Happy New Year to all. I hope 2013 has been treating you all fairly well so far – well at least as well as Andy Reid. Has there ever been a head coach in a major North American professional sport that went from being fired on Monday and fired less than a week later? Usually guys have to take a step down to co-ordinator, not make a lateral move to a new gig.
But, enough with the preamble, we’re talking about the playoffs now.
Lines are straight from Vegas and the home teams are in CAPS.
TEXANS -4.5 over Bengals
A crappy game from last year’s playoffs gets a rematch that should be just as uninteresting. The Texans may be slumping a bit hurt on defence, but their upgrade from T.J. Yates starting last year’s matchup and Matt Schaub starting this year is more than enough to pick Houston. I’m also not going to buy into the Bengals hot streak heading into the playoffs. The only playoff-bound teams they beat this season were the Redskins back in Week 3 and the Ravens last week in a meaningless affair.
Vikings +8 over PACKERS
The key here is that both times Adrian Peterson faced the Packers this season, he rushed for 210 and 199 yards. That’s good enough to counteract how bad Christian Ponder can be. Don’t complete buy in to the fact that game is at Lambeau Field either. Lambeau has been anything but a fortress, winning just one game there in the past five years. Also, how great would it be to see Ponder miss this game? With Joe Webb at QB, I’d be confident enough to take the Minnesota money line.
RAVENS -6.5 over Colts
I’ve got to hand it to Ray Lewis, there’s no way that any of his Ravens teammates will dog it in this game after he announced he would retire after this season. That should be enough to get Baltimore going on a Chuckstrong-like run. Throw in that the Ravens are significantly better playing at home coupled with the Colts stinking away from Indy and this one could get ugly.
Seahawks -3 over REDSKINS
This should be the best game of the wild-card round, hands down. These two teams will know each others’ offence since they both run variations of the read option. The big difference here is that the Seahawks defence is going to be good enough to stop RG3. The Skins haven’t exactly been too impressive during their seven-game winning streak, beating only the Ravens and they did that at home and needed OT. While the points are tempting to take, I’d rather have a complete package of a team.
Last week: 11-5
This season: 132-116-9