1-3 last week, turns out Jacoby Brissett is probably a semi-legit NFL QB now with the better play callers that now work for the Colts and a couple more years of seasoning, and those that backed them at 6.5 and 7 deserved their money. To be fair the Chargers outplayed them pretty hard at 7.4 yards per play to 6.1 and the 7 points of missed field goals has to be mostly offset by a fumbled punt and really sick red zone pick.
The other two losses, not really much to say, Jets blew a big lead in a really shitty game, and the Jags lost their quarterback although they were getting beat down already at that point, plus you could argue that had the Jags O-line been better they would have protected Foles there, so that should be part of the bet and it's not really a bad beat. As the Chiefs D sucks and much of the performance was essentially in garbage time, I would not assume Minshew is going to be good based on his ridiculous stats in that game. I would also avoid over-reacting to the Dallas offense as well although I think they will be better as they finally figured out they should copy what the good teams are all doing, and they have always had good personnel.
As for this week we have the Panthers who are basically just a model play against the TB defense, which is not very good anyway and is missing several players. The one thing I don't really like about this game is that Cam Newton might be slightly hurt, plus I front-ran this game at -6, so at -7, this is a worse bet. However, Newton is always hurt, meaning that is probably reflected in his rating.
The MIA-NE game is obviously the most interesting contest here. The problem with this game is that most NFL statistical models are going to assume that teams are trying to win that season, which means that especially early in the season, all teams are going to be regressed to the mean a little, and big blowouts under-weighted. The nature of the NFL rules with the salary cap, coach turnover, training camps and limited rosters, copycat league, etc, ensures that teams really can't ever be that bad, assuming they don't want to be, until later in the year. However, the Dolphins are obviously not trying to win this season as they are spending only about half of their cap allocation on their active roster (the rest is dead money due to trades/cuts and cap space), and even of that half, about 25 million is on bad contracts that they probably tried to front-load knowing they were doing nothing this year. Other than the Browns when they were tanking, and not covering games either, there isn't much precedent for this, as we have a team that is basically running out a roster of replacement level players and rookies with a few okay players still around by accident, mostly on defense.
With our assumption of mean-reverting "trying to win" thrown aside, which is valid in almost all early-season NFL games as probably 95% of such games played since 2012 were played by teams that were realistically trying to at least make the playoffs, we know that the number of 12.5 is only a lower bound on how many points the Dolphins should be getting. At 14 or 14.5 I would certainly never touch this game but going across the key numbers of 17 and 18 I still think this game is worth the gamble, even against the Patriots. I personally never bet against the Patriots if it is close, but I don't think they are as bad to fade in games with large spreads, as they tend to do some weird stuff at the end of games with the lead (I recall getting screwed by this last year).
The other three games are pretty standard "fade teams that looked good or bet on teams that looked bad in week 1" plays. There is also a pretty good angle around Denver in the early season at home against teams not yet in shape, although they looked like garbage last week, so really fun to have to bet on them.