BAD BEATS: NFL WEEK 8

BY ADAM GREENE

After a week with no Bad Beat to speak of, the NFL was back to its old tricks, delivering a solid selection for us to choose from, especially thanks to lines moving by gameday.

You want upsets? We had upsets all week, starting on Thursday night when they Green Bay Packers knocked off the previously unbeaten Arizona Cardinals 24-21. The Carolina Panthers shocked the Atlanta Falcons, 19-13. Ben Roethlisberger reclaimed his FirstEnergy Stadium belt with a Steelers 15-10 win over the Cleveland Browns.

The lowly New York Jets knocked off the high flying Cincinnati Bengals with their back up quarterback 34-31. The New Orleans Saints, with their No. 2 QB, benefited by a last second pick six from none other than Tom Brady himself in a 36-27 win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

And Mac Jones claimed his first victory over a team not starting a rookie QB when the New England Patriots upended the Los Angeles Chargers 27-24.

My picks this week were a bloodbath fit for Halloween and I’m sure I was not alone. But an upset doesn’t a Bad Beat make. Nope. A Bad Beat has to come out of the blue, has to reach into your wallet and steal your money in the final plays of the game. None of those games were even in the mix.

We had two contenders this week. The first was Los Angeles Rams 38, Houston Texans 22, but I had to disqualify it. The game was Rams -14.5 or around there until Sunday when the line moved to -16.5. You only suffered the bad beat if you slid your bet in under the wire and, frankly, with a line that large, you couldn’t be too shocked to see the Texans back door cover against LA’s third teamers.

Los Angeles sat its starters up 38-0 with a full quarter left in the contest. A preseason game broke out for 15 minutes and Davis Mills actually moved the ball against Rams players who hadn’t seen significant action since August. As long as you didn’t wait until noon Sunday to place your wager, you had the Rams at -14.5 and took home your payday.

No, there was only one real choice for this week’s Bad Beat and it not only cost you money, but complexly upended the AFC hierarchy in 60 minutes of football. I’m talking, of course, about Tennessee Titans 34, Indianapolis Colts 31.

Now, you might think that this one would have tossed up some red flags as the Titans had just, in consecutive weeks, knocked off the Buffalo Bills and Kansas City Chiefs, but you had metrics on your side. You knew that Carson Wentz was riding the longest pass streak without an interception in the league and Indy had also won their last two games. Of course, one was over the lowly Texans, who we’ve already mentioned are garbage. The other was a road victory in the rain over the San Francisco 49ers. That one counted and Wentz was spectacular there, throwing for two touchdowns and running for one in a monsoon.

The Colts were -2.5 favorites, so all you needed to collect your cash was an extra field goal. And if there’s any team that will absolutely soil the bedsheets after two monster wins it’s Tennessee, who managed to lose 27-24 to the New York Jets a month ago. No, we’re not forgetting that fiasco.

So it was with all that knowledge and research in hand you plunked down your wager and started thinking about the future, the post-winter world you would emerge from come June 2022 with better pandemic news coming every single day. Somehow the plague rats natural immunity, gained from actually catching COVID-19 on purpose and those of us that got vaccinated in spite of the danger of magnetizing our necks and testicles, are currently overlapping to the extent that coronavirus rates are dropping all over the country.

Even Florida is seeing an improvement and they’re a Mad Max Fury Road Covid hellhole led by Imorten Ron DeSantis, a guy who somehow, in spite of a solid paycheck, can’t seem to find a suit that doesn’t make him look like someone draped a tarp over a beached beluga whale carcass.

And if Florida is safe next year, you know what that means? Disney World, a place that might actually be OK to visit a solid eight months from now. Your kids have been dying to step aboard the life sized Millennium Falcon since you first saw people standing in front of it at the Star Wars park on Facebook and Instagram, or at least that’s what you plan on telling everyone when really it’s the dream you’ve held in your heart since you first saw it streak across the movie screen in 1977.

And in the first quarter, you were all but sliding into the cockpit next to Chewbacca as the Colts took a 14-0 lead. Tennessee stormed back to tie it, but a field goal at halftime put Indy up 17-14 and gave you all the points you’d need to explore the Black Spire Outpost on the Planet Batuu.

Of course, all that changed in the second half when the teams started trading ties back and forth, one thanks to a Wentz interception, the first he’d thrown in weeks. But he got it back, leading a scoring drive with barely a minute to go to force the game to overtime.

Once in the extra period, the teams traded punts which meant a field goal would win it. Indianapolis had the ball and you were already holding a custom made action figure from the Toydarian Toymaker’s shop in your greedy fingers when Wentz, on his own 27 yard line, tossed a perfect interception to the Titans’ Kevin Byard.

Tennessee ran three plays and kicked the game winning 44 yard field goal, destroying your Star Wars hopes. You slumped back on your couch, feeling a great disturbance in the Force, as if all your dreams of taking the Millennium Falcon into hyperspace while dodging a kid’s melting ice cream cone were suddenly silenced.

The NFL season is rolling along and the Week 9 Schedule is up and taking bets at BetOnline.AG.

Follow our BetOnline Twitter account for the latest sports news and betting odds, and stay tuned on the Instagram feed for more good information too