Taking Dallas as slight dogs at NY Giants: Cowboys +1

We are backing America's Team plus the solitary point in the third installment of 2022-23 Monday Night Football. The Dallas Cowboys will face an NFC East rival in the New York Giants in the last NFL action of the week. Even without Dak Prescott, we note strong precedent for the road cover.

After knocking off the Titans and Panthers in weeks 1 and 2, the New York Giants will head into Monday's action with a perfect record. The last time the Giants won their first two games of the season was in 2016--when New York went on to lose its next contest to Washington, despite being favored by 3.5 points.

More broadly, the Giants won their first two games of the year only four times since 2005. New York is 1-3 versus the number in the action following these sequences. To support our thinking that this narrow swath of history is likely to repeat this evening, we point to the following system:

Over the first half of the season, fading favorites with winning records that missed the prior postseason, versus teams that did appear in the previous playoffs has been good for an other-worldly (statistically significant) 32% return on investment back to the 2005-06 season.

This angle has suffered cover rates south of 50% in only two seasons over this horizon.

We believe the key to this system's success is the betting public's tendency to overweight recent outcomes. Our hypothesis is that stints of overachievement by poorer teams erroneously steers bettors toward these temporarily hot-hands. This skew commonly results in inflated lines for undeserving favorites, we think, and opportunities for the objective to realize value with dogs.

Happy betting!!