It’s Bears vs. Chargers for our Sunday Night Football prediction. The Bears defensive behavior is trending up while the Chargers offensive behavior is trending down. Below we show you what that means for the bets we placed based on the Football Behavior sports betting model.
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Sunday Night Football Prediction: What To Know
- When:
- Sunday Night, October 29th, 8:20 pm, est
- Where:
- SoFi Stadium, Inglewood, CA
- Odds:
- Bears +330
- Chargers -425
Bears vs. Chargers: Bears Bets
- Bears Moneyline (+328 @ Caesars Sportsbook)
- Bears +9 (-110 @ PointsBet)
- Bears Alt. Spread +12.5 (-170 @ PointsBet)
Our Bears vs. Chargers Sunday Night Football prediction forecasts a potential upset. The reason is because two directly opposing forces are trending in opposite directions. The Bears defense is trending up, while the Chargers offense is trending down.
On defense, the Bears are seeing a 50% improvement week to week in their score prevention behavior. That celeration trend is unsustainable, but given how far into the season we are, when it levels off, it is surely to be better than expected. Last year, after trading Roquan Smith, they had a SPBx of 1.001 points allowed per minute of opponent possession time. This year, that average has come down 26%.
On the flip side, the Charges offense is doing the opposite. They are regressing week to week at a 40% rate in their scoring behavior. At 2-4, they are in real danger of throwing away the cheapest years of Justin Herbert’s career. What should be most concerning about their regression, is the consistency with which it is happening. Their bounce rate is x1.4.
A x1.4 bounce rate indicates there have been no outliers in any of their performances pulling the trend in any direction. It has been a steady decline as the season goes on.
Again, a trend that large is mostly unsustainable. However, it has them projected to have a scoring behavior of only 0.6 points per minute of possession. With a projected time of possession of only 26 and a half minutes, that could be very problematic.
On top of that, let us not lose sight of the Chargers defense. They seemed to have turned a corner heading into their bye week, but coming out of their bye week, it appears they turned the corner into a dark alley way and are in danger of getting mugged.
They have had two consecutive weeks of having a worse SPBx than the previous week, both times giving up more points than projected. A lot if going against LA in this one, at a time the Bears may be beginning to figure some stuff out.
*All terms, and why they matter, can be found in our glossary of terms
Bears vs, Chargers: Hedge Bets
- Dutching Winning Margins (What Is Dutch Betting?)
- Bears By 1-6 (+600)
- Bears By 7-12 (+1200)
- Chargers By 1-6 (+350)
- UNDER 46.5 (-110 @ PointsBet)
- Alt. Total UNDER 50.5 (-190 @ PointsBet)
As we mentioned, our Sunday Night Football prediction is that this game will be an upset. Since we can see that goes sharply against where the market seems to be, we are hedging our Bears bets with winning margins. As long as the Bears win by up to 12 points OR the Chargers win by up to six points, we will net a profit based on how dutch betting works.
If the Chargers win, we anticipate it will be close, but we also acknowledge it is a real possibility, and so we are hedging our shares in the Bears with this. Likewise, we project the total in this game, due to less than stellar offenses, to be closer to 40 points. The market has it set at 46.5. By teasing it to 50.5, we are giving ourselves some extra cushion at a 40% ROI if it hits.
Bears vs. Chargers: Sunday Night Football Pick
The Football Behavior Sunday Night Football pick for Week 8 is that the Bears will upset the Chargers. We see project that each team will continue their behavioral trends on two sides of the ball that will meet directly on Sunday Night.
This will also come down to time of possession. If the Bears control the clock, the odds of this dramatically increase. We project they will control time of possession by 7-8 minutes.
Bears vs. Chargers: SNF Pick & Prediction
- Projected Score
- Bears 23 | Chargers 17
- Straight Bets Placed
- Bears ML
- Bears +9
- Bears Alt Spread +12.5
- UNDER 46.5
- Alt Total UNDER 50.5
- Risk Report
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- 20.1% Chance Of Outlier Performances: Relatively Safe Bet
- Most Likely Outlier: Bears Offense. They have an x2.7 bounce rate and are starting Tyler Bagent for the second week in a row. Can he stay clean?
**All Odds provided by PointsBet (Last Updated Wednesday PM)
** All Pigeon Picks bets tracked at Pikkit