NFL Week 14 Picks

I can't say that Week 13 was especially good for me -- since I always pick the Kansas City Chiefs with a 100% chance to win (it's a religious thing),  I lost a whopping 75 points on their loss to the Bengals. But I did end up in positive points territory with 2.8 points (down from 97.3 last week), even though I lost an easy 20 points or so by somehow accidentally not registering my 79% pick for Dallas to beat Indianapolis. I picked nine of 15 games correctly.  At the moment, I am close to, but not quite in, the top third of players in the FiveThirtyEight NFL Forecasting Game.

This week's picks:

Las Vegas Raiders beat Los Angeles Rams -- 61%
Baltimore Ravens beat Pittsburgh Steelers -- 53%*
Cincinnati Bengals beat Cleveland Browns -- 71%
Dallas Cowboys beat Houston Texans -- 100%
Tennessee Titans beat Jacksonville Jaguars-- 67%
Minnesota Vikings beat Detroit Lions -- 71%
Buffalo Bills beat New York Jets -- 91%
Philadelphia Eagles beat New York Giants -- 79%
Kansas City Chiefs beat Denver Broncos -- 100%
Seattle Seahawks beat Carolina Panthers -- 91%
San Francisco 49ers beat Tampa Bay Buccaneers -- 71%
Miami Dolphins beat Los Angeles Chargers -- 71%
New England Patriots beat Arizona Cardinals -- 53%*

Asterisks indicate where my picks disagree with the FiveThirtyEight model's predictions. Any changes to my picks will take place before game kickoffs and will be noted in updates to this post.

Update, 8:50am, Monday, December 12: With only one game left to play (Monday night's), I am changing my prediction from New England Patriots beat Arizona Cardinals -- 53%* to New England Patriots beat Arizona Cardinals -- 61%*. Not because I'm any more confident that the Patriots will beat the Cardinals than I was last Thursday, but because I am at -9.8 points for the week and a Patriots win would get me, you guessed it, 9.8 points for a net zero for the week. So far, all of my bad picks for the week have been picks that agreed with FiveThirtyEight's model, but they're only down 7.4 points because I tend to "bet bigger" than the model does. My only other pick than this one that disagreed with the model was right -- the Ravens beat the Steelers. Unfortunately, I didn't go big on that one and only picked up 2.9 points.