Next Up: Da Bears! New quarterback Jay Cutler has them off to a 3-1 start. They are coming off a bye week and will be ticked. They had the Falcons beat last season before Matt Ryan's heroics in the final 12 seconds. Also, teams coming off the bye week have won 59.9 percent of the games (57-38-1) over the last three seasons, according to Elias Sports Bureau (Give Jeff Schultz some love for digging out this stat!). This is the first of four games the Falcons will have facing a fresh team coming off a bye week. Dallas, Washington and the New York Giants will also have byes before facing the Falcons.
Credit: D. Orlando Ledbetter @ AJC
Game time is 8:20 p.m. ET on NBC's Sunday Night Football, which means I'll finally get to see the Atlanta play.
The Falcons don't have a very good record playing on Monday/Sunday nights, 9-20, which puts them at the bottom of the standings. So that concerns me. But the Bears record isn't a lot to brag about either, 18-32, which puts their winning percentage only two spots up from the Falcons.
We're favored by 3.5 points at home. This is a tough one to call. But I'm gonna have to say Falcons win!