I was very wrong about the Panthers in week 2 against Falcons

My betting strategy is normally one that makes me a bit of money. It is a simple system: Bet against the Carolina Panthers, my favorite team and also the team I think is most likely to choke in clutch situations in the NFL.

They went into week two as 3 point favorites (odd that an even number would be the spread) against the Atlanta Falcons and I just presumed, because of my pessimism, that if they did manage to pull off a victory, that it would be by less than 3 points or something silly like that. Honestly, I have such little faith in Carolina despite them being my favorite team that I just presume they are going to lose at everything.

However, lightning does strike every now and then and not only did the Panthers win, but they made Atlanta looks stupid and completely dominated the game, but to the chagrin and probably the expectations of the Atlanta crowd, who are also a bunch of pessimists no doubt.

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I am a very loud critic of "tiny boy" Bryce Young, the QB for Carolina. At less than 6 foot and under 200 lbs he is drastically undersized for this sport but yet Carolina thought it was a good idea to invest something crazy like $50 million in the guy. I'm not going to claim to know more than the people employed by billion dollar NFL teams, but this seems like a bad idea. Not since Dough Flute has an undersized QB managed to be good, remain uninjured, and make an impact that I can remember.

But I will eat my words when I am wrong. Young was damn good in this game but before we get to excited we need to look at how absolutely awful the Atlanta defense is. On very few occasions did Bryce look remotely pressured and he had a ton of time to decide what to do with the ball. This is why Bryce got nearly 300 yards passing and 3TD's.

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The tiny fellas is all smiles right now, but let's wait until a team with some good pass rushing on it get a hold of his little but and shows him what good defense it like. We saw this in week 1 vs the Chicago Bears as Bryce scrambled to find space but rarely found it. The thing about that is that the Bears aren't even one of the better defenses in the league either.

To be honest I hadn't given much thought to exactly how terrible the Falcons can be but wow, they are really bad and in for a very rough season if they can be tossed around like this in a game vs. Carolina. The final score at halftime was 20-3. The final score of the game was 34-3.

Atlanta has a lot of holes in their game but one of the biggest ones is that they don't really have a reliable QB. It is really rare that a team will sub out an uninjured QB mid game but that is exactly what they did when starting Falcon QB Cooper Rush threw 2 interceptions and got sacked a time or two. Unfortunately for Atlanta his replacement didn't fare much better with 2 sacks and an INT for a team total of 6 turnovers just by the quarterbacks. Ouch!

Just so everyone can know that I am not full of hot air, my pessimism when Carolina is favored to win a game is not unwarranted. This victory over Atlanta is the first time in 5 years that Carolina has covered the spread when they are favored in a matchup. Not only that, in most of the games they were favored in the past five years they LOST the game.

This is why I bet against them and I am definitely going to bet against them next week because pundits and bookies are going to look at this victory as a momentum shift of sorts when what it really is, most likely, is that Atlanta is just a team in shambles. I give the Falcons about 3 more weeks before they hang it up for the season and start actively losing games on purpose so they can get good draft picks.

Next week could prove me wrong again, because they are facing the Cleveland Browns, who once again, appear to be one of the worst teams in the NFL (Cleveland fans are used to this.)

Carolina is favored by 3 to win and what I think could happen is that the Browns are going to see this matchup as one of their only opportunities this season to get one in the W column. Unfortunately for Cleveland, they share a division with the Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals, and Pittsburgh Steelers so they don't really have much hope for making the playoffs, even this early in the season. Carolina on the other hand, only has to do better than the Falcons, the Saints, and the Buccaneers and none of these teams are "good."

On the season I am 1-1 in my betting against Carolina. Zero thought goes into this, only pessimism :)