I've been handicapping the National Football League for a long time, and I still admit at the beginning of each week I look at a matchup and think, maybe this is the week the more talented teams will just win. It’s so easy to take a team like the Baltimore Ravens at home over the Las Vegas Raiders, who the week before got routed by the Los Angeles Chargers while the Ravens were within a half-a-toe length of beating the defending Super Bowl Champion Kansas City Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium.

Then they play the game, and in Baltimore the Raiders overcome a nearly double-digit underdog role to hand John Harbaugh’s team a second straight loss.

A week ago, the Dallas Cowboys looked like world beaters in Cleveland while suffocating the Browns. Yesterday, the Cowboys got blown out on their home field by the New Orleans Saints and Cleveland went on the road to upset the Jacksonville Jaguars in Florida.

All these games are more examples that talent only takes a team so far and from a week-to-week perspective motivation plays an even greater role in determining NFL winners and losers.

Tonight, the Atlanta Falcons, who were upset at home by a suspect Pittsburgh Steelers squad last Sunday, meet the Philadelphia Eagles at Lincoln Financial Field. The Eagles opened with a win in Brazil over the Green Bay Packers a week ago Friday, so they have had more time to prepare for this second week matchup than the Falcons, who are working with a new quarterback, Kurt Cousins, and new head coach, Raheem Morris.

Cousins is an interesting study in inconsistency. He has a horrible record against teams with winning records and is most often a flop in primetime. But statistically, he ranks among the top five quarterbacks of the past quarter century. So, given the Eagles are considered a good team and won their opener this year before hosting this Monday Night Football primetime show, the public has gravitated to Philadelphia without regard to any other factors.

The wise guys haven’t.

Over the weekend I canvas sportsbooks to get a read on where public money is, and publish that information on Sunday morning while listing the three most bet games by the general wagering crowd. While doing that work this weekend, one sportsbook manager paused and said, “This must be wrong. We have $180,000 on the Eagles and $3,000 on the Falcons.”

A further examination of those figures, as lopsided as they were, didn’t reveal any error in the numbers.

So, if the books are attracting Eagles money at that kind of pace, we can expect the point spread to rise like the temperature at the Phoenix airport in August. But, alas, it’s not. The opening spread on this game had the home team favored by 4½ points and an early surge on the Eagles drove that number up to 6½ points before some books even posted the number.

Then, over the weekend, the line dropped to the Eagles by six points, and today, in some sports books, that has been trimmed an additional half-point.

How can this be?

Well, the public is betting the Eagles off their win and against the Falcons off their loss like what happened last week is going to happen again. And some others wagering on this game, big money players, are looking for what is more difficult to imagine happening. That is, having motivation play an important role where the team with the greater fear of failure coming up with a big effort against a confident home team.

That’s the side I’m on.

Qoxhi Picks: Atlanta Falcons (+5½) over Philadelphia Eagles