Andre Szmyt’s 56-yard field goal with 10 seconds left gave Cleveland a 27-24 win over Pittsburgh on Thursday night. The Browns Steelers odds had Pittsburgh as a 2.5-point road favorite with a total of 38.5, per ESPN’s DraftKings listing. Cleveland has now been priced as the worse team in all four of its games this season. It has won the last three.
Yahoo Sports’ Ben Fawkes counted Thursday as the eighth straight game in which the Browns were underdogs, and the 12th in their last 13. We checked the eight. The numbers agree with him, from Bears -7.5 last December through Thursday’s 2.5, across FOX Sports, ESPN and NFL.com listings. Four of those games belong to last season, and the four from this one are below.
Four Prices, Three Wins
| Week | Game | Browns’ Number | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | at Jacksonville | +8.5 | Lost 34-10 |
| 2 | at Tampa Bay | +8.5 | Won 23-19 |
| 3 | vs. Carolina | +2.5 | Won 21-18 |
| 4 | vs. Pittsburgh | +2.5 | Won 27-24 |
The first two numbers come from FOX Sports’ weekly odds listings, and the Carolina number is the close we logged in Tuesday’s line-move table. Be careful about reading the column as a six-point upgrade. Cleveland played the first two games on the road and the last two at home, against four different opponents, so some of the drop from 8.5 to 2.5 is venue and schedule. The column still shows a team that hasn’t been favored yet and is 3-1. According to the Associated Press recap, the Browns last started 3-1 in 2021.
How the Browns Steelers Odds Held Up on Thursday
Cleveland led 21-7 late in the first half and 21-10 at the break. Pittsburgh erased all of it. Aaron Rodgers threw for 299 yards and three touchdowns while taking five sacks, and he tied the game at 24 inside the final two minutes with a touchdown pass to Pat Freiermuth and his own sneak for the two-point conversion. Deshaun Watson, who finished 24 of 33 for 268 yards, then moved the Browns far enough for Szmyt. NBC Sports had the final yardage at 372 for Cleveland and 361 for Pittsburgh.
The spread gave our line-move log nothing to grade. RotoWire, the fantasy and betting site, had the lookahead and the current number both at Pittsburgh -2.5 in its Week 4 report, and FOX Sports listed the same number the day before kickoff.
The total moved, and the reports on who moved it disagree. ESPN’s listing shows DraftKings opening it at 40.5 before it settled at 38.5, and the game produced 51 points. The betting site SportsBettingDime showed 83% of bets and 83% of the money on the over, while Steve Makinen of the betting network VSiN wrote that 86% of the DraftKings handle was on the under. Those can’t both describe the same bettors. We won’t pretend to know what the public did with the Browns Steelers odds.
The Case for the Market
Cleveland has scored 81 points and allowed 95. A 3-1 team with a minus-14 point differential got there by losing once by 24 and winning three times by 4, 3 and 3, and the AP recap notes that Watson has led a go-ahead drive in the fourth quarter three weeks running. One-score wins are the least sturdy part of any record, which is the usual argument for trusting point differential over wins. A bookmaker who keeps this team a short underdog may be reading the scoreboard more carefully than the standings.
The pregame numbers were close to a coin flip already. ESPN’s FPI made Pittsburgh a 1.4-point favorite with a 55% chance to win. DraftKings’ moneyline of -148 and +124 works out to roughly 43% for Cleveland once the book’s margin is removed. Our page on closing line value treats the last price before kickoff as the market’s best estimate, and a 43% side winning on a 56-yard kick is an ordinary Thursday. Nothing in the result says 2.5 was the wrong number.
Then the Thursday trivia. The AP recap says Cleveland has won eight straight Thursday night games and that Pittsburgh is now 0-10 on the road against AFC North teams on Thursdays. Nine of those ten losses came before Mike McCarthy took over in Pittsburgh this year. A streak that old belongs to several rosters, and it’s a poor reason to move a number.
A Number Written Down Before the Result
Cleveland plays at the Jets on October 11. Before Thursday’s game, RotoWire’s Week 5 odds page and CBS’s SportsLine both had New York favored by 2.5 with a total of 39.5. We’re recording that number here for the same reason we recorded the Week 3 board: a number noted before the result can’t be tidied afterward. The Jets are 1-2 and play at Chicago on Sunday, so whatever comes back after Sunday’s games will carry their result as well as Cleveland’s. It won’t be a clean reading on the Browns.
If the line comes back with Cleveland still getting points, the market is siding with the point differential, and the underdog run reaches nine. If it comes back with Cleveland favored, three wins by a combined 10 points were enough to move it. The first would be the more interesting result, because it would mean the market looked at 3-1 and declined to believe it. Neither outcome tells a bettor which side to take, and we’re not offering one. The underdog philosophy this site is built on asks whether a price is too long, and a team can go 3-1 as an underdog at prices that were fair every time.
RotoWire had the Jets number at 2.5 on Wednesday. We’ll print Monday’s number next to it.