Week 8 of the NFL season is upon us and while the overall quality of teams is disappointing, that won't stop us from providing our expert picks against the spread. We are coming off our best week of the season where we went 9-3-1 against the spread which puts our season record at 53-44 ATS. You can pick against us in our weekly contest which you can join here (ID: 55411, PW: arizona).
Last week we recorded a push when we picked Cleveland -3 and they managed to beat Seattle by the impressive score of 6-3. We lost with the Lions who seem to be in a free fall, the Raiders who we figured would find some way to beat the Chiefs by a touchdown and like the vast majority of the free world, we picked the Ravens to handle business against the Jaguars.
We will have the rest of the NFL Week 8 picks later in the week, for now we start with the pathetic 1-5 Arizona Cardinals.
Arizona Cardinals at Baltimore Ravens (-13): No one in their right mind would pick the struggling Cardinals to go on the road and beat the Ravens. Baltimore is going to be pissed about their embarrassing performance on Monday night against the Jaguars and their defense is going to pin their ears back and attack poor Kevin Kolb who compared running the offense to trying to drive a car with his left foot.
Making matters worse for Arizona is the knee status of Beanie Wells. The team isn't going to say if he can go and will continue to obfuscate all week, but given how they've handled Wells in the past our guess is that he doesn't play.
The big question for picking this game is if the Ravens offense can score enough points to cover a spread this large. Joe Flacco was horrible in his last game and hasn't exactly been great all season long. The Cardinals young cornerbacks are getting better and we expect to see more Sam Acho and O'Brien Schofield at outside linebacker in place of ineffective veterans Joey Porter and Clark Haggans. The rest of the defense has played pretty well.
As difficult as it is to pick the Cardinals, we've not seen enough from the Ravens offense to think they can put up enough points to cover. Pick: Cardinals (in a low scoring game)