There’s a reason they play the games. Teams don’t always play the way stats and power rankings suggest they are supposed to. That’s often evident early in the pro and college football seasons because some teams are very different from year to year. Look at a team like Michigan. The Wolverines stumbled badly last year with a very young team and a new coach bringing in a whole new offensive philosophy.
College and pro football offer a variety of great match-ups every weekend. A good handicapper, though, doesn’t just look at individual and team match-ups. There are other factors surrounding a game that can be equally important to identifying a winning spread cover, such as scheduling and road travel.
You have to remember that in September it’s more likely that defenses are ahead of the offenses in pro and college football. This might not seem the case when you watch Miami and Florida State put on an exciting 38-34 shootout with both teams tallying over 400 yards. However, that’s not the norm, either, something that needs to be assessed carefully when trying to find football picks each week. Think of the NFL opener as the Steelers and Titans battled to a 13-10 low scoring affair in overtime.
The first step each season is to take a painstaking look at the previous season. We focus on all the factors that contributed to a team’s success or failure. There has to be a cause for every effect. We break down the strengths of each team. We study the reasons that might explain why it had the kind of season it did. Team morale and unity, season turning points, the caliber of opposition, how it won and lost are intricately related. Was it outclassed or beaten by breaks?
