Cleveland Browns

DPD Bettor's Guide - Conference championship "rigged polls" edition

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 1:18 p.m. ET

Fansided, Roger Cohen/FanSided via Dawg Pound Daily

The NFL conference championship games have arrived and our resident handicapper is looking to get his record back to .500 this weekend.

For the NFL, it’s technically still 2016, a great year for big underdogs but not so great for pundits, pollsters, common wisdom and all sorts of “that can’t really happen” stuff.

First, in what was termed the “biggest upset in sports history”, 5,000-1 longshot Leicester City won the English Premier League (that other boring, penalty-marred football) championship. One month later, Great Britain kicked common wisdom in the shins by “Brexiting” the European Union.

More from Dawg Pound Daily

In November, Lourdes-like regenerative powers from a brief Cleveland rain shower quenched the Chicago Cubs’ 108-year-long title quest – but the untimely weather barely raised pressures in Believeland ever since the hometown hero LeBron James-led Cleveland Cavaliers became the first team to overcome a 3-1 NBA Finals deficit (and 40-1 odds) to deliver four generations of Northeast Ohioans from the longest, most-tortured sports curse in history.

Finally, today a 70-year-old reality TV star was inaugurated 45th President after pulling an improbable electoral college inside-straight – claiming all the polls predicting his loss were “rigged,” including the gold standard FiveThirtyEight all-things-data-driven website.

(Wonder how a thin-skinned, ratings-driven POTUS will react when his coming-out party draws 50 percent fewer attendees than the 1.3 million who came out to honor King James and His Court last summer.)

Even the most casual follower of politics or sports knows of Nate “I used to be a savant, now I’m just another blogger” Silver – FiveThirdEight’s founder/editor who became an instant genius pinpointing the 2008 and 2012 election results. Even Silver gave The Donald only slightly more than a 20 percent chance to win when most other polls gave it less than 1 percent.

All that’s a roundabout way to say I’m picking against both of Silver’s favorites – the New England Patriots and Atlanta Falcons – to advance to Super Bowl LI. I also need to win both games this weekend just to get my season tally back to .500 before the Big Game.

So, on to this week’s selections:

Last week 1-3; Season record 38-40-3.