Green Bay at Seattle

Green Bay comes in off a 0-35 spanking at the hands of the Patriots. Brett Favre went down in that game and Aaaron Rodgers was thrown to the wolves, going 4 for 12 for 32 yards and a fumble. Tom Brady carved up the Green Bay defense as the Pack got shutout for the second time this season. Now no one can bring themselves to back the Packers tonight. But we will. I know what you are saying to yourself. How can we possibly get behind the hapless Packers here off that kind of performance? But, the reason we are going with Green Bay is exactly that performance. Forget everything else. Forget Hasslebeck and Alexander's return. Forget the stats. You see, teams off that kind of performance bounce back in their next game. The fact is that teams off a shutout are 34-15 ATS since 1991. This year, they are only 4-5. But, if we look at shutout losses by 30+ points (an incredibly humiliating loss), teams in their next game are 12-2 ATS over that span. I don't know about you, but 86% ATS sounds pretty good to us! There have been two such instances already in 2006. In week four, San Francisco got hammered by Kansas City 0-41. The next week they beat Oakland 34-20 as a three point favorite. The following week the Jets lost to Jacksonville 41-0. They came out next game and beat Miami 20-17 covering the spread. Why do teams that get hammered this bad perform so well the next week? Pride and emotion. These are pro athletes and when their manhood gets challenged, they come back with everything they have. Meanwhile, we get line value as the public jumps all over their opponent and inflates the line. This one started at -9.5 and has jumped to -10.5, crossing a very key number of 10. Our contrarian approach often leads to picking ugly underdogs. While the past two weeks it hasn't worked out so well, over the course of this entire season it has been gold. We're not abandoning it here as we'll take 15 years of NFL history over two weeks of results. It tells us the ugly underdog is the strong play in this one.
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