NFL Football Betting: Miami Dolphins at New York Giants
After a ‘false start’ in the Hall of Fame game last Sunday NFL football is back. We’ll head into Week One of the preseason this weekend and as you’re probably aware by now you just can’t handicap exhibition games the same way you do regular season. They’re completely different animals with completely different competitive dynamics. Our lead handicapper has been betting NFL preseason successfully for over twenty years so stay tuned.
One of the handicapping factors involving NFL preseason play that recreational player often misapplies is the record of the head coach. The conventional wisdom is that some coaches ‘care about the preseason’ and other coaches ‘don’t care about the preseason’. That is a severe oversimplification. There are often distinct patterns in a head coach’s success (or lack thereof) in preseason games but it is a mistake to say that a coach cares or doesn’t care. What’s going on here is that by the time a coach reaches the NFL he has his own methodology for how to get teams ready to play football. Within this context, the actual preseason games may have a different prioritization or emphasis. For example, some coaches may do their primary talent evaluation during practice while others may weight ‘in game’ performance more heavily. Logic strongly suggests that this will be no secret to the players on a team and that their focus and intensity during preseason games will reflect this.
There is at least one universal coaching situation that is usually money in the bank during preseason–a newly hired coach in his first preseason home game. This one just makes sense. Regardless of the situation and the pressure that he’s under every coach wants to win their first game. And this is certainly the case with New York’s Ben McAdoo. McAdoo was tabbed to replace longtime Giants’ coach Tom Coughlin and not every fan was happy about it. McAdoo was the team’s offensive coordinator for the past two years and there’s a feeling that he was either a ‘cost cutting measure’ or that he’s essentially an interim coach until a ‘real coach’ becomes available.
Compounding the situation–Coughlin has continued to hang around Giants’ facilities and in practice despite the fact that he isn’t the coach any more. The NFL has made a new job for him and hopefully that will keep him out of McAdoo’s hair but few new head coaches have to worry about the former coach snooping around. The motivation here should be obvious–while the New York media talks about his ‘big shoes to fill’ and pressures him to win immediately he can use all of the success he can get. He definitely wants to quickly put his own stamp on the team and make clear that Coughlin is no longer in charge.
BET NEW YORK GIANTS -2′ OVER MIAMI DOLPHINS
