Miami at Pittsburgh

At first glance this looks like an easy decisive Pittsburgh win. They are coming off a loss and playing a winless team. It sure looks easy right? Not in our eyes. What motivation does this Pittsburgh team have? They have a commanding lead in their division, and little chance to overcome New England or Indianapolis for homefield advantage. Miami has everyone wondering if they will go winless the entire season. Odds are they will not, but we aren't talking about a win here, just a cover of a ver large number. As bad as their season has been, the Dolphins have only been blown out three times the entire season and one was vs New England who owns about eight blowout wins. The others were to Dallas and Oakland. The last six weeks this team has played teams with a combined record of 40-26 and lost by 3 points in half of them. They got blown out by the Pats and played to within 10 in the other two. It shows that they certainly have not quit. Pittsburgh is not one of the teams that should have such a big pointspread to cover this season. There have been 22 games with a double-digit pointspread played this season, and so taking the dog or favorite has broken dead even, at 11 covers for each. If you look closer at those numbers there are three teams that are capable of covering these, and that is: New England, Dallas and Indianapolis. If we isolate these three teams, we see that 10 of the 11 covers by double-digit favorites have come from these three teams! The rest of the league has been just 1-8 ATS trying to cover these big lines. Teams starting at 0-9 SU or worse have been 7-1 ATS in their next game. Road dogs after seven consecutive losses are 31-9 ATS since 1983. Miami isn't a very good team, but is still playing hard which is what you need to see to back a team like this. They have been good enough to cover five of their last six as a double-digit dog, and we will ride them to make it six of seven tonight.