Sometimes upsets surprise you, and sometimes you can smell a fishy line a mile away.
This was the Colts and Bills game in a nutshell.
I said it all week on BetMGM Tonight: This line feels oddly wrong, Indy is playing really good football, they’ve beaten some good teams, and being 7.5 point dogs seemed … off.
Of course, everyone talked about the Bills having the top defense in the NFL, how their offense would roll over the Colts. The storyline was how the Bills had the best point differential in the NFL, which was the rationale for why the Bills were 7.5 point favorites.
But upon a closer look, here are the teams the Bills blew out: Miami without Tua, Houston without Tyrod Taylor, and the New York Jets without Zach Wilson. So, dogsh*t teams without their mediocre starting QBs.
Not exactly a murderer’s row.
And as for their “quality wins,” this team has just one: the Kansas City Chiefs, who at the time were STRUGGLING.
Seems like a whole lot of smoke and mirrors to me.
Let’s be real. The Bills hadn’t proved themselves at all to be legit and certainly not legit enough to be 7.5-point favorites to a VERY consistent Colts team with a staunch defense and the nastiest running game in the league.
So if it looks like a fish and smells like a fish, it mostly likely is… a Buffalo Bill.
And just like that, as soon as they faced another tough opponent, they put up a big stinky L like they did against the Titans (and the Steelers and even the trash-ass Jags). And it wasn’t just an L, it was a shellacking. Josh Allen looked more like his rookie season than the MVP level play we’ve gotten used to.
His stat line: 21/35 for 209 yards with 2 TDs and 2 picks. The entire offense only put up 300 yards total.
Yikes.
We need to talk about what this all means.
The Bills may just mess around and lose this division. The Patriots sit atop the AFC East at 7-4, having won five games in a row, and have huge wins against the Browns and the Chargers. Even in their losses against quality teams, the Patriots have looked impressive. The games against the Bucs and the Cowboys were both games that went down to the wire.
We’re going to find out what the Bills are actually made of very soon.
The Bills face the Pats twice between now and the day after Christmas. If they don’t get their shit together soon, they’re going to be staring at a wild card game and a one-and-done end to a season in which pretty much everyone anointed them the team to beat.
I think this team can be good, but they just haven’t been. And only time (and three games against the Patriots and Bucs) will tell us if their fan base has been drinking the kool-aid, or if they are a legit threat to go deep.
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I am sick to my stomach thinking about what Stephen A. will say tomorrow about my Cowboys.
Sometimes in your mind you envision how something is going to go, and then in reality the exact inverse happens. I thought the Cowboys would give the Chiefs a hard time defensively -- and they SORT of did -- but I never suspected a Chiefs D that was ranked dead last three weeks ago would put the top offense in the NFL in handcuffs, but that is exactly what happened.
The Kansas City defense beat the Dallas Cowboys and I’m still kind of shellshocked about it. Chris Jones had four tackles, and I think they were all for losses. The front four held Ezekiel Elliott to just 32 yards on nine carries.
CeeDee Lamb got hurt on the last play of the first half. Amari Cooper is unvaxxed and now will miss NEXT week as well. Terence “The Turnstile” Steele was in for Tyron Smith and let me tell you, he reverted back to his 2020 form when he was statistically the worst offensive linemen in the league. He got ABUSED.
The Chiefs stacked the box, and knowing that Cooper (and later Lamb) were gone, it was the let’s make Michael Gallup beat us show, and with Dak getting hit on pretty much every play, it was curtains. Dak was bad (he threw two picks for the first time this year) because the offensive line was a sieve, the running game was non-existent, and the Cowboys got decimated on special teams.
The only plus was that the Cowboys defense showed up, holding Mahomes to zero touchdown passes. Micah Parsons had two sacks and two tackles for losses despite facing multiple double teams. The Chiefs only scored 19 points which should have been enough for the Cowboys to win this game, but this offense was 0-2 in the red zone and had to settle for three field goals total.
As for the Chiefs? Maybe Super Bowl aspirations are not exactly back on, but they finally got a quality win they needed to instill some confidence. The defense looked much improved, but there’s still some questions because they were only able to score two touchdowns. The offensive issues haven’t been fixed and the line is still porous. There’s still some work to do going forward, but they might just have righted the ship.
What does this mean going forward for the Cowboys? They might not get a first-round bye. It means they need to get healthy, and they need to get better coaching as Mike McCarthy looked lost at times, per usual. They’ve now lost two of three but the schedule is favorable moving forward with only one winning team on the schedule for the rest of the year.
It also means we’re in for a short week of Stephen A. laughing and trolling with his Cowboys hat on before Dallas faces the Raiders on Thanksgiving night.
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So, all week long I’ve been thinking about trap games. I wrote two weeks ago we were entering trap season, and sure enough, the last three weeks at least one +10 or greater underdog has won on the Money Line.
Surely not this week, though, right? After all, the only big dogs this week were the Detroit Lions who ended at +13.5 and the Houston Texans who were +10 at the surging Tennessee Titans.
No way a huge dog wins again this week, right? I mean the Lions are so, so bad, and the Texans are… the Texans.
LOL Guess again.
Just like clockwork the bear trap sprung and cut the Tennessee Titans off at the knees in what was one of the ugliest, least entertaining games of the year, Tyrod Taylor and the Houston defense led the Texans to a 22-12 win that wasn’t ever close, certainly not like the final score would indicate.
The Titans got stuffed in pretty much every aspect of the game. The Houston secondary picked off Ryan Tannehill FOUR TIMES. Tennessee fumbled four times, although they recovered three. In other words, the Titans had FIVE turnovers. Legit no one in the NFL can win turning the ball over that much.
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Here’s where they truly, madly, deeply miss Derrick Henry. This is the kind of game King Henry could have won on his own. And it exposes the fact that the Titans have very big problems on their hands if they can’t establish a running game without him. Adrian Peterson is not the answer.
Who’s getting bear trapped next week? Look for those big underdogs on the money line, because trap season is here to stay.
So much more happening around the league -- Baltimore’s season might have been saved by a back up, Minnesota upended the Packers, and Colt McCoy put a coffin nail in the Seahawks’ season.
What a fun weekend. Can’t wait for Thanksgiving football!
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