Game Flowbotics: Week 11 Picks Against the Spread

Nov 18, 2021

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The season continues to roll along, and we’re on to Week 11. I’ve updated the Game Flowbotics worksheet to show actual Weighted DVOA for teams instead of DAVE in the “Wt’d DVOA” cells. If you’re unfamiliar with these metrics from Football Outsiders, Weighted DVOA assigns more value to a team’s recent performance, while DAVE combines DVOA for the full season with preseason projections. At this point in the season, our sample size of in-season data is now large enough to outweigh the impressions of preseason projections, so DAVE has less value to us when evaluating over/under and against the spread picks. Ultimately, it’s a minor change but still worth announcing for any of you who might be deep-diving into the spreadsheet each week. With that out of the way, let’s review how last week’s article fared before blasting off into my best bets for Week 11.

Accountability

Last week, I went 3-2 with my picks for a gain of 0.75 units. Year to date, my record is 45-36-1 (55.6%) and I’m up 5.871 units overall. On the plus side, my best bets went 3-0. Unfortunately, my rapid-fire picks went 0-2 and gave most of the best bets’ profits right back to the books. A winning week is a winning week, but I might go back to more half-unit bets on the lines where I’m less confident.

With that said, picking last week’s Atlanta-Dallas game to go over 54.5 points wasn’t an angle where I lacked conviction. The Cowboys did their part, piling up 43 points, but the Falcons failed to hold up their end of the bargain. Perhaps I should have seen more value in the team total for Dallas than the game total, but expecting Atlanta to post 12 or more points didn’t seem too tall an order, especially considering how much garbage time they had to work with. I’m chalking that loss up as a bad beat, but it does serve as a good reminder to consider team totals rather than game totals in certain situations.

On the other hand, picking the over for the Rams-49ers game was an instance where my confidence level was low. I said as much in my brief write-up, indicating that a pivot to the under might make sense if the game total moved north of 50 points. The line closed at 50.5—I hope you took that advice. Still, the fact I was wishy-washy on the bet in the first place means I either shouldn’t have recommended it or risked only half a unit on it. Lesson learned for future weeks and apologies to any of you who went down with me on that o48.5 ship.