The National Football League opens their first full week of preseason action on Thursday with a pair of games featuring the New England Patriots hosting the Carolina Panthers and New York Giants entertaining the Detroit Lions. To complete the first week of 2024 play, there are three games on Friday, nine on Saturday, and a final two contests scheduled for Sunday.

The preseason is not just scrimmages before the season as far as the gambling world is concerned. If I was to contend that more money is wagered on a Major League Baseball spring training game than the Super Bowl, you would likely discount anything else I had to say. That is absurdly not true. But isn’t it a parallel to show the popularity of football betting to know that more money is wagered on an NFL preseason game than baseball’s World Series?

That’s true, by a significant margin.

So, welcome to the football season, where wagering is as much a part of the game as touchdowns and sacks.

While there's a lot of wagering on preseason games, most gamblers are approaching the contests with as much acumen as trying to open their garage door with the television remote. The talent that will be on display when the regular season kicks off next month is not nearly as important a factor in predicting a preseason winner as coaching philosophy and objectives.

During the years that the Indianapolis Colts behind Peyton Manning rolled to multiple seasons of double-digit regular season victories, they were as likely to win in the preseason as a car trying to start with a dead battery in the winter. The Colts knew what talent they had and utilized the preseason to install new formations and find the marginal players good enough to crack their opening day roster.

Still, the public piled on the Colts with wagers thinking of their talent over their strategy, and the books would entice them further by making point spreads that seemed to beg for Indianapolis wagers.

That’s what they do. While many think the books set numbers to split the wagering equally between the two combatants, that is an objective almost never achieved in reality. More often, lines are set to edge the bettors to the wrong side of the proposition. It happens in the regular season and playoffs but is much more obvious in the preseason when bettors are expecting the Kansas City Chiefs, San Francisco 49ers or other top team to perform up to the level when their talent is fully utilized to determine the result.

The preseason is the only time one can find a game where one side has a desire to win on the scoreboard while their opponent is focused on an objective that has nothing to do with the final score.

The trick, in the preseason, is finding the spots where the books are setting a number that has a majority of the bettors biting at what appears to be a generous line. Does it surprise you to know that the Chiefs and 49ers are both underdogs in their opening preseason game? Kansas City opens in Jacksonville against a Jaguars squad that missed the playoffs last year and by our numbers are scheduled for a solid bounce back year in 2024.

Okay, no big deal that Jacksonville is a slight home favorite in this contest.

But the 49ers open in Tennessee, against a team with a new head coach, Brian Callahan, and without their dominant offensive player of recent seasons, runningback Derrick Henry. Henry signed as a free agent with the Baltimore Ravens a few months ago and the Titans made a somewhat surprise decision to fire their former head coach, Mike Vrabel.

The Titans, who as recently as three seasons ago had the best record in the American Football Conference, appear to be in full freefall while in addition to working under a first-year head coach are also in search of a starting quarterback. The three candidates currently in the Titans camp are Will Levis, Mason Rudolph and Malik Willis.

This all adds up to the Titans being projected to finish last in the AFC South Division race, just as they did last year in Vrabel’s final season as their head coach. And yet, this projected last place team is favored on Saturday when they host the highly regarded and defending National Football Conference Champion San Francisco 49ers.

Welcome to the preseason, don’t get caught trying to open your garage door with the tv remote.

Qoxhi Picks: Tennessee Titans (-4) over the San Francisco 49ers