Green Bay at Detroit

The Lions have not won or covered a Thanksgiving Day game in the last five seasons. In those games, their offense has been atrocious. They have scored 10 points or less in four of the last five. They will enter this one in a challenging offensive spot yet again, likely without QB Matthew Stafford and an injury-slowed Calvin Johnson. In two games played without Johnson this year, they scored 10 and 0 points. The goose-egg came against this Green Bay team. The Packers are starting to get the running game going and that will help take ticks off the clock. And their defense is really stepping up. They have allowed just 272 yards per game on the road this season and 280 per game overall their last three. Bad teams simply haven't scored much vs. this Packers' defense this year. The bad teams (Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland and Tampa Bay) have averaged just 14.6 ppg on the Pack. And, that includes a fluky 38 put up by Tampa. Take that game out and the other four averaged just 8.75 per game! They didn't give the Lions an inch in their 26-0 shutout earlier this season and I don't see them getting much room here either. When you start talking about a total that is high enough that only about 6% of all NFL games are posted with a total this high, it usually means that there are two good offenses in the game. The Lions unfortunately, have the No. 24 ranked offense in the league and are missing some guns, or at the very least they aren't going to be healthy. That turns a bad offense into something unspeakably worse as we have seen from this Lions team before this year. I like this one to go UNDER the total.