CINCINNATI BENGALS @ HOUSTON TEXANS 
Vegas Line: Bengals + 4
Rob’s Line: Bengals + 2.5
Welcome to the business end of the NFL season. The serious stuff of loser goes home doesn’t get any more real than this and wild card weekend kicks off today when Cincinnati and Houston renew hostilities in the same stadium that hosted their Week 14 matchup just four short weeks ago. There’s some interesting things to look at here, including the spread, which, yes, I believe to be too far in Houston’s favour, but I’ll come to that in a little while.
As much as I enjoyed Christmas and New Year, it’s good to be able to get back to individual game previews and putting some meat on to the bones of a betting tip.
In the aforementioned meeting, the Bengals led 19-10 with six minutes on the clock, but conspired to lose 20-19 as T. J. Yates found Kevin Walter in the end zone from six yards out with two seconds remaining. The ensuing extra point did for Cincy and it was a result that hurt. It was a truly thrilling encounter which only whets the appetite for this one even more. That game was Yates’s second career start and his stats of 26 of 44 for 300 yards, 2 TDs, 1 INT wasn’t bad going at all for a rookie 5th round quarterback against a defense that ranked in the league’s top ten.
The line here opened with Houston as three point favourites, but that’s now shifted to four and the consensus is that not only are the Texans the more talented team, they also possess a home crowd capable of disrupting visiting teams, particularly playoff teams…yes, I will say it, akin to the quite fantastically rabid fans that inhabit CenturyLink Field in Seattle. That may be true, but the Texans do enter this one on a three game losing skid and two of those losses (to Carolina and Tennessee) were, rather worryingly, at home.
Yes, I am tipping the Bengals with the four points on offer and while my wallet is encouraged by the Texans’ recent form, Cincinnati’s record of 1-6 versus teams with winning records doesn’t make pretty reading. Four of those came against division rivals Baltimore and Pittsburgh so, should they triumph here, you’d have to conclude that they won’t go much farther. However, this isn’t about next week, it’s about the here and now and I believe the Bengals can look past defeats to what they know are superior Raven and Steeler teams and focus on exacting revenge on Houston.
What’s paramount and the key to advancing is stopping the Texans’ second ranked running game, a tough ask considering that Arian Foster and Ben Tate have helped them to average 153 rushing yards per game. The Bengals rank tenth defending the run, but they’ll need to pull out a lot more stops than last week when they were ripped for 221 yards by the Ravens, Ray Rice accounting for 191 of those on his own. You’d better believe that Foster and Tate have analysed every second of that performance and will be licking their chops in anticipation of the kickoff.
For those of you, like me, with an inkling for the Bengals on the spread, that last paragraph may look a little frightening, which I understand, but I’m not sold on Yates being the QB for an occasion like this. Granted, he’s a rookie the same as Cincinnati’s Andy Dalton is, but my faith in Dalton is double that of which I have in Yates. Call it a hunch, but I enjoy betting on a hunch so a small wager on the Bengals +4 will sit in my back pocket as wild card weekend begins. Enjoy the spectacle!
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