Photo by Atlanta Falcons, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia CommonsThe Loudest Voice Making Atlanta's Case Covers the 49ers
San Francisco ruled out three starters and the expert panel picked them anyway. The one prominent voice arguing the 49ers lose this game is a 49ers reporter.
San Francisco ruled out three starters. The expert panel picked them anyway.
Nick Bosa, knee. Deebo Samuel Sr., hamstring. Mike Evans, achilles. All three carry a November 8 return date, and Evans is the one who leads the 49ers in receiving yards. Yahoo's Week 7 roundup ran under a headline that says "Experts overwhelmingly favor 49ers over Falcons."
Three days ago this desk logged the other half of the week's discourse: Atlanta as the consensus pick to cover the spread.
That is not a contradiction, and anybody treating it as one is reading too fast. Covering is a question about the margin. Picking is a question about the winner. You can hold both.
Put them together and you get the sentence nobody printed.
The market thinks Atlanta keep it close and lose.
And the number says it out loud. DraftKings had San Francisco at minus two and a half this morning. Two and a half. An unbeaten team, on the road, without its best pass rusher and its leading receiver, against a side that has lost all three of its home games — and that is where the line sits. Lines move. That one was there at seven o'clock.
So the panel and the number are not arguing. They are saying the same thing in two languages.
Here is the part that should bother somebody.
The most prominent voice arguing San Francisco loses this game is Grant Cohn, who covers San Francisco. He put it on video Saturday. Nobody on the Atlanta side is making the Atlanta case.
Miles did the real work on this one Saturday — why Friday's injury news cost San Francisco less than it cost Atlanta — and the mechanism holds up. I am asking the other question. When the other team's reporter is your loudest advocate, what does that make you?
Forty-nine points in three games in this building. One o'clock.
Tell me I'm wrong.
The Tilt
Atlanta's best advocate this week covers San Francisco, and that should embarrass somebody.
— Dex Ponce
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