Oakland Raiders (0-1) at Miami Dolphins (0-1)

Before the season, I had the Raiders as one of my overrated teams. The Raiders’ Pythagorean Expectation last year suggested they should have won 6 games, not 8, as they went 7-2 in games decided by a touchdown or less, the most wins of that kind of any team last season. The Raiders also lost their top cornerback Stanford Routt and their top pass rusher Kamerion Wimbley in free agency.

If that’s not enough, starting linebacker Aaron Curry could be out for the year and will be replaced in the starting lineup by a 4th round rookie and defensive tackles Tommy Kelly and Richard Seymour are both going into their age 33 seasons, with the latter already dealing with a bad knee. They had the league’s 29th ranked scoring defense last year, allowing 27.1 points per game and could be the league’s worst scoring defense this year. Carson Palmer and the playmakers on offense can make some plays, but they’ll also commit a lot of turnovers and it won’t be enough to offset the defense’s play.

The idea behind identifying overrated and underrated teams was to be one step ahead of the odds makers and essentially blindly bet against the overrated teams and on the underrated teams until the odds makers caught up or the teams proved me wrong. Well I haven’t been proven wrong as the Raiders lost at home to a banged up Chargers team that normally struggles on the road early in the season. Have the odds makers caught up? Well, considering the Raiders are road favorites here in Miami, I would say no.

Miami is a very good team or anything, but the Raiders don’t deserve to be road favorites over anyone. I’ve mentioned before that teams that finish with 6 or fewer wins cover at about a 30% rate as favorites of 6 or more. Well, the Raiders aren’t favorites of 6 or more, but they’re road favorites of 2.5, which would translate to -8.5 in Oakland. The trend isn’t as strong in this situation, but the logic is the same; they’re just not good enough to be favored on the road over anyone.

There’s also the issue of the Raiders having to play a 1 PM game on the East Coast as a West Coast teams. Teams are typically flat in this situation and the Raiders are no exception, going 6-12 ATS on the East Coast in 1 PM games since 2003. The Raiders came in to Miami in a very similar situation last year and lost 34-14 as 3 point underdogs, even though the Dolphins were 4-7 at the time and the Raiders were 7-4. This time, the Raiders are favorites, which makes Miami an even more enticing bet since Oakland is 4-14 ATS as favorites since 2006. They also haven’t been road favorites since week 14 of 2005 (a loss), which makes sense since they’ve never been qualified to be road favorites since then. They aren’t this week either.

These teams are pretty evenly matched. This line should be about -3 in favor of Miami (3 points is home field advantage), as it was last year. The Dolphins are worse offensively since last year, but the Raiders are worse defensively. Instead, it’s -2.5 in favor of Oakland, so there’s about 5.5 points of line value, which goes back to my point about Oakland being overrated. That alone would be enough for a bet on Miami, but I like betting against Oakland as favorites and on the road on the East Coast at 1 PM.

Public lean: Oakland (new thing I’m adding, siding with the odds makers on bets is not a bad thing to do since they make so much money, so I’m listing this here to allow readers to “fade” the public, if they so choose, in this example, the odds makers win if Miami covers)

Miami Dolphins 20 Oakland Raiders 17 Upset Pick +140

Pick against spread: Miami +2.5 (-105) 3 units

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