It’s official, Gardner Minshew is the Las Vegas Raiders’ starting quarterback, but he won’t be taking the field against the San Francisco 49ers. Will that deter our 49ers vs. Raiders predictions from backing the hosts?
Find out why my NFL picks are siding with Las Vegas on Friday, August 23.
49ers vs Raiders prediction
My best betRaiders +7.5 (-110 at bet365)
My analysis
Nobody is overly confident in a QB combo of Carter Bradley and Nathan Peterman, however, the San Francisco 49ers aren’t expected to play any of their key players either.
Winning by more than 7.5 points in a battle of backup players fighting to make the 53-man roster is a tall task, even for the defending …
It is likely that if most managers found themselves in charge at Vicarage Road at this moment they would glance at Watford’s fixture list – which in their next eight games includes encounters with both Merseyside teams and both Manchester sides as well as Chelsea, Arsenal and Leicester – look at the average lifespan of their recent head coaches and then book in a removals company and a flight home.
But to arrive at this moment, with Xisco Muñoz having been sacked for collecting seven points from seven relatively gentle opening games, something of an injury crisis brewing in central defence and the gates about to open on the raging fires of footballing hell, takes an unusual level of optimism. The kind of optimism generally found eithe…
Manchester City spend most of their time in the Premier League playing against low blocks where lines of four and five do their best to slow down the leaders in the desperate hope that they can keep them out. Because of this it is very important what happens in between the lines, the small gaps where midfielders are allowed to operate. Ilkay Gündogan is the master of finding the gaps and settling tight matches but how much longer he will be doing it in blue is unknown.
Everton operated as one would expect considering their precarious league position and the fact Sean Dyche is resident in the technical area. There was a back four, which often became a back five when auxiliary left‑back Dwight McNeil dropped back to help the unfortunate Mas…
Kristaps Porzingis just began his third season, and somehow it feels like we’ve waited a decade for him to have a competent point guard. This is a more Knicks-wide crisis, decades in the making, involving a procession of washed, deluded, or otherwise bleak names: Stephon Marbury, (old) Baron Davis, (old sad) Steve Francis, (sad) Derrick Rose, Raymond Felton, Pablo Prigioni, Jose Calderon, to name just a few. So yes, the issue precedes him—but Zinger is the type of player who makes that absence really felt, the voracious son who deserves to be fed. Someone, anyone, just feed this boy, he’s so slender. Already it was heartening to see Jarrett Jack—yet another old point guard, an easy signing to mock, but a good one—deliver Porzingis 12 assists in their first 28 minutes together…
Early this morning, a cargo truck overturned on a Detroit highway, scattering boxes of frozen chicken wings across the asphalt, capping off what has been a remarkable year for highway-spill enthusiasts. Let us now stroll down food-spill memory lane. Watch your footing, it might be slippery. The year started off slowly, but finally in March, there was a corndog spill near Shreveport, La. The spills started picking up steam in the summer. There were two separate Bud Light spills in 2014: The first, in June, happened in North Dakota, and was followed by a September spill in the Houston area. A massive Red Bull spill menaced I-95 in Florida in early July. In August, a fish spill took place in Thailand. Woof. Closer to home, a " cranberry sludge" spill marred a Massachusetts…