This article is part of our NFL Picks series.
In a rough week for the pool as a whole, we snuck in a 3-2 card. That gets us to 50-34-1 (59.4%) overall, tied for 298th place in a contest that started with 5270 entrants. Great! Except we need to gain 2.5 points on enough of the pack to get into the top 100 for the cash.
In better news (for us) we entered the week 15-5 in Q4 which ties us for 20th, one tantalizing point out of 5th place and a quarterly prize. We really needed to go at least 4-1 picking from a batch of strange Week 18 point spreads. Unfortunately we had the Ravens +4 on Saturday, so now it is 4-0 or bust. Fortunately, so did a lot of people as the Ravens were the most popular pick of the week. Matt Youmans of VSiN aka "Johnny Utah" leads Q4 and had the Ravens on both his entries. So did overall leader "SAINTS31-1" and 5 others in the top 10.
Enough about us for a moment, here are the picks.
We landed on lots of "chalk", so I will just run down our remaining card since it more or less overlaps with the remaining pool favorites.
Raiders -2.5 vs. 
Broncos: Almost exactly 40 years and two home cities ago, Marcus Allen did this and the Raiders won Super Bowl XVIII in a rout. We play Guess The Motivation on this one. The Raiders have shown life since ditching Head Coach Josh McDaniel for Antonio Pierce. The Broncos kicked QB Russell Wilson to the curb for Jared Stidham last week and won a 16-9 snoozer over the Chargers pre-season level squad. We will roll the dice on Vegas ending on a high note and perhaps getting Pierce the full time gig in the process. Just Win Baby (by at least a field goal please).
Patriots -1.5 vs 
Jets: Is this the last game of the Bill Belichick era? If yes, will he go out doing something he always does and beat the Jets? Will he put extra emphasis on getting this win if he knows he's gone, seeing as it may cost the Patriots a shot at drafting their QB Of The Future? Will he get a cameo in the next Boston Accent trailer? This all assumes Belichick can just will his team to victory as the Patriots sit in this predicament thanks to fielding a lousy team. Then again, so do the Jets. The weather forecast looks as awful as these two offenses and the current betting total of 30 would be the NFL's lowest since a Bears-Steelers game in 2005. Again, we play Guess the Motivation and will ride off into the sunset with Grumpy Bill.
Cardinals +2.5 vs 
Seahawks: Intuitively it seems like teams playing for their playoff lives should dominate teams with ostensibly "nothing" on the line. But it does not play out that way on the field, at least as far as the point spread is concerned. As per Evan Abrams of Action Network, eliminated teams have gone a sterling 100-64-4 ATS in the final two weeks of the season when playing teams in must-win spots. It gets even worse when the contending team has a 40-60% winning percentage and the non-contender is 8-25% worse (29-72-5 ATS). The Cards fit this criteria and have often played surprisingly competitive football, while the Seahawks frequently underwhelm. The counter-argument here is that I suspect the betting market often overprices the motivation of the contender and that does not seem to have happened here. I show the Seahawks with a power rating about 3 points higher than the Cards, which suggests a spread of Seattle -1 in Arizona, so not much edge. We really hoped Circa would hang Arizona +3 and in fact the betting line has gone there but with the Cardinals juiced up. We still like it enough at 2.5 plus we needed to take some chances.
Bears +3 at 
Packers: Well, similar to above in the Contender vs Eliminated team matchup, though not the second part as the teams have nearly identical records. In this case, the Bears are not just frisky like the Cards but have actually rolled big time in the second half of the season. This matchup almost perfectly mirrors the last seasons' Lions at Packers finale. Green Bay hosts a hot division foe, win-and-in, lose and (maybe) the Seahawks make the dance. Too pat to expect history to repeat itself? We hope not.
We almost duplicated the top 5 on our card as we originally intended to go with the Bills instead of the Patriots. A combo of trying to avoid yet another pick that was likely popular plus nervousness about the Bills in a must-win spot moved us off it. As Circa Director of Operations Jeff Benson pointed out on VSiN's Football Contest Show", pool entrants may have wanted to play the final game so they could potentially wager on it as a hedge. And indeed with 1371 on the Bills and 926 backing Miami, it is the most selected game overall.
Pool entrants hit on just 45.29% of their picks in Week 17, the second worst mark of the season.
Between over 300 contestants not sending in a card, others trying to collect season-long and quarterly booby prizes , and an unknowable group gaming their choices a bit to try to gamble on an outlier smash week to move up in the standing, it is hard to know what kind of sample we get here now. Fading the "pros" did work well last week though. In addition to the poor overall results, the top 4 picks all lost as did 11 of the 16 consensus sides.
