BAD BEATS: NFL WEEK 5

BY ADAM GREENE

Usually the week’s Bad Beat leaps off the screen at us, but not in Week Five. An NFL Sunday that saw one of the league’s best players in Dak Prescott leave the field with a season-ending ankle injury was just weird all around. And maybe nothing was more odd than the fact that not a single team attempted to murder your betting ticket late in the fourth quarter.

Nope, for the most part all the damage was done early. So while we didn’t get that technical definition of a Bad Beat, money was still lost by the truckload.

For instance, let’s talk about that aforementioned New York Giants at Dallas Cowboys game. The Cowboys were -9.5 favorites. At the end of the first quarter, they trailed 17-3. You get a score like that, you know that a scramble is about to happen. While Dallas could still come back and win (and they did), is it going to be by 10 points? Not unless they’re the Kansas City Chiefs.

Oh yeah, the Chiefs. They were -11.5 favorites over the Las Vegas Raiders. At halftime it was 24-24 and Derek Carr had body switched with 1999 Kurt Warner.  If you laid money on that double-digit line, your money was gone before your nachos congealed.

And our old friends the Atlanta Falcons, who seem to live to get into this article? Well, they’re still here because all they had to do is cover a single point against the Carolina Panthers and they couldn’t even do that.

Remember how you saw Jimmy Garoppolo returning for the San Francisco 49ers as they hosted Ryan PICKSpatrick? That -9 looked like a wide open three, with no one anywhere in your zip code, but you fired it up only to see it brick off the rim so hard you were fined by OSHA for not wearing a hard hat and safety goggles. The Dolphins led 30-7 at halftime of that one. Not only were your nachos congealed, the cat was eating them and you didn’t even care.

It all wrapped up Sunday night with the Seattle Seahawks enjoying a seven point cushion over a hapless one-win Minnesota Vikings team whose lone victory came over the even more hapless aforementioned Falcons. Russell Wilson had thrown, and I’m not checking stats here, 472 touchdowns so far this season and the Vikes hadn’t stopped any team in four tries. And they didn’t Sunday night either. It’s just that all those issues we’ve tried to ignore on the Seattle defense decided to show up at once too, making Kirk Cousins look like Russell Wilson.

The Seahawks won, but at what cost? Any bet or parlay you laid on them. That cost.

As always, when it comes to a football week of bad luck all around, the blame lies at the feet of one man; Tom Brady.

Because this nonsense all started Thursday night.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers were just -4.5 favorites over a Chicago Bears team that scored 11 points against the Indianapolis Colts the week before. Brady, on the other hand, had just lit up the Los Angeles Chargers to the tune of five touchdown passes. The only thing that could go wrong is if Brady was so off his game that he forgot how to count to four.

What were the chances of that happening?

Yeah. There was no single Bad Beat for Week Five. Week Five was the Bad Beat.

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