[bills217]

What I'd like to know is, exactly who out there was betting on SD?

Oh wait - I was - lol

I honestly feel bad about winning money on that game. Like I've sold out to the voodoo of blindly public-road-fave-fading over sound, rational handicapping.

This is one of those games where I cannot think of any good reason why the line was what it was - seemingly, sharp and square cappers alike were all on the Colts, with only the mindless faders/line shoppers like MT2R, iggy, myself, etc. on the Chargers, and the books also (presumably) with considerable exposure on the Chargers.

It's because of games like these that I don't waste even 1 second trying to cap an NFL game. Of course, fluky stuff happens, and it's no reason not to handicap, but my point is, it just seems to me like the fluky stuff tends to happen more often in weird situations like these where all the coherent opinions from a handicapping standpoint are on the same team. (I have absolutely no evidence to support this.)

I would stop short of calling the games fixed, but it is just extremely odd to me. Honestly, the betting angle has ruined the NFL for me as a fan because of how random I view the outcomes to be. Every time someone mentions NE going undefeated to me, I tell them I expect NE to lose 2-3 games, because it's the NFL and the only constant is that totally inexplicable things happen all the time.

I think part of the problem may be that the games are just too short and thus extremely high variance - also the advent of more athletic DB's/return guys results in more TD returns, which is the ultimate high variance play in perhaps all of sports, of which this game was a great example. I think I would like to see the clock stop until the ball is spotted after first downs like in college. It would lengthen the game (which is exactly why it won't happen). It would also make things a lot more entertaining near the end. Imagine how many 4Q comebacks Favre/Elway etc. would have had if the clock had stopped after 1st downs.

I'd also like to see pass interference limited to 15 yards like in college. 50-yard pass interference penalties are really dumb. They put the game in the hands of entirely subjective snap judgments by the officials that cannot be reviewed.

I guess the NFL higher-ups actually love the parity though - look how great it has been for the league.