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(Sorry for the length here, I just started rambling)

There seems to be a more clearcut division between the haves and havenots among NFL teams this year. Of course, there have always been good and bad teams, but what's notably missing this season, one of the most reliable products of parity, is the huge number of 'in-between' teams: the teams that can legitimately match up with the good teams, but are vulnerable enough to lose to the bad teams in any given week.

It was games involving these teams that usually offered tremendous dog value. And these games would then promote even more parity, as teams would often beat supposedly "better" teams, naturally balancing out the league, making teams harder to classify, and causing uncertainty for future games. In recent years, you could count on as many as 10-12 teams to hover around this in-between level.

This year, many of the teams that had "tweener" potential have, due to injury and/or other factors, slipped into the "bad" tier: Ravens, Bills, Titans, Packers, Saints, Cardinals, Jets, Eagles, etc. While a few others have established themselves as good: Seahawks, Cowboys, Bengals, Giants, Bucs...

While there are certain teams that would seem to fit the tweener mold this year, there are many fewer than usual, and even those can be easily divided. So as an experiment, I decided to eliminate the middle level altogether.

I came up with 16 good and 16 bad teams, based not just on records, but purposely basic evaluation. It's probably not hard to figure the dividing line, and I'm fairly comfortable saying the worst teams in the good tier are clearly better (weighted over the season) than the best teams in the bad tier, a distinction that the muddiness of the in-between element made almost impossible to discern in the past.

I probably don't have to tell you the ATS record this year in games of good vs. bad teams is extremely lopsided. I think it's 67-29-2. And, despite what Fezzik and other experienced cappers are saying, I see no reason why the trend won't continue. To anybody who has watched the games this year, does this seem like a fluke? It's good teams beating up on bad teams, plain and simple, and tweaking the line a couple points (which is all the books can really do) isn't going to change that.

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I determined that among the home dog subset which is 19-39 ATS, adding 3 points to the dog would still only generate a record of 26-31 ATS. I believe there are two explanations for this:

1) The linesmakers, more or less, have done a very bad job evaluating teams this year.

2) While the talent differences always exist even between high-mid tier and low-mid tier teams, the biggest anecdotal difference I've noticed is how rarely favorites are turning the ball over relative to years past. I watch an awful lot of games and I've seen this pattern hold all season. This is the single largest reason to bet underdogs and the well seems totally dry in this regard in '05.