Thoughts on My Lines & Line Movements & Middles

For the second week in a row, my lines are picking more favorites and Overs. Last week we did well on the totals, +4 Units, and just narrowly missed being +5.5 Units when the Browns failed to get a touchdown on 1st and Goal from the one. A touchdown there would've put the total Over the 40.5. It was pretty much an even week on the sides played, as the stronger selections did pretty well, while most everything else went by the way side, in no small part due to the horrible turnover ratios we suffered in many games. The bad turnover imbalance over the last few weeks makes it harder to gauge how good my lines on the sides have actually been. I was killing the sides earlier this season, but have done quite poorly the last 2 weeks when looking at all the sides, which is what is graded at thepredictiontracker. There have been several games the past few weeks where I've had the dogs picked to cover and in spite of gaining more yards than their opponents, they lost and also failed to cover. What I'm probably going to do is look at the yards per play averages for each team and project what the final score would have been based on NFL averages. That will give us a ballpark estimation of the quality wins and losses for the week.

As I've said before, I've traditionally been stronger on sides than totals with my lines. This week's line movements attest to that. I'm almost always on the right side of the biggest line moves with totals. On sides it can be hit and miss. I've dropped a half point on a couple of games where I really liked the other side so far this week. The lesson to be learned is that if you're looking to put extra units down on an early play looking to set up a middle, my strongest value totals are the ones to do it with. This week, the OAK/ATL Over was showing the most value versus the opening lines, and it ended up being the line with the most movement in the first hour. The MIN/HOU & DEN/MIA Overs followed suit within the day. We've had overall good success with line movements on sides as well this year, but I think there will be fewer opportunities with middles there, as most of the line changes with sides occur on the less key numbers. The books are loathe to move numbers through 3,7 & 10 for fear of being middled. The lines don't move as much on the sides typically anyways, as the books tend to post softer lines on the totals that the sharps (like us, lol) will attack right away forcing the books to make quick adjustments.