As usual, this year’s Week 17 games provide a set of unique circumstances in many cases. There are four teams who have their seed completely locked up and have very little incentive to play starters–New York, Dallas, Pittsburgh, and Houston. Point spreads for those games are pretty disconnected from the actual strength of the teams, so (with one exception) we’ll leave those games alone–for now at least. The rest of the games involve teams who have a playoff spot or playoff seeding to play for, and teams that have been eliminated. I haven’t found that eliminated teams play worse than expected, given the lack of motivation. After all, these are professionals playing for future contracts and starting jobs; whether their team makes the playoffs has little to do with how they’ll get paid in the future. So we’ll stick with our guns on the rest of the games.
Had some misfortune last week with our lone Big Play (Cincinnati Pk/+1), which fell by two as Randy Bullock pushed the potential game-winning 43-yard field goal wide right as time expired. It was certainly a game where the timing of posting picks hurt, as I took a position on the game at Cincy +2.5 early in the week, and injury news drove the line back to +2.5/+3 over the weekend. But, unfortunately, the game still gets graded a loss for Massey-Peabody purposes.
Big Plays (8-17.5-2.5 YTD)
- Carolina +4.5 at Tampa Bay [MP Line: CAR -1.3]
- New Orleans +7 at Atlanta [MP Line: NO +4.1]
- San Diego +5.5 vs. Kansas City [MP Line: SD +1.3]
- Denver -1 vs. Oakland [MP Line: DEN -6.0]
- Cincinnati -1 vs. Baltimore [MP Line: CIN -4.1]
Other Plays (11-13.5-2.5 YTD)
- Tennessee -3 vs. Houston [MP Line: TEN -5.7]
Break-Even or Better (13-17-2 YTD)
- Indianapolis -4.5 vs. Jacksonville [MP Line: IND -6.8]
Massey-Peabody Line on Remaining Games
- Buffalo -3.6 at New York Jets
- **Washington -2.2 vs. New York Giants
- Green Bay -4.0 at Detroit
- **Dallas -1.5 at Philadelphia
- Minnesota -8.1 vs. Chicago
- **Pittsburgh -14.8 vs. Cleveland
- New England -11.0 at Miami
- Arizona -5.8 at Los Angeles
- Seattle -8.1 at San Francisco