Monday Night Football Betting Picks: Indianapolis Colts at Tampa Bay Bucs

Added on Oct 03, 2011 by Jack Thurman in

NFL

The NFL slate for the week concludes with a Monday Night Football matchup between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Indianapolis Colts in the ‘Cigar City’ of Tampa, Florida. The Bucs are 2-1 and keeping pace with New Orleans atop the NFC South while the Colts are a mess and 0-3 heading into this contest.

Indianapolis Colts at Tampa Bay Bucs
October 3, 2011 5:35 PM Pacific

Horrible Monday Night matchup between the ‘blue collar’ Bucs and the Peyton Manning-less Colts. In defense of the NFL schedule makers, this would have been an intriguing ‘contrast of styles’ matchup had Manning been in the lineup but now is just an ugly pairing that will likely have fans turning the channel to watch the baseball playoffs.

The kneejerk reaction is to go against the woeful Colts who’ll start Curtis Painter at quarterback with Kerry Collins still sidelined with a concussion. Sometimes, however, doing the ‘right thing’ feels very wrong and that could be the case here. Simply put, we’ve got a team desperate for a win against a team that might be ‘overpriced’ relative to their development. The line has found some equilibrium at 10, but keep in mind that the Bucs haven’t been favored by more than 7 points during Raheem Morris’ coaching tenure. They’ve also been a terrible investment in home games–4-12 ATS since 2009. They’re definitely an improving team but they’re not constructed to cover big margins. They’re a team that nothing comes easy for, that has to scrap for everything they get. Not exactly the time of team you want to be laying double digits with.

Obviously it’s difficult to extrapolate the Colts recent pointspread trends with Manning to the current state of the team, but they’ve done well as a pointspread play on the road since 2009. During that timeframe they’ve gone 11-5 ATS. We’re not sure that the Colts are as bad as the mainstream media likes to think they are–only one of their three losses came by double digits and they were competitive throughout against Pittsburgh at home last week. The Bucs are a nice young team, but we’re not sold on them in this role. If the Colts put up the same effort they did against Pittsburgh last week they’ll be in this one throughout and cover the spread with ease.

Bet Indianapolis Colts +10 over Tampa Bay Bucs