Straight-up NFL Picks, Week 4: Pulling up from a tailspin and backing the Bengals against danger
Week 3 was vicious for NFL home teams. Seven of last week’s games were won by visiting teams.
But the teams that did win in friendly confines pulled up some big upsets to do so. The Miami Dolphins closed as a four-point underdog before claiming AFC East supremacy over the Buffalo Bills. The Indianapolis Colts were a 6.5-point dog to the Kansas City Chiefs, then rode a special teams imbalance to the first win of the Matt Ryan era. The San Francisco 49ers were 1.5-point favorites in Denver, then lost an 11-10 game at least partially decided by Jimmy Garoppolo forgetting how long a football field is.
This led to a thoroughly brutal week for our straight-up picks. Not a single one of us here at FTW scraped the modest heights of .500. I was 7-3 through the 1 p.m. games and failed to predict a single game correctly afterward. Just gruesome stuff.
Will we learn from this? Probably not! But we will shout into the void once more and wait for feedback that either will not come or will be summarily ignored? Oh, friends, yes.
On to Week 4’s straight-up picks.
| Game | Christian | Robert | Charles |
| Dolphins at Bengals | Bengals | Dolphins | Dolphins |
| Vikings at Saints | Vikings | Vikings | Vikings |
| Bills at Ravens | Bills | Ravens | Bills |
| Bears at Giants | Giants | Bears | Giants |
| Browns at Falcons | Browns | Browns | Browns |
| Jaguars at Eagles | Eagles | Eagles | Eagles |
| Jets at Steelers | Steelers | Steelers | Steelers |
| Titans at Colts | Titans | Titans | Colts |
| Chargers at Texans | Chargers | Chargers | Chargers |
| Seahawks at Lions | Lions | Lions | Lions |
| Commanders at Cowboys | Cowboys | Cowboys | Cowboys |
| Cardinals at Panthers | Cardinals | Cardinals | Cardinals |
| Broncos at Raiders | Raiders | Raiders | Broncos |
| Patriots at Packers | Packers | Packers | Packers |
| Chiefs at Buccaneers | Buccaneers | Chiefs | Buccaneers |
| Rams at 49ers | Rams | Rams | Rams |
| Last week: | 7-9 | 6-10 | 6-10 |
| Year to date: | 27-20-1 | 25-22-1 | 22-25-1 |
And here those pics are in a better-formatted screenshot of our actual picks sheet, which sadly struggles to translate to our editing software.