Oakland Raiders and Denver Broncos Renew Their Rivalry On NFL Monday Night Football

Christmas Eve is historically a terrible day for sports betting enthusiasts with little to no action on the board. There’s not much to choose from this year but at least there’s something. The NHL is off until Thursday, December 27. The NBA is focused on its big slate of Christmas Day TV games. College bowl action resumes December 26. There’s one college basketball game and one NFL game which is actually a lot more than in a typical year. That’s the good news, now the bad news—the NFL game is an ugly matchup between the 6-8 Denver Broncos and the 3-11 Oakland Raiders.

The old cliché about rivalry games is that the teams involved ‘throw the record out the window’ when they play each other and hopefully that is the case here. The Broncos and Raiders have one of the most intense rivalries in the NFL which is curious for teams separated by 1,250 miles, several massive mountain ranges and in different time zones. Even the die hard fans of the teams disagree on when the rivalry started. Some trace the official date to January 2, 1994 but most suggest that it began much earlier. An article on The Football Educator website dissected the rivalry and its origins:

There are those in Bronco Nation that’ll tell you the rivalry between Denver and Oakland was born long before January 2, 1994. Denver Broncos’ players like Randy Gradishar, Tom Jackson, Karl Mecklenberg and the rest of the Orange Crush recall the bitterness boiling between the two well back into the late ’70’s and throughout the ’80’s.

A good rivalry can make for an intense game even between struggling teams. Unfortunately, that might not be the case here. Travis Wakeman is one of the sharper observers of the Denver Broncos in the media zeitgeist and he suggests that the poor play of the Raiders over the past decade has undermined the rivalry. This year, you have to add the Broncos’ poor play to that dynamic. We last heard from Wakeman a couple of weeks back when he ranked current Denver head coach Vance Joseph as the worst in franchise history.

The sum total of all of this? The rivalry is there and among the most intense in NFL football but might be somewhat dormant due to the struggles of both teams at this juncture. If Broncos coach Joseph had the ability to a) gameplan or b) get his team motivated he might be able to get a win in hopes of increasing the dwindling chances of keeping his job. Oakland’s Jon Gruden is in the first year of his second tenure with the team and isn’t going anywhere. Then again, he’s got deep roots with the Raiders’ organization and might have a better grasp on the rivalry’s significance. Plus there’s the thing about his ability as a football coach—we know that Gruden can win at the NFL level. The same thing can’t be said about Denver’s Joseph.

For some reason, Gruden has never done well against the Broncos. Despite his considerable ability as a head coach his teams are 1-10 SU lifetime against the Denver Broncos. Of course most of the Denver teams he’s faced to date had more talent and were better coached. Gruden has forgotten more about coaching than Vance Joseph will ever know. Joseph’s NFL pointspread record as a favorite (4-11-2) doesn’t give us much confidence to lay the points with a bad team. Also worth noting that the last four games in this series have gone Under the total including this year’s previous meeting won by Denver 20-19 in Week 2.

Ultimately, my verdict on this game is simple. We’ve got two bad teams with few offensive weapons. The series has trended toward low scoring games and the Broncos at this point might be more offensively inept than Oakland (Denver Under in 7 straight, 8 of 9, and 11 of 13 this season). Laying points on the road in the NFL is a tough thing to do even with good teams. It sounds like an extremely bad idea with this Broncos team no matter who they’re facing.

BET OAKLAND RAIDERS +3 OVER DENVER BRONCOS