The Patriots lost last week, taking out a substantial portion of survivor pools (48 percent) by my count, including all five of my entries. (I've bought back into one that allows it so as to have a live stake as I write this column). Several useful things can be learned from this:
(1) There's no such thing as a lock in the NFL;
(2) Fading the most commonly-picked team results in a good payout, i.e., those who avoided the Patriots this week have far more pool equity than those who picked the Pats would have had if the Pats won and say the Giants or Texans had lost; and
(3) The Vegas odds (and my odds) making the Pats such a heavy favorite were wrong.
I want to make two comments on this before turning to this week's slate. First, it's odd that I lost with the ch
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