When I first opened Qoxhi Picks, a good friend of mine had the master lease on an office building in San Francisco and I rented space from him. We’ll call him Peter, because that was his name, and he was an avid San Francisco 49ers fan which included holding season tickets.
When the 49ers schedule first came out, Peter would sit behind his desk and predict how Bill Walsh and his team were going to do that year. If they were on the road against a good team, like the Dallas Cowboys, he would pause while recognizing the challenge that opponent poised on the road. Still, most often, he opted for a lean towards his team, putting a “W” before moving on to the next contest.
Often, a game that looked a lot easier to win would find Peter marking a “W'' with little thought of losing that game. When the 49ers were meeting a weak team and Peter was marking his schedule he often said, “They’ll win that one easy.”
The one they are going to ‘win easy’, is the game I’m most interested in finding in the right point spread position. Taking the underdog that has clear knowledge that even their best might not be enough to win, is often going to be up against a team confident that what they’ve done in the past is going to mirror today’s result.
Often, those results favor the team that has what John Madden contended was the greatest motivator of all; the fear of failure.
Another group that is on a quest for a ‘sure thing’ every NFL game day is the gambler that needs to win. He will gravitate to the team with the least to worry about while buoyed by the amount of validation he gets all week long from friends and the guy on TV.
Looking to win money with teams that have won it in recent weeks, turns the gambler into a heat-seeking-missile for the team with the least to worry about.
That thinking is also prevalent with the teams themselves. The good ones are confident of a win, and the weaker squads focused like their lives depend on it. Knowing a full effort is required to first avoid a blowout loss and kindle even a faint hope for a win is lethal against an overconfident opponent.
This is where the public really comes in handy.
They siding with the teams seemingly with little to worry about, most often moves the point spread up on the favorite. A point spread move off an opening line affects the point spread result 7% of the time, and on those occasions getting the better line always wins.
My marketing people would like me to claim 70% winners on Top Picks since 1981, but the real number is 68.4%.
It would also be honest to claim we have not lost a September Top Pick in any of the past four years, opening the first four weeks of the past four seasons with one push, 15 wins and no losses.
Last season, the Pittsburgh Steelers were facing an uphill challenge on the road when they opened against the defending American Football Conference Champion Cincinnati Bengals. The point spread opened at 6½ points, and a majority of the betting public took the defending champs at home, pushing the closing line to Cincinnati by seven. The game was highly contested and eventually won by the Steelers, 23-20, but the point spread decision with plus a touchdown on the line was never seriously challenged.
Pittsburgh was the first of our four straight opening day Top Pick wins in 2022. In all, of those 16 games over the first month of an NFL season, 14 have been underdogs and 10 of those teams won their game straight-up. The two favorites picked in the opening four weeks over the past four seasons both won and covered the point spread.
Today, Peter lives in Palm Springs, and I bet when he gets the 49ers 2023 schedule he won’t have any trouble putting a “W” next to the 49ers when they visit the Seattle Seahawks during Week 12 action at Lumen Field.
So, we have that to look forward to.