Betting point spreads, over/unders on Thanksgiving I: Bills at Lions

For the NFL bettor, Thanksgiving is a top-three day in any football season, right up there with Super Bowl Sunday and Championship Sunday – with a limited number of games to concentrate on and none running concurrently, it’s a fantastic time to turn your betting season lucrative.

On this Thanksgiving Day, the NFL’s slate of three games starts with

Buffalo Bills -9½ at Detroit Lions, over/under 54½ points

NFLbets tends to wait for Thanksgiving to even consider betting on the Lions, but the bettor can usually determine whether Detroit is ahead or behind of their reasonably expected win total for the season.

For 2022 thus far, the Lions are 4-6 SU/ATS including a 3-0 SU/ATS winning streak. With a surprisingly difficult schedule, Detroit has played just two games against teams which currently do not have a winning record – vs Green Bay in week 9, at Chicago in week 10 – and won both SU/ATS. The other two wins came versus Washington in week 2 and at the New York Giants last week, arguably both cases of catching a team on the right Sunday.

Since Detroit began playing this game in 1934, they’re 37-43-2 SU. NFLbets mentions this particular statistic here only to show that the Lions on Thanksgiving tend to be slightly better than the average Lions team, though still notably worse than the average home team Since ’34, the Lions are .463 on Thanksgiving and .445 in all other regular-season games.

Coming into Detroit (or rather, staying in Detroit thanks to a snowout in their home city in week 11) are the Buffalo Bills, almost on an opposite trajectory to Detroit’s: While the Lions are averaging 26.0 points per game over a 3-1 SU/ATS run, the Bills have allowed 23.3 ppg on a 2-2 SU/1-3 ATS jag.

While we can’t expect the Lions to get their first win against high-quality competition this season, this point spread is far too high for a Bills team whose past month of play has been more characterized by mistakes than the scoreboard-spinning of the past two seasons. Buffalo has won by double digits against anybody just three times in 2022 – and all before week 6.

Last week, playing in this same dome, the Bills ran up 368 yards on offense and scored 31 points against a far better defense than the Lions’. And other than the games at New England and at Dallas, Detroit has been good for 30.5 points per game. The (first) course on Thanksgiving is clear: take the Detroit Lions +9½ vs Buffalo and take the over on an O/U of 54½ points. (We know that’s a lotta points but they, fun!)

– written by Os Davis