[legend42]

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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.

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I think both those points are very good, and the lack of turnovers might point towards this being an aberration, as that's a fluctuating factor that usually returns to the mean. But it could also be just one more effect of the overall disparity.

For instance, those tipped-pass-INTs for touchdowns in last Monday night's SEA-PHI game are the kind of fluky game-altering plays that would seem to occur equally for both sides early in a close game, if anything, more likely to happen for the home team. But these also occur often when you have a total mismatch on the field- these are the types of plays that the dominant teams can pull off with weird regularity. You see this a lot more often in college usually, where superior teams can rush 3 and let their DBs face up and sit on routes. But this year, there has been such an extraordinary number of blatantly lopsided contests, I think the turnover ratio might not be as fluky as it seems.

Also, there are several teams with such anemic offenses that they're unable to capitalize even when they do get a turnover. But I have no real stats to back that up.