Imagine you’re a handicapper out there in Nevada doing your chart on the odds to show your clients for next seasons NFL games. You’ve got graphs up all over the room and you have just finished fine tuning your calculations when up pops on the internet a bit of news that could blow the whole project back to Jersey.
You set the Seattle vs Carolina game set at Seattle -3 with the over & under at 45 and just as the action starts to pick up you notice on the news that the Panthers top running back Maurice Jones-Drew has been busted for battery. Oh Great! Will he play? Is he in jail? What’s this going to do to my lines?
Of course, by the time that you get back to your computer, a bunch of guys have already jumped on the Carolina game before you get a chance to make some changes. That’s life in the fast lane. It seems that every week we get hit with the news that yet another of America’s sports heroes has committed some sort of dumb-ass act that has landed him in the news again… if not in the pokey.
Then, to add insult to injury, it comes out the next morning that Jones-Drew was not even charged with a crime and the whole things was likely to blow over without having any negative effect on the Panthers chances against the Seahawks.
Just as Saints fans are gearing up for a big comeback season, wide receiver Joe Morgan gets his butt busted by the Louisiana State Police with a blood alcohol content of 0.218 which more than doubles the legal limit. Now, these boys are big but 0.218 will make anybody drunk as a skunk. Call a cab.
Tampa Bay safety Cody Grimm is the son of NFL Hall of Famer Russ Grimm formally of the Washington Redskins and so comes with a strong football background. At the ripe old age of 26, Cody has now been arrested twice in one summer for public intoxication in Virginia. What was he thinking?
Stranger yet, according to reports, Panthers wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson was returning to his home in the Calabasas neighborhood when Justin Bieber came flying past at “breakneck speeds” at which point Johnson gave chase and called the police on the young singer in his new Ferrari.
Antics like these often keep handicappers up into the wee hours of the morning.
