If you’re looking for the NFL pick of the day for Christmas, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve got a solid Thursday slate with three games kicking off throughout the day, and I’ve been digging through the numbers to find where the real value is hiding. There are two player prop bet angles today that I’ve tabbed as my favorite picks.
Christmas Day football is a different beast – you’ve got teams dealing with short rest, unique scheduling, and motivations that don’t always line up with what the spreads are telling us. Some squads are fighting for playoff positioning, while others are basically playing out the string.
Let’s open today’s NFL pick of the day: Isiah Pacheco.
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NFL Pick Of The Day: Christmas Best Bet
Let’s talk about Isiah Pacheco of the Kansas City Chiefs going higher than 11.5 receiving yards, and I like his receptions props as well (higher than 2.5). This is my favorite ladder play and is very reasonable – it’s my NFL Pick of the Day for Christmas.
Now, it’s getting legitimately ugly for Kansas City, and who knows what the future will hold. But we know what happened last week, and we know who’s starting at quarterback today: Chris Oladokun will be under center for Kansas City. He played most of last week’s game after Gardner Minshew exited with a season-ending knee injury.
The real story here for betting purposes is Pacheco, who logged his second-highest percentage of snaps this season at 73%. Just for comparison, he hasn’t cracked 60% of snaps since Week 6. That’s a massive usage bump.
He also ran 19 routes according to Fantasy Points data and had 7 targets against Tennessee, which he turned into 6 catches for 41 yards. Now, we might not be able to expect that kind of ceiling performance every week, but again, I’m going back to who’s at quarterback.
Oladokun is a checkdown machine. Pacheco led the Chiefs in first-read rate looks last week with 5 of them. Get this – he has 12 first reads all season, which means he had 7 the rest of the year combined. That’s an absolutely ridiculous concentration of targets.
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Now I know Denver’s defense is very good, especially against the run. But if they play with a little bit of a lead (and they are big favorites), they should leave the underneath stuff open for Pacheco and the smaller check-down passes. That plays right into Oladokun’s tendencies.
Pacheco is a free agent in the spring, and I think there’s a correlation here. Right after the Chiefs were eliminated from playoff contention, Kareem Hunt barely played.
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Andy Reid is a player’s coach, and I think he’s letting Pacheco do his thing before the offseason hits and he chases a bag. There’s no reason to keep playing Hunt if the team is uncompetitive, and Pacheco likely has no ties to the team’s future – he’ll most likely not be re-signed.
At 11.5 receiving yards with this kind of target volume from a checkdown-happy backup QB? I’m all over it, and I’m laddering this play up through his reception props as well.
That being said, anything can happen this late in the season, especially with an inexperienced quarterback, and teams looking to get young players some snaps. Bet responsibly!
Good luck, and enjoy the day!
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