#1: Teaser-6.5 points
Houston Texans +1.5 / New York Giants -0.5
Houston Texans
Teams hosting a Thursday Night game typically have a pretty significant advantage as they don’t have to travel on a short week, and can spend that time on rest and practice. When you only have 3 days off in between games, it’s very tough to recover physically and perform at 100%. Throw in travel into the equation and it becomes even more difficult. To make things worse for Indy, they start a 40-year old QB in this one for the 2nd consecutive week. He’s coming off a week where he attempted 47 passes, was hit 8 times, and sacked another 3 times. He also missed some practice time this week with an ‘illness’. This is a really bad scenario for the Colts as I expect a very difficult time on offense for them. Gore has been a zero in the run-game, and I’d expect Texans to shut that down with their D-line and force Hasselback into beating them.
On the other side, I’m not overtly concerned who is starting at QB for Houston. Mallet is once again a starter and he is horrible. The reason why I’m not concerned is because I expect this to be a typical “Arian Foster” game where he puts the team on his back. He struggled @ ATL, but that was probably to be expected give the time he missed. Now having gotten his legs under him I expect 20+ touches for Foster in this one. Houston is missing Cecil Shorts and Nate Washington, but I don’t think that matters. DeAndre Hopkins is a ‘beast’, and the Colts will most likely be without their stud CB Davis (if he plays he’ll be at less than 100%). I know that Greg Toler is finally making his return to the lineup for Indy (missed first 4 weeks) but this is a guy that was ranked 99th out of 108 CB’s by PFF last year. His return actually helps the Texans, as he’ll serve as Indy’s primary cornerback tonight.
Bottom line is that this is a terrible spot for the Colts who are playing without Luck once again. They were very lucky to win last week as Jags’ kicker missed two late FG attempts in a row, but I doubt the same thing will happen tonight. Keep in mind that against a lowly Jaguars squad at home they averaged 4.4 YPP and allowed 5.5. In my opinion they didn’t deserve to win that game. Well, tonight they’ll face a Houston team that got absolutely embarrassed in Atlanta in week 4. From what I could tell O’Brien is a type of a coach that gets a lot out of his players and turns mediocre talent into competitive football players (see last year’s Houston team). I think he’ll have the Texans ready to go tonight, and I think this is a great spot for them to grab their 2nd win of the year.
I’m not comfortable laying this many points with Houston so will tease them down.
New York Giants
My model has this game at 28-15 Giants. Teasing it down to virtually PK gives about 13-points of ‘value’. I’ll take it any day. (Will breakdown this game in more detail in the next few days, and could potentially have a straight ATS play on it as well)