A pattern has emerged from our resident scumbag handicapper. When the weather grows cold, so do his picks.
Last year, the Rhode Island Scumbag proved to be the world’s most fadeable expert, botching every single recommended bet from Week 17 onward. 2022-23 hasn’t been as disastrous, but the downturn is significant. The RIS was 23-15-3 with his locks as November wrapped up — a tidy, profitable 59.8 percent hit rate. In the eight weeks since he’s 6-17, meaning if you’d done the opposite of his picks the past two months you’d be up roughly 9.5 units.
Is the Conference Championship round the place where that trend stops? The final non-Super Bowl Sunday of the NFL season means only two games and a rough spot to find obvious betting value. The San Francisco 49ers and Philadelphia Eagles will stage a battle between explosive offenses and smothering defenses. The Cincinnati Bengals and Kansas City Chiefs will pair arguably the league’s top two quarterbacks against each other in a matchup Joe Burrow has won three times in the last 13 months alone.
So who do we have for Super Bowl 57? Two completely different picks — which, if you’ve seen how bad our locks perform when we agree, you’ll recognize is a good thing.