A few weeks ago in the Bondi Blog, we wrote that “we are so close to cashing in BIG on the PGA Tour we can taste it!”
Well, we are happy to report that we WON BIG with Colin Morikawa winning the Workday Open at Muirfield last weekend! He paid 30-to-1 and the taste is oh so sweet!! A $20 bet on Morikawa paid $600 while $100 bettors cashed in for $3,000.
Not a bad way to spend a late Sunday afternoon. Watching golf and winning $3k.
We also had another winning week with our golf matchup bets and in horse racing we tabbed Art Collector at 5-1 to win the Blue Grass Stakes!
What a weekend!
You can get our golf and horse picks for this week for only $99 or join for baseball, basketball or football and get them for FREE! Call 1-877-332-0077 and speak to America’s Greatest All Sports Handicapper, Harry Bondi now!
It’s hard to believe how quickly things have turned badly for the LA Rams.
Two years ago, they were the NFC Champions and head coach Sean McVay was being hailed as the next great NFL head coach. But since putting up just three points of offense and losing Super Bowl LIII to the “real” genius, Bill Belichick, and the Patriots, the franchise has been in a downward spiral.
Last year, the defending NFC Champion Rams started 3-0, but ended up 9-7 and missed the playoffs, finishing third in the division. As they enter 2020, they are handicapped by a shoestring budget that is going to severely hurt the depth and talent of the roster.
The main culprit is the ridiculous deal they handed QB Jared Goff before the start of last season. After just two years in the league, Goff was rewarded by the Rams with a new contract that runs through 2024 and will give him the highest guaranteed pay in the NFL, even though he had two years left on a five-year entry-level contract paying him an average salary of $6.9 million. Goff made $4.3 million last season but because of the new contract that jumps to $28.8 million in 2020!
Goff responded by sorely regressing last season, posting career lows as a starter in TD passes, yards per attempt, yards per completion, and QB rating, while tossing a career-high 16 INTS. Yuck.
Think about that for a minute. Would you rather pay Goff $28 million to lead your team this year, or pay Andy Dalton, who is making $3 million as the back-up in Dallas, Cam Newton, making $1 million in New England, or Jameis Winston, making $3 million as a back-up in New Orleans. That kind of puts in perspective the gaff the Rams made in signing Goff to this albatross contract.
As a result, this season the Rams are paying nearly a third of their cap number ($64.8 million) to what appears to be an average or even below average QB and four other players who are no longer with the team, including last year’s top WR Brandin Cooks, who they signed to a five-year, $81 million contract before the 2018 season and then this past April traded, along with a fourth-round draft pick, to the Texans for a second round pick.
And wouldn’t you know it, this is the year the team opens a new stadium, which very likely will have no fans in it for at least the first half of the season.
As for the on-the-field outlook for the 2020 season, the Rams do return all five offensive linemen, but other than that there isn’t much positive news. With no spring practices or OTAs because of COVID-19 and limited practice time during training camp, this isn’t a great season to be revamping your schemes on both sides of the ball and bring in a new offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator and special teams coach.
The schedule-makers didn’t do the Rams any favors either. We rank their 2020 slate as the sixth-toughest in the league. The team opens with a brutal stretch that features a home game in Week 1 against the Cowboys, followed by road games at Philly and Buffalo. (As we noted in a previous Bondi Blog about the winners and losers of the NFL schedule release, teams that start the season 1-3 make the playoffs just 14% of the time!)
Not to mention, they’re divisional schedule forces them to play two games each against Seattle and San Fran, two of the best teams in the entire league, and the Cardinals are no longer a pushover.
But the biggest concern for McVay has to be the fact that the Rams will play seven teams with a projected Top 10 run defense in the league this season, meaning the team’s success in those games will fall on the shoulders of Goff, who will be without Cooks and RB Todd Gurley for the first time in his career and leaving rookie Cam Akers as the likely starter. Worth noting: Last year the Rams went 1-5 vs. teams with a Top-10 ranked rush defense and 8-2 vs. non-Top-10 run defenses.
We’ll be looking to take advantage of this mess in LA by playing the Rams under 8.5 wins for the season, as well as laying the -170 on the Rams to NOT make the playoffs.