Price Per Head Football Betting: Chargers Are Living a "Charmed" Life
At WagerHome, the San Diego Chargers are seven-point underdogs in the first round of the AFC playoffs (at -115) as they visit the Cincinnati Bengals.
Price Per Head bettors often hear terms like "team of destiny" to describe NFL squads who seemingly have a path laid out for them, on the way to bigger and better things every step of the way. Bob Costas' line was pretty good a couple weeks ago, when he said that there really aren't any teams that "control" their own destiny, because after all, destiny is destiny, and controlling anything along those lines would be a contradiction in terms.
Well, like many people who live in San Diego (LOL), these Chargers seem to be "charmed" at the very least, and maybe that is something for WagerHome.com customers to keep in mind. For certain, they appear to be beneficiaries of the NFL's version of "affirmative action," as the league has allowed an atmosphere for them to get where they are. Of course, we're being a little facetious with that comment; we don't want to begrudge the Chargers their place in the post-season. Under first-year coach Mike McCoy, they have made great strides on offense, particularly quarterback Philip Rivers, who lost some of his top receivers right at the beginning, and has had to deal with constant shuffling of the offensive line because of injuries.
But as we know, things have a tendency to get strange and unpredictable for PPH football bettors in the final week of the season. Even though there is a level of importance placed on playoff seeding and home-field advantage, sometimes there is that situation of the team that can't really do anything to help itself, and therefore finds it in their best interest to hold out all the important players in order to keep them healthy for that first-round playoff game.
Really, Kansas City was the only team that found itself in this situation this season. They could not win the AFC West, which meant they were going to be traveling somewhere on Wild Card Weekend, and none of the possibilities for the sixth playoff spot could overtake them. As a result they treated this almost as if it was a pre-season game, and that had the effect of playing fast and loose with the game's integrity (in the opinion of many Price Per Head players), inasmuch as they had a team opposing them that not only had to win to get into the playoffs, they knew that because of losses by other teams (Baltimore and Miami) they WOULD get in with a victory. Could there be any path that was paved out more advantageously than it was for San Diego?
Undoubtedly WagerHome.com customers spent so much time complaining about how Mike Shanahan kept Robert Griffin III out of the last three games of the Washington Redskins' season, because he was concerned about the long-term health of his quarterback (and maybe because he was trying to forces firing, but that's too long a story to get into). But he announced that beforehand, and everyone knew about it (God knows that nobody would let you forget it).
But this was different in that it this was a situation that very directly impacted the playoffs, and no one really knew who was playing and for how long. So you just know the Pittsburgh Steelers, who would at that point get into the post-season with a San Diego loss, could not have been happy about that.
Well, as WagerHome PPH patrons know by now, that was just the beginning of their unhappiness.
You see, as it turns out, the Chargers had life-and-death against what amounted to the Chiefs' second-team, having to come from behind, and extremely fortunate to get the game into overtime. They got much luckier than that, when Kansas City kicker Ryan Succop missed a 41-yard field-goal attempt in the final moments, and the Chargers were not flagged for having an illegal field-goal block formation (with seven players on one side of the football). NFL bettors know that this is a league were officials need to confer for 5-10 minutes, it seems, to debate certain decisions, and seem to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the rules, but somehow everybody missed that, as has now been admitted by the league office. If they would've called the penalty, as PPH bettors know, that field-goal attempt would have been much easier, from 36 yards out, and the game would have been over, with Pittsburgh in the playoffs.
Instead, the game went into extra time, and the Steelers were further horrified when an apparent fumble by Eric Weddle of San Diego on a fake punt, carried into the end zone by the Chiefs, was ruled to be blown dead because of "forward progress." Never mind that the Chargers may have both pushed and pulled Weddle past the first down marker, which could have been ruled a penalty as well. San Diego was able to continue a drive that ended in a field goal, which supplied the decisive margin.
None of this necessarily meant anything to people who were betting the point spread; indeed, once Baltimore and Miami were on their way to a defeat, the line jumped a great deal, from nine points to 14 or thereabouts at WagerHome. But maybe it should serve notice that since sometimes luck runs in streaks, one may want to tread lightly when it comes to placing that NFL bet against San Diego this weekend.
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