While Green Bay started the season out 2-0, they had no answer for Dallas' relentless ground attack in Week 3 and with Tampa Bay squeezing out a big OT win on the road in Chicago, a definite shift in momentum appears to be occurring and the various situations at play in this game would appear to bear this projection out.
The Buc's are one of my plays of the week and here are the main reasons why:
Reason #1
The Packers fall into a number of negative situations this week, the most significant of which, involves Favs (or Dogs of < 7 pts) playing between Week 4 and 15, that have a higher Offensive Holding Penalty Against average (OHPA) than their current opponent.
Season-to-date, the Packers have a dismal OHPA of 3.33 while Tampa has a more reasonable average of 2.33 Offensive Holding Penalties Against per-game.
When a handful of secondary conditions are also added to the mix (excluding play-against teams that have had to deal with a Strength-of-Schedule > 0.600 is one example), this situation has been almost automatic since 2001, with a brutal record of 85-191 ATS.
Reason #2
Another negative situation hurting the Packers this week involves teams that would appear to be a good wager based on how their Pass Defense Rating matches up with their opponents Pass Offense Rating.
Green Bay's Pass Defense Rating of +1.28 would appear to match up well with Tampa's anaemic Pass Offense Rating of -0.44, but, when an 'advantage' of at least +1 occurs, as in this case, AND the team in question also had an above average Pass Offense Rating (POF) last season, (with Favre at the helm, the Packers were +0.28 in this category in '07) we start to see the makings of a situation that has caused grief for the team involved, versus the line, all the way back to 1994.
Now, there are other conditions that need to be met as well, most importantly, that the opponent of the team with the 'Pass Offense Advantage' also happens to have an above average Rush Offense Rating (the Buc's are currently at +1.11 in this regard) and this game does not happen to be on Monday Night.
Add everything up, and you are looking at a killer situation that is 53-138 ATS since 1994 and 8-28 ATS in the past 2 years alone.
Reason #3
In addition to the bad news surrounding the Packers and their statistical make-up this week, the Buc's are in a powerful situation that is 135-52 ATS since 1994 which looks at 'undervalued' teams that have seen a big improvement in their Rushing Offense from the previous year.
The logic is fairly simple and it entails playing on teams with a Rush Offense Rating (ROF) that is at least 0.5 pts higher than last season and is also a minimum of 0.5 pts higher than their current opponents ROF.
As mentioned above, Tampa Bay's ROF is currently +1.11--a vast improvement from their mark of +0.24 last season.
In addition, Green Bay's current ROF of only -0.13 suffices the 2nd primary condition for this trend as well.
The one other key ingredient in this situation is that the opponent of our much improved rushing team was a Playoff team in the previous season, which of course the Packers were, albeit with Brett Favre running the offense....
For more information on these trends, and a total of 6 pages stuffed with every team statistic imaginable, please visit my site and follow the link to the 'articles' page.
Tampa Bay's Confidence Percentage for covering the spread in this game is: 65%