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Over the past few years, we have given the subscribers of Footballguys.com the Staff Confidence Pool Challenge, where numerous staffers try and pick the winners each week with a confidence ranking, and Jeff Pasquino’s “For The Win” column where Jeff attempts to pick each and every NFL game against the Las Vegas spread.  Both of these have been very popular features, so this year Footballguys is proud to bring you the combination of the two. The Footballguys.com Staff Against the Spread Pool Challenge. Multiple staff members (19) will pick the winner of each NFL game against the Las Vegas line.  As a tie-breaker, the person who is closest to the total points scored on the last Monday Night game will be the winner. Winners will be announced from week to week and the best overall record will be crowned Against the Spread Champion. Picks and ranks are due on Wednesday, so any late-breaking news may not be reflected in the choices.  

Note that the links above are for 2013 articles.  Please see the Week 7 2014 Page at Footballguys.com for the 2014 Week 7 updates.

LAST WEEK'S RESULTS

Here are the results from last week:

Three staff members (Will Grant, Jeff Haseley and Danny Tuccitto) finished atop the standings for Week 6 with 10 correct picks, bringing the tiebreaker of Monday Night Football total points into play for the first time this year.  Danny Tuccitto was closest to the final total between San Francisco and St. Louis (31-17 49ers, 48 points) with his guess of 49 points, so he wins the week.  Overall it was a good week with most of the staff getting more than half of the games right and no staffer finishing with fewer than six correct selections.  This week's record was above 50% (165-150, 52.4%) thanks to big wins for the staff by Indianapolis, Carolina, Denver, Arizona and San Francisco.  The only bad picks for the staff combined were Green Bay and San Diego as both Miami and Oakland fared much better than expected.  Overall the group is hovering near 50% (930-981, 48.7%) with Phil Alexander (54), Dan Hindery (52) and Dave Larkin (49) the Top 3 in the group so far on the young season. 

THIS WEEK'S PICKS

Here are the picks for this week:

CONSENSUS WINNERS

Nearing the middle of the regular season, you would think that there would be some sort of better understanding of who are the dominant teams – and we are finally starting to see some consensus based on the 18 sets of picks this week.    No team was picked unanimously, but three games were reasonably close as Seattle (17 of 18 staff) was almost picked by everyone to win in St Louis.  Both the Bears (16 of 18) and Bills (15 of 18) were very one-sided selections to win this week as well.  Las Vegas would love these sets of picks on New England / New York Jets, Baltimore / Atlanta and Pittsburgh / Houston as the choices were split almost exactly in half for all these contests.  It should be very interesting to see how it plays out.

ODDS AND ENDS

It's about halfway for the regular season, and the picks are due by Wednesday night. Most of the staff would agree that picking this weekend's games on Wednesday night is very difficult because you don't have much information about injuries and practice. If your league allows you to pick the later games separate from the rest, take advantage of it and make your Sunday and Monday picks as close to the weekend as possible.

A reminder that these picks are against the Las Vegas lines – so getting above 50% is respectable, above 53% gets you into the “profitable zone” (accounting for the Las Vegas house odds of taking 10% of every losing wager) – and anything above 60% is outstanding.  That may sound easy enough, but it is much, much harder that it might seem.

Good luck this weekend!

Questions, suggestions and comments are always welcome to pasquino@footballguys.com.

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