Will the Washington Redskins win the game against the Dallas Cowboys in week 17?

Covering the last week in the regular season for our “Offsides” articles, a co-operative collection of opposing views from Football Betting World and OddsOnBetting, we look at the game between the Washington Redskins and the Dallas Cowboys.

As far as the Wildcard Playoff spots are concerned, this is one of the most important games of this week. Both of these teams are in an absolute must win scenario. Washington must win to hold their 4th seed spot, and with the win clinch the Division.

Dallas must win to have any kind of chance to win a spot in the wild card round. For the Cowboys it is a little more complicated. For them to get in they must win Sunday, and the Bears, Vikings and the Seahawks must lose. Not very likely for that to all happen, but it is mathematically possible.

Dallas has had a bit of a strange season, a few times they looked like were getting things together but then something would get kind of quirky and they would suddenly look like they couldn’t win games they should have dominated.

Then in some games they would get behind and come back and win. They come in to this final game at 8 and 6 so they will finish the season with at least a close to 50% record, but if it wasn’t for some of the mistakes they had made earlier in the season they would have a much better record.

Last week’s game against the Saints is a perfect example. At one point mid way through the game they were down by 14 points, but with only 5 minutes left in the game they got it together and turn on the defense a bit and stopped the drives of Drew Brees. Then on offense, Tony Romo was able to convert on some nice plays and they tied the score as the clock wound down and went into overtime.

But true to what has plagued Dallas a lot this year, what was looking like what was going to be a game for Dallas after an exciting come back, a turnover led to the winning drive by the Saints. I mention this to bring up that even though Tony Romo threw for 416 yards; the Cowboys have found ways to lose games in which it appeared they would win.

They can not have that kind of game against the Redskins. This football game is just too important to do so. In fact it’s kind of ironic that this is the late game on Sunday, the very last game of the regular season since it is so important to both of them.

What are the odds on Washington winning against the Cowboys and can they cover?

As of Monday night I checked a few different books and most of them have the Washington Redskins winning this game by 3 points. I recall at least one book had the line at 3.5 so be sure to check the odds when you place a bet.

Let’s take a closer look at whether the Redskins can in fact comfortably cover that spread. First of all, Washington has a fairly strong defense. They are ranked 6th against the pass and have 17 interceptions and 36 sacks against their opponents so they can be an obvious threat to quarterbacks.

Even though Dallas quarterback tony Romo has been throwing for a good amount of yards in games recently, if we look at the games where he was under a lot of pressure from his opponents defenses we see those are the games were he makes the most mistakes. This is due mostly to the fact that although Dallas has done a decent job of acting under pressure when their backs are against a wall as a team, Romo himself does not exactly handle pressure well in the backfield.

I think that Washington will take advantage of this and linebackers like Perry Riley and Ryan Kerrigan will force him to hurry a number of plays and try and raise his potential for making mistakes. Romo has already thrown 16 interceptions this year, and increasing that number will be one of the goals of the Redskin defense.

The tradeoff on that extra pressure is the difficultly in making sure they don’t leave themselves wide open in the secondary, but that is something that Washington has been improving on quite a bit since mid season as is evidenced by their record. They have won the last 6 games and they have already beaten Dallas once this year, 5 weeks ago in week 12.

The Redskins have the 5th ranked offense in the league. They currently hold the number one rank in rushing and that rank comes mainly from the effectiveness of running back Alfred Morris who is over 1400 yards this year. In addition to his running plays, a lot of the rushing credit goes to the mobility of quarterback Robert Griffin III. Often when it appears a play action play is falling apart, he just has an uncanny ability to make things happen and turn what looks like will be a loss into yards gained and very often into a first down.

Yes I do think that the Cowboys heart will be in the right place, but I do not think it will be enough to stop the Redskins from getting the job done and I think Washington will finish the season showing that they truly deserve the Division title and how hard they have worked to get there.

Not only will they cover the 3 point spread, I think they could cover a 6 point spread. I am not sure how I feel about them going all the way or whether they will make it to the final round, but they will be playing in the wild card game in January.

With the season just about over now is the time to get your bets placed for the final games as well as the playoffs, and in fact you can even make your superbowl picks now. All you need do is Visit Bet Online and create a betting account and you could be betting on football in a matter of minutes.