Let’s be honest — the Super Wild Card Weekend games kind of sucked thanks to blowouts in five of the six games, but like I often say, “this is why we bet.”

Monday’s Steelers vs. Bills game was anything but entertaining, but I clung to my TV until the final whistle to see if the Steelers could cover the 10-point spread. They of course did not, which resulted in the Bills bringing an end to their 0-8 ATS skid as a double-digit favorite.

So that trend was a bust last week, as was the Over in Detroit after the offenses fell asleep in the second half. But the other four NFL betting trends in last week’s article came through, so hopefully we can pick up in the Divisional Round odds where we left off in the Wild Card Round.

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The Battle of the Big Apple is four years in the making with the New York Jets and New York Giants fighting over MetLife Stadium bragging rights in the Week 8 odds.

Both teams enter this Sunday non-conference clash off a win. The Giants snapped a four-game skid by dumping Washington at home last weekend while the Jets have had two weeks to let their Week 6 upset win over Philadelphia sink in… enjoying a bye in Week 7.

The NFL odds peg the Jets as 3-point “road” favorites in their own stadium as the G-Men wait on the status of starting QB Daniel Jones, who missed Week 7 and hasn’t been cleared of a neck injury suffered two weeks ago.

I break down the spread and Over/Under total for this New York City showdown and give my best NFL pick…

The 50th edition of The Players Championship begins Thursday at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. Often called "the fifth major," the 144-player field is arguably the strongest of the year outside of the four majors, even minus those who left for LIV Golf. Our golf experts preview the event and provide their favorite prop picks along with best bets to win this week. THE PLAYERS CHAMPIONSHIP Location: Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., March 14-17 Course: TPC Sawgrass (Par 72, 7,275 yards) Purse: $25M (Winner: $4.5M) Defending Champion: Scheffler FedEx Cup Leader: Scheffler HOW TO FOLLOW TV: Thursday-Friday, 1-7 p.m. ET (Golf Channel); Saturday, 2-7 p.m. (NBC); Sunday, 1-6 p.m. (NBC) Streaming (ESPN+): Thursday-Friday, 7:30 a.m.-7 p.m. ET; Saturday, 8 a.m.-7 p.m.; Sunday, 7…

Mikel Arteta has compared Arsenal’s disappointing run of results to an onion and is confident his side’s “phenomenal” mid-season break can reignite their title challenge.

Successive defeats against West Ham and Fulham at the end of last year have seen Arsenal slip to fourth, and last season’s runners-up have won only one of their past seven matches in all competitions. Arteta’s side face a Crystal Palace team similarly out of form on Saturday after a week in Dubai that the Arsenal manager believes has helped to “recharge the batteries” of his players.

Although Arteta was positive about Arsenal’s chances of overhauling Liverpool’s five-point gap at the top given that the statistics show they are c…

IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE

Shortly before former Uefa secretary general Hans Bangerter commissioned the current incarnation of Big Cup, its designer Jürg Stadelman and his father went to his office and covered the floor with drawings of different trophies. “He made comments like ‘The Bulgarians would like the bottom of that’,” Stadelman would later recall. “‘The Spaniards would like this but the Italians would prefer that and the Germans would go for this.’ We put the design together like a jigsaw puzzle.” It remains unclear whether or not Stadelman specified that Bangerter insisted on making the mouth of the trophy wide enough so that one day, decades in the future, Lucas Hernandez might hit upo…

The tributes after the death of the former Northern Ireland manager Billy Bingham inevitably evoked glorious memories: two World Cups, Gerry Armstrong’s goal in Valencia, beating West Germany home and away as the country went so close to qualifying for Euro 84. Even that Josimar goal was a special moment.

Sandwiched between Spain 82 and Mexico 86 is another triumph that is still cherished by Northern Ireland fans. Winning the British Home Championship in 1984 was an achievement in its own right – it was only the third time they had won the competition outright – but that season’s trophy was particularly significant.

When it was announced in August 1983 that England would be leaving the tournament that had st…

It’s not officially official just yet, but Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet reported that the NHL and NHLPA have a tentative deal for a 56-game regular-season schedule with a Jan. 13 start. So, one way or another, the 2021 hockey season is a go. Questions still to be answered are exactly what the realigned divisions for the shortened season will look like, whether a division with all the Canadian teams will be allowed to actually play in Canada, and, rather importantly, how in the bloody hell they plan to actually get through this. Last week in college hockey, eight of the 47 games in Division I had to be postponed, and that total is lower than it might otherwise have been because the NCHC was able to put together a quasi-bubble in Omaha. The NFL has struggled all fall, and its teams …

The Scottish Open serves as the final tune-up before the last major of 2024, and six of the top 10 players in the world have made their way to North Berwick this week along with top players from the DP World Tour. The event also serves as the return of Rory McIlroy, who tees it up for the first time since his Sunday meltdown at last month's U.S. Open. The Scottish Open begins Thursday, and our golf experts preview the event and provide their favorite prop picks along with best bets to win this week. SCOTTISH OPEN Location: North Berwick, Scotland, July 11-14 Course: The Renaissance Club (Par 70, 7,237 Yards) Purse: $9M (Winner: $1.62M) Defending Champion: Rory McIlroy FedEx Cup Leader: Scottie Scheffler HOW TO FOLLOW TV: Thursday-Friday: 10:30-11 a.m. (Golf Channel – world f…

Listen, whenever the hell it actually started, this seems like a great moment to look ahead, “pre-view” what is to come this season, and address some of the key questions. Who are the teams? Are they the same teams as before? Why wouldn’t they be the same teams as before? Is that really a key question going into the 2019-20 season? Can we just get on with this? The answer to all of the above, and more, is: You can go to hell.Below you’ll find the NBA teams, in alphabetical order, along with important information about each of them, such as whether they are any good or not. Please print this blog out and carry it with you in preparation for any sudden basketball conversations that might break out. Onward, to the teams! Atlanta Hawks credits: Brynn Anderson | source: [object Object]…

Many years could have been the year of Juan Martin del Potro. So many of them weren’t. This, in part, explains why rooting for this 6-foot-6 lunk remains such an appealing proposition to so many: none of the buttery mundanity of rooting for Federer, none of the monotony of hyping up a Nadal or Djokovic who’ve already enjoyed their soul-crushing runs of dominance with double-digit major haul. It is instead rooting for someone whose gifts explode off the television screen but who remains, in some sense, unproven. Much of that Delpo appeal is that faint air of melancholy, the whiff of what-if. What if his wrists hadn’t failed him? But they did. Now his every gesture reads as impossibly soulful. The hugs (of linespeople, of injured opponents), even the protests (of his own errors, o…