Christmas Eve is historically a terrible day for sports betting enthusiasts with little to no action on the board. There\u2019s not much to choose from this year but at least there\u2019s 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\u2019s one college basketball game and one NFL game which is actually a lot more than in a typical year. That\u2019s the good news, now the bad news\u2014the NFL game is an ugly matchup between the 6-8 Denver Broncos and the 3-11 Oakland Raiders.<\/p>\n
The old clich\u00e9 about rivalry games is that the teams involved \u2018throw the record out the window\u2019 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<\/a> dissected the rivalry and its origins:<\/p>\n There are those in Bronco Nation that\u2019ll tell you the rivalry between Denver and Oakland was born long before January 2, 1994. Denver Broncos\u2019 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 \u201970\u2019s and throughout the \u201980\u2019s.<\/em><\/p>\n 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<\/a>. This year, you have to add the Broncos\u2019 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Jon Gruden is in the first year of his second tenure with the team and isn\u2019t going anywhere. Then again, he\u2019s got deep roots with the Raiders\u2019 organization and might have a better grasp on the rivalry\u2019s significance. Plus there\u2019s the thing about his ability as a football coach\u2014we know that Gruden can win at the NFL level. The same thing can\u2019t be said about Denver\u2019s Joseph.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s faced to date had more talent and were better coached. Gruden has forgotten more about coaching than Vance Joseph will ever know. Joseph\u2019s NFL pointspread<\/a> record as a favorite (4-11-2) doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s previous meeting won by Denver 20-19 in Week 2.<\/p>\n Ultimately, my verdict on this game is simple. We\u2019ve 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\u2019re facing.<\/p>\n BET OAKLAND RAIDERS +3 OVER DENVER BRONCOS<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Christmas Eve is historically a terrible day for sports betting enthusiasts with little to no action on the board. There\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":4922,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[129],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nfl"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4921"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4924,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4921\/revisions\/4924"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}