Biggest Takeaways and Questions From Week 8 in the NFL

The NFL season is a beautiful thing. You hear all the time that’s a week-to-week league and anything can happen on any given Sunday (they did make a movie about it, after all). With the nature of the seven-day turnaround, which can vary due to primetime games, every week offers us lessons to learn about individual players, each team and sometimes, the state of the league as a whole.

With any luck, these lessons offer us true insight while other times they can leave us scratching our heads. All we can do as fans and bettors of the game is absorb all the information and use it to shape our decisions in our own week-to-week entertainment when putting together our best NFL bets.

Here are five takeaways, lessons and questions from Week 8:

Davante Adams Needs Out of Las Vegas Before it's Too Late

We'll start off with this one as the most recent display of Riaders "football" is still fresh in our minds. This whole team is an abomination. It causes so much displeasure to watch this Raiders team that by all accounts should not exist in its current form. Find the lie: Josh McDaniels is not good enough to be a head coach in the NFL. Jimmy Garoppolo is not good enough to be a starting QB in the NFL. Davante Adams is way too good to be forced into irrelevance. Can't find it, can you?

The New York Jets Aren't Going Away

It's now Week 9 in the NFL and the Zach Wilson-led Jets are a half-game behind the Buffalo Bills in the AFC East. This probably says as much about the BIlls as it does the Jets, but plenty of people envision a world in which the Bills fall short of expectations and lose some head-scratchers. But no one imagined we'd see Zach Wilson do what he's done this season. He's not blowing the doors off, but he's willed the Jets to a 4-3 record, he had them on the verge of an upset over the Kansas City Chiefs, *did* upset the Eagles for their only loss and he's playing like the best QB in the state of New Jersey.

The Jets' path to the playoffs is not easy, even though they sit above .500. They have only a couple "softie" games (Raiders, Patriots, Falcons) with two against the Dolphins and one more against the Bills. The Wild Card race will be tight as the entire AFC North is above .500 and three out of four teams in the AFC East have winning records. But if the Jets (6.1% probability to win the division) can keep treading water and by some small miracle Aaron Rodgers makes the fastest return from an Achilles tear ever, they will be there at the end of the regular season. He's +4000 to win Comeback Player of the Year right now.

Is it Will Levis Season?

Buy your stock in Hellman's now, because Will "Mayo in my Coffee" Levis has arrived. The second-round rookie QB for the Titans stepped in for his first NFL start after Ryan Tannehill was ruled out following an ankle sprain sustained in Week 7's London affair. The organization has apparently decided it has seen enough of Malik Willis who has yet to come close to his post-pro day, pre-draft hype that plagues so many players in draft season.

Regardless of what is to come, they made the right move on Sunday, with Levis throwing four touchdowns in his debut, simultaneously bringing DeAndre Hopkins' career back to life and engineering the Titans to their highest scoring output in two years. And he did so in the Houston Oilers throwbacks! The love affair with Levis was so instantaneous, that when Malik Willis came out for a carry during the game, he was booed by Titans fans (much to Mike Vrabel's displeasure). We'll see what happens in the next few weeks, but Levis looks like a viable starting quarterback in fantasy as well as someone who can generate offense for this Titans team (and therefore our bet slips).

At 2.5 games back of the Jaguars in the AFC South, the Titans have a 12.5% probability to win the division per our model, while their best odds of +1300 imply just a 7.1% chance. Buy low time?

Check out our latest Super Bowl odds here.

Flu Games Are for Michael Jordan Only

Let's let the legend have this one, okay? In case you're unaware, Michael Jordan famously dropped a 38/7/5 line in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals while battling flu-like symptoms, just adding to the man's already ridiculous living legend. Patrick Mahomes, another man on a quest to be in the GOAT conversation of his respective sport, tried to do the same in Week 8 while battling the actual flu and safe to say, it didn't go so well.

The NFL is a Better Product With a Morning Game

It's not complicated or revolutionary, but in the context of this year's international schedule, it's more clear than ever: the NFL needs a morning game every week. If you're a fan of the international slate, then you know we're spoiled this year. Three London games in consecutive weeks with two more in Frankfurt, Germany in Weeks 9 and 10 is the beefiest overseas NFL schedule we've had to date. And in a week free of byes with all 32 teams in action, it seemed like a no-brainer to utilize that spot, but no such luck.

There are plenty of reasons to love these games. The NFL already has an event-like atmosphere to its weekly offering and putting a game on "primetime" in the morning in a unique stadium with all the fanfare surrounding the hype of being in a different city is just pure entertainment. The morning game gives us a chance to attack all-day sportsbetting, get some early-morning fantasy football gratification and get the bad taste of the inevitably terrible TNF game out of our mouths that much earlier. If you ask any NFL fan (and probably most players), they'd take a 9:30 am Sunday game over Thursday Night Football every single week. Make it happen, Roger.

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