Welcome to the first betting article of the 2021 NFL season! It has been nearly six months since the Super Bowl and almost two years since the last preseason football game was played, so any sort of professional football will be a welcome sight tonight. Let’s get into what makes the Steelers the more appealing team to side with tonight, and hopefully get the new season off to a prosperous start.
NFL Betting Picks: Hall of Fame Game | PIT vs. DAL
NFL Betting Pick: Steelers -2 (-110, PointsBet)
Tonight’s Hall of Fame Game features the Steelers against the Cowboys. There are many variables at play when assessing third- and fourth-string players who see the bulk of the playing time in these games, but preseason coaching records can help shed some light as to who fields the deeper teams — and more importantly, who may be trying to actually win preseason games. Take Jim Harbaugh, for instance: He has spoken in the past about wanting to set the tone early in the year with victories coming into the season, and that shows up in his 33-15-1 preseason record.
Similar to Harbaugh, both head coaches tonight seem to win more often than not in the preseason. Mike Tomlin sports a 31-23 career record — including three consecutive 3-1 preseasons from 2017 to 2019 — while Mike McCarthy is a cumulative 28-23 dating back to his time in Green Bay. Neither of those numbers account for the spread, but considering the tighter spreads of preseason games due to exponentially fewer points being scored, it stands to reason both are above-average coaches during this four-week stretch of games.
As for tonight, Tomlin and his above-average quarterback pool looks like the side to be on. Dwayne Haskins has had glowing preseason reviews, but he and Josh Dobbs, who will be doing almost all of the backup work behind starter Mason Rudolph, feel like exponentially better options than the likes of Ben DiNucci and Cooper Rush for the Cowboys. And while both teams will be starved for pass-catching options, James Washington should be the best wide receiver target tonight. He has shown upside at the pro level before, and against a weak Cowboys secondary made even weaker with the reserves playing a majority of the snaps, expect him to be the one non-running back capable of making plays.
Still, this projects to be a defensively focused game considering the super-low 31.5 total that Vegas is projecting. And when factoring in the two defenses, the Steelers are unquestionably the better team, having graded out as PFF’s second-best defense in 2020, while the Cowboys were fourth worst. First-string players will not be out there for long (if at all), and there are a number of additions from the 2021 NFL Draft that could end up being difference makers for Dallas, such as first-round pick Micah Parsons and fellow rookie linebacker Jabril Cox. But on the whole, trusting Tomlin’s hand-picked defensive players feels like the secure play. That makes the Steelers laying the points the NFL betting pick to target tonight.
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