NFL Football Betting for September 8, 2016
OPENING THURSDAY IN THE NFL!
After an interminable wait since the Super Bowl we’ve finally got regular season NFL football. The league serves up a very entertaining game for the opener in the form of a Super Bowl rematch between the Denver Broncos and Carolina Panthers.
CAROLINA PANTHERS AT DENVER BRONCOS:
The most irritating thing about the media coverage prior to this game is their desperate attempt to convince America that Cam Newton is ‘controversial’. The NFL and their media supplicants at ESPN and wanna-be supplicants all over the country are funny. When a legit scumbag like Michael Vick is involved they circle the wagons to try and advance the case that he’s a ‘changed man’ and is now a ‘good person’. When a guy like Newton does anything out of the ordinary the same types forget that he keeps his nose clean off the field and plays like a monster on Sunday’s. They try to make the case that he’s a ‘heel’ or that there’s something unseemly about him.
Anyway, Newton is getting all sorts of abuse from the Denver media this week. Talk about ‘sore winners’. One columnist harps that Newton is desperate to ‘rewrite the national narrative‘ that he’s a loser. Newton played his worst game of the year at the worst possible time–in the Super Bowl. For some reason, they’re also convinced that the opening game of the NFL football season is somehow ‘legacy defining’. You’d think that this media shill was getting a commission based on ticket sales or TV ratings.
A decade ago Chuck Klosterman wrote one of the best articles ever examining why sports media is so awful. In this article for Esquire Magazine he mentioned several things but among them he emphasized the need to ‘kill the argument model’ which he suggested relied on ‘debates’ and ‘controversies’ that no one except sports media types are having. He also suggested the importance of ‘de-emphasizing the ‘fan perspective” and maintain some journalistic integrity and at least the veneer of objectivity. They’re kind of corollaries of each other–the sports media pretends to take the ‘fans perspective’ and engage in meaningless ‘arguments and debates’ that no one else cares about.
Unfortunately, the media is worse than ever and is likely to the point that nothing can save it. The best hope now is that new forms of media will make it less relevant. Klosterman’s critique is clearly on display leading in to the NFL opener. One thing that Klosterman didn’t mention–likely in an effort to be diplomatic–is that the ‘argument model’ and the ‘fan’s perspective’ became so widely adopted because the majority of sports media types are lazy. It’s a lot less work to rant at length based on a ‘take’ than it is to actually do some work breaking down matchups and providing cogent analysis. That’s why you’ll hear a lot about this mythical ‘national narrative’ about Newton that nobody else is having.
The more interesting story here is the Super Bowl champion Denver Broncos. It’s hard to recall a Super Bowl champion that experienced such a downgrade at quarterback during the off-season. Peyton Manning is retired, his backup Brock Osweiler is now the starting quarterback in Houston and the starting quarterback–for now at least–is Trevor Siemian in his second year out of Northwestern.
Siemian is the starter for the time being but the Broncos moved up in the draft so they could get a quarterback, Paxton Lynch out of Memphis. For now, he’s Siemian’s backup but Denver is very big on his future. For one thing, Siemian is huge–6’7″ 244 pounds–and has good mobility for his size. No matter which quarterback is in the game for Denver they won’t be expected to be the second coming of Peyton Manning or even Brock Osweiler. The general idea is for them to be a ‘game manager’ type and that’s what Lynch did in college at Memphis.
All the offense needs to do is contribute *something* to the team and let the Broncos top rated defense do the rest. That’s not a ‘lock’ at this point and even though they’re not really asking their quarterback to do much the question is their ability to do enough to win. The Broncos were home underdogs three times last year, winning and covering in all of them. This is their opening game against a highly motivated team in a matchup that has trended toward the road team. We’ll back the Panthers.
BET CAROLINA PANTHERS -3 OVER DENVER BRONCOS