When your job is to write about football betting, one of the questions that you most commonly hear is, “wo do you like this weekend?” It’s a question that is easy to answer, but one that is also difficult to get right on a regular basis. The stats and trends can tell you a lot, but as is the case with any sport, upsets and bad decisions happen. By the time you reach the Conference Championship Games, which is where we are now, you are generally left with 4 very good teams, all of whom have a legitimate shot of becoming the top dog. It’s just that some shots are more legitimate than others.
The toughest task that any team faces this coming weekend is the one that the Green Bay Packers have to go with. Playing the defending champion in a stadium where they rarely if ever lose is tough enough, but when you have to try and do it with your QB essentially operating on one leg, the mountain that has to be climbed seems very high indeed.
The Packers got to this point in the postseason by knocking off a very talented Dallas Cowboys team, but it’s a win that many feel should carry an asterisk. No single call decided a game, but it’s tough to argue that the overturned Dez Bryant TD late in the game may have swung the decision in favor of Dallas. The decision to overturn it may have been right by the letter of the law, but that’s a law that is likely to be changed sooner than later. That game aside, you have to ask whether Aaron Rodgers can summon the strength to make it past a ridiculously good Seahawks defense, to which I have to respond, no he can’t.
Another team that has been very, very good at home over the past few years has been the New England Patriots. That said, the losses that they have taken at home tend to come at this time of the year. The Baltimore Ravens did them in at Gillette Stadium a couple of years ago, and came perilously close to doing it again in the Divisional Game. They will play an Indianapolis Colts team that stunned everyone, except maybe their own fans, by knocking off Peyton Manning and the Broncos in Denver. Are the Colts really this good, or where they up against a team with a hobbled, aging QB who couldn’t get the job done? We will find out this weekend, but the feeling is that Brady and company will not be as big a pushover as the Broncos.
