NFL 2012 Playoffs Week 2: Life is good

This morning the OB/GYN told us our baby fetus is perfectly healthy.  Tonight I'm going to go see a couple movies with friends on a Friday night.  Tomorrow I'm going to watch playoff football, then go to another friend's house for a nice dinner.  On Sunday, I'll watch more playoff football and go to a birthday party for one of Violet's cousins and it will be a lot of fun.  Even all the 49ers fans around me are happy and excited going into the weekend.  You know what this means?  It's really hard to write with angst and disgrunt when you have such a positive outlook on life.  Even my $-130 week last week can't get me down.  Wait, maybe it can a little.  I can start to feel the emotion boiling up inside me.  I can start to envision losing to Scott and MP, and worst of all, giving up my $50 lead over Royce.  That will really frustrate me.  I put in so many hours and devise a pretty sound process and these schmucks come in and "go with their gut" and emerge victorious.  You know what really irks me?  The fact that I really, really do think the Patriots and Broncos will meet in the AFC Championship, but 9.5 is just too many damn points.  ARRRGGGHHHHHH!!!!!



Baltimore (+9.5) over DENVER: The classic demsiado puntos.  It feels wrong to be making a pick hoping for a backdoor, garbage time cover.  But I would only be taking the Broncos if they were favored by 7.  The one thing I take solace in, is that both of these teams are pretty close and pretty average in terms of interceptions.  So this could actually be a close game...but I don't actually believe that.  Separately, I have always been a decent fan of Peyton Manning.  I really do consider him the best quarterback ever because I don't value Super Bowl victories as much as subjective analysts do.  So when the Colts faced the Saints a few years ago, I wanted Manning to win just to end that part of the discussion.  The same still applies.  But as a Chargers fan, I don't like having Peyton Manning in my division for the next few years.  So I hope he does well over the next few weeks, but Von Miller becomes a 'personality' and decides to get paid a ton of money from another team.  You know, in 2015.  Ugh.

SAN FRANCISCO (-3) over Green Bay: For some reason, coming into the week, I felt the most comfortable with this pick.  But after looking at my data and realizing I would be taking the 49ers all the way up to 3.5 points, maybe I shouldn't be very comfortable.  In fact...I was trying to think of some way to phrase how I was most likely to get this wrong, but only among favorites I am picking to cover.  From my interceptions data, Green Bay is actually more likely to win.  They are better at intercepting the ball and not throwing interceptions, which you would think would be the staple of Jim Harbaugh's strategy.  There's something in there about being happy to go contrarian by picking Green Bay, but I can't quite formulate it.  Maybe it's the thinking the 49ers will win, but getting tired of all the SF fans I live around turning into Boston fans with the success of the 49ers and Giants.  That's right.  You heard me.  SF fans are approaching Boston fans levels of obnoxiousness. 

Seattle (+2.5) over ATLANTA: This doesn't feel special or contrarian because most people are picking the Seahawks.  (Currently 52% are picking the Seahawks ATS, while the favorites are getting 60-65% in the other games.  WAIT!!  I read that wrong.  The Packers +3 are getting picked 65% of the time, so my 49ers pick above IS contrarian!  YAY!)  So that means, the Seahawks are the only non-contrarian pick I am making.  In general, with sports betting, do you believe in the wisdom of the crowds or being contrarian?  Also, this paragraph is filled with red squigglies because Blogger is telling me contrarian, Seahawks, and squigglies are not words.  There is not a single red squiggly in the previous three paragraphs.  Even ARRRGGGHHHHHH!!!!! does not have a red squiggly.  Although it does in this paragraph.  Weird.  Maybe its a sign that this paragraph should be the anti-weird paragraph in terms of my picks and I'm going to go 4-0 this week?  Or more likely I'll go 3-1 or 2-2 or 1-3.  Because we all know that analytics (another red squiggly), if nothing else, know how to suck all the fun out of whatever.

Houston (+9.5) over NEW ENGLAND:  I wanted to go with the French translation of "too many points", but that would have ruined my no red squiggly in ...wait a tic ...all the red squigglies from the previous paragraph are gone.  Apparently they disappear once I move on to a new paragraph or the post autosaves.  So, that entire thing about red squigglies was pointless and doesn't actually mean anything.  Not that it actually meant anything regarding my picks.  Because does anything we do or say or believe actually affect these games?  Well if one of us was employed by the NFL, then yeah, probably.  But I'm pretty confident everyone reading this is not employed by the NFL and therefore, any thoughts or superstitions you have don't actually make a difference.  BUT, they don't NOT make a difference either.  Nothing bad can happen from your game day superstitions.  So why not embrace them?  I'm going contrarian on this pick and I'll figure out some superstition other than red squigglies (man, that one really was stupid, wasn't it?) that will make me feel better about myself when I go 1-3 again and get pass by Royce's brain and/or gut.