Prime-Time First TD Bets — Sunday Night Football, Week 16
Alex Christenson
The first Sunday slate of NFL games is behind us as we turn our attention to a Monday night clash between the Baltimore Ravens and the Las Vegas Raiders. The Ravens come into this game banged up, as they’re down three running backs, a receiver and a cornerback, which could lead to this being a closer game than many expect. It’s also opened the door for a number of attractive PrizePicks.
PrizePicks is a creative new way to parlay picks based on expected fantasy point production. To dive into the ins and outs of everything PrizePicks, FTN’s Tyler Loechner wrote a comprehensive App Review.
How to play PrizePicks NFL
For the sake of this NFL article, the format is simple.
You pick 2-4 players and predict whether they will go over or under their projected fantasy point total, or their single-stat total.
When parlaying the players, the larger your parlay, the better the payout:
- Two-pick entry pays 3x (max entry: $400)
- Three-pick entry pays 5x (max entry: $200)
- Four-pick entry pays 10x (max entry: $100)
As a bonus offer, there is a “flex play” option. This provides an added level of security on your entry where you can decrease your multiplier received if you miss one of your entries but hit on all of the others.
An important note – these lines can shift over the course of the day leading up until lock. The lines that I am quoting are at the time of writing (Monday morning). I will be in the PrizePicks Discord channel (which is FREE!) up until lock to help out with how to adjust to the changing projections.
Scoring breakdown for PrizePicks contests can be found here.
NFL PrizePicks for today
Here’s a look at my favorite two-pick PrizePicks Power Play for Monday.
Ty’Son Williams over 57.5 rushing yards
While the Ravens as a whole are hurting at running back, Williams should be an individual beneficiary, at least for this week, as he assumes a lead-back role against a defense that allowed the fifth-most yards per attempt (4.49) in 2020. Not only did they allow chunk yardage to running backs, but they also allowed the second-most rushing touchdowns (24), the fifth-most yards after contact per attempt (2.94), and the third-most missed tackles (83) in the league. The Ravens are still favored (-4, DraftKings Sportsbook) in this game despite their injury concerns, setting up for a positive game script for Williams in an offense that ran the football for a league-high 55.04% of their plays last season.
Darren Waller over 5.5 receptions
Sure, the Ravens’ secondary is one of the better units in the league, but this line is criminally low. In his 16 games in 2020, Waller averaged just under seven receptions per game (6.68) on over nine targets per game while falling just short of 1,200 total yards. He only got better as the year went on too, as he averaged nearly nine receptions per game between weeks 13 and 18 last season, per the FTN Daily splits tool.
The weakness in the Ravens’ defense is in the short middle part of the field, as teams attacked that part of the field 27.7% of the time (per FTNFantasy’s passing direction against tool), totaling 164 plays for 1,098 yards (6.7 yards per attempt). Given that this is the softer spot in their defense, Waller should be able to rack up receptions operating as the possession receiver in the short-middle area of the field and if the Raiders are playing from behind, they’ll continue to have to throw and look his way.
