SuperContest Week 1 Picks: An Odds Shark Voyage

This is college football blog, and that won’t change. Although as many of you long-time visitors likely know, K ‘n E—over a few years—has become rather gambling centric. No complaints here.

Over the next 17 weeks, however, there will be some NFL gamblin’ sprinkled in thanks to a pretty wonderful opportunity to from Odds Shark. The site—which is proving to be invaluable for our weekly podcasts, Top 25 picks against the spread and general point-spread info, sponsored some of us here Internet folks in this year’s Hilton Westgate SuperContest.

So we’re picking NFL games—five, to be exact—each week, and hopefully winning more than $700,000 in the process. Those are the expectations—right in front of “don’t get horribly embarrassed”—and we’ll attempt to do that in Week 1.

So here are my picks (please feel free to laugh, offer praise or offer fake praise as you please). I’ll provide weekly updates on how I’m doing and go from there.

St Louis (-3.5) vs. Minnesota: I actually think we’re overreacting a bit to the loss of Sam Bradford. Shaun Hill isn’t all-worldly, but he can play. And this defense should force the Vikings into having to throw passes, which should come with mixed results.

Miami (+5) vs. New England: The Dolphins, to me, are one of the more intriguing teams in the entire NFL. They have the defense to pressure Tom Brady, and offensively, they have enough pieces to cover this spread. I think they win this game outright.

Kansas City (-3.5) at Tennessee: This line seems… light. But I don’t care. Although paying Alex Smith $75 billion is sorta interesting, the Chiefs are still a much more talented team. I hate the hook here, but I’m not going contrarian just yet.

Denver (-7.5) vs. Indianapolis: I’m just not as high on the Colts as most, especially in an environment like this. Although much will be made about Peyton’s lack of weapons, you and I could catch 75 passes playing in this offense.

Dallas (+4.5) vs. San Francisco: Contrarian play, ahoy. This is the time to catch the 49ers. The offense has struggled, and thus, even though the Cowboys’ defensive depth chart has “LOL” written all over it, the offense should still be quite good. I think it wins this game.