over according to odds fire. You can still get it 40 and a half in some spots. And I would do a bit of price shopping before you dive into this one. But at 41 and a half, I am very okay taking it here at Fandall Sportsbook. I want to get it now because I think that this one has the potential to increase another point or two before we get to Sunday. I thought that last week, the Jets Bengals game was undervalued from a total perspective with Andy Dalton starting. It went well under. I think it was 28 total points scored in that game. But I think we're kind of still underrating how bad Ryan Finley was relative to Andy Dalton. So I want the over here on the Browns Bengals at 41 and a half points. This is a very low, low tier game that but any thoughts for you on Browns Bengals? Yeah, my total is model, which I don't trust a ton. Not as much as my size model. It does say 45 in this game. And it's probably a lot with how bad Cincinnati's past defense has been in terms of adjust the yards past attempts. Cleveland's offense has been better when you look at yards per attempt than success rates. So I think that's what the model is seeing. So yeah, I love looking at those bottom games. I was in a bar watching some football here in Ann Arbor and there were two Bengals fans glued to the TV at the bar. And they were so excited that their team got off the shot. I think it was what, 351 days since their last win. And yeah, me and my two friends just kind of sat in the peanut gallery and clapped for them as they left the bar in victory. Yeah, the good thing too is they were far enough. They were bad enough where they could afford to win a game and still be fine from the NFL draft perspective. They could still get Joe Burrow if they win a game. So they played it really well. They started riding Finley long enough to like B-O-N-11 or whatever it was. And now they can go back to Andy Dalton. They got a game cushioned. Why not? How many games did Finley start? Too many? Three, I think. Three, OK. I don't know, he was really bad. He's also, again, he's really old. He at the time he was starting was the oldest quarterback in the AFC North, he's like two years older than the Marjaxon, which is wild. And age does matter when evaluating NFL draft prospects. So it was very interesting that the Bengals decided to do evaluation next. I didn't think a lot of evaluation was all that necessary. But I think this game's fun. I think Jets Dolphins is actually fun too. So even the bad games in week 14 are going to be good. So hopefully you can sit back and enjoy some football this weekend, both on the college side and on the NFL side. A big thank you to Bob Stoll for talking with us about the college football games yesterday. You can find him on Twitter at Dr. Bob Sports. And then today, Whalecapper, for breaking down the NFL and the NBA, find him on Twitter at whale underscore capper. Ed, what you got going on for this weekend over at the Power Inc? Yeah, just released a podcast with Rob Pizzola, which was a lot of fun. We talked about both team and player-based models. And it was interesting to hear some of the contrarian takes on NFL quarterbacks. Oh, interesting. Not the typical takes that you hear out there. So Rob's a pro, sports better. So really good information over there. I know that Rob does not like my God, Jared Goff. So I got to proceed with caution. He does not like God, Jared Goff. I understand where he's coming from though. So I get it, but I got to proceed with caution. But I respect Rob a lot. So I'll check that out by searching for the football analytics show wherever you get your podcast. Ed is on Twitter at the Power Inc. You can also find all of his work at thepowerinc.com. I am on Twitter at Jim Sonnis, J-I-M-S-A-N-N-E-S. We posted our DFS podcast today, breaking down week 14. We did talk, Chiefs Patriots. We also had some talk on that, Jets Dolphins game and Browns Bengals as well as you can find that by searching for the number fired Daily Fantasy podcast feed. If you missed our college football breakdown, make sure you search for covering the spread wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please rate, interview the podcast and subscribe so you can get next week podcast as well. Big thank you to Calvin Theobald for running the video side of things here today, as always. Thank you, Cal, for doing that and chopping up clips for the atFanDual Twitter account. And thank you to everyone for tuning in. We really do appreciate it. And good luck with your bets this week. We'll talk to you again next week. This has been covering the spread right here on the FanDual podcast network.