Sportsinteraction

Posted at 10:00 AM EST. Odds are subject to change.

Dallas--104 over Green Bay 

8:20 PM EST. This one is not about X's and O's, so we're not going to pretend it is. This one is buy low, sell high in its purest form. Dallas played at home last Thursday night, in prime time, in front of everybody, and lost outright to Tampa Bay as a 9½-point favorite. You cannot fall any flatter than that, and you cannot do it in front of a bigger audience. The Cowboys' stock did not just dip after that game. It hit rock bottom.

Think about the damage that loss did way beyond a regular betting slip. Dallas was the survivor-pool pick all over the country. Dallas was teased down in every teaser on the board. One game, one Thursday night, and tickets were being ripped up everywhere. People are not just down on the Cowboys, they are disgusted with them, and disgusted bettors do not go running back to the window to bet the same team again the following week. They do the opposite.

Green Bay is the mirror image. The whole world faded the Packers at home last week against Chicago. The Bears were the small favorite, Green Bay had looked awful for weeks, and fading them felt like the easiest play on the board. Then Green Bay went out and buried Chicago, and just like that the Packers went from a team nobody would touch to a team everybody suddenly believes in again. So now put the two together and you get the double zig-zag: the bettors who lost on Dallas last week are flipping to Green Bay, and the bettors who lost fading Green Bay last week are flipping to Green Bay too. Everybody ends up in the same place, for two completely different reasons.

That is exactly the spot we live for. One team's price is being dragged down by a prime-time embarrassment that the entire betting public lived through together, and the other team's price is being propped up by one result that flipped the entire perception in a single afternoon. Forget the matchups, forget who is supposed to win the stats battle. When a game checks this many psychology boxes at once — buy low on the team nobody wants, sell high on the team everybody just fell in love with, and a double zig-zag pushing money the other way — it becomes one of the strongest wagers on the board. .

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