This Dallas Cowboys vs. Tampa Bay Buccaneers prediction forecasts one of the top offenses in the NFL going on the road in the playoffs to face a team with a losing record. If that team had any other quarterback but Tom Brady, this would be a no-brainer discussion. But the mythology of Tom Brady is inescapable.
The Behavior Bets sports betting model has identified value with these Cowboys vs. Buccaneers odds. The overwhelming amount of money being wagered on the moneyline and against the spread is coming in for Tampa. Fade the public.
Cowboys vs. Buccaneers Odds | Wild Card Weekend
- Spread
Cowboy -2.5 - Moneyline
Cowboys -140 - Over/Under
Over 45
*Odds provided by, and my personal bets, placed at Caesars Sportsbook.
Cowboys vs. Buccaneers Prediction
The Behavior Bets sports betting model went 20-12 in Week 18, going up 10.7u and sporting a +15.23% ROI. For the season, the model is 157-80-6* on bets against the spread, on the moneyline, and in player props. Let’s see if we can keep it going starting with this Dallas vs. Tampa Bay prediction. Make sure you also check out my full NFL playoff bracket prediction.
*Stats on the Behavior Bets model can be tracked at Pikkit, the best bet tracking app on the market.
The Cowboys are road favorites against a quarterback they haven’t beaten in seven tries. Speaking of seven, that is how many Super Bowl championships Tom Brady has in his career. Bad omen for the Cowboys?
No. Let us be clear, the Buccaneers are a bad football team who are only in the playoffs because they are in a division with even worse football teams. Yet, as is the case with so much in Tom Brady’s career, a little luck comes into play, and they are hosting a much better football team in a home playoff game.
There is a compelling argument to be made, as Trey Wingo did to me during our show, that Dallas should be a road dog. They struggled on grass this year, winning only once on that particular surface in a game against the Josh Dobbs-led Tennessee Titans.
That said, I believe the talent to be too overwhelming for Tampa to overcome. This is not the Cowboys’ offense from Week 1 when Dak got hurt and Tony Pollard was an afterthought with only eight touches. In that game, the Cowboys averaged 0.1 points per minute of possession time in scoring behavior rate (SBR).
Since Dak’s return, the Dallas offense is averaging 0.993 points per minute of possession time in Scoring Behavior Rate. With Cooper Rush, that average was .742 points per minute. That is a whopping 33% increase in point scoring. That .993 SBR is second among all playoff teams, behind only the five-game stretch the 49ers have had with Brock Purdy.
The Tampa Bay defense conversely has gotten worse as the season has gone on. It has been giving up 23% more points per minute week over week in score prevention behavior rate since the start of the season. Since their bye week, they have given up 47% more points per minute of opponent possession time than they did before the bye.
Their scoring behavior prevention rate (SBPR) of .807 after the bye is the worst in the playoffs in that timespan.
In this Cowboys vs. Buccaneers prediction, the Behavior Bets model predicts the Cowboys to nearly 10x their Week 1 score with 28 points.
Tom Brady’s Mythology
Tom Brady has not been a good quarterback this season. There. I said it.
Sure, he has one good stat, which is passing yards. Though, he needed 733 attempts to accumulate those yards. That is two games worth of attempts more than Patrick Mahomes, who had two games worth of yards more than him.
He is 31st in yards per pass attempt out of 34 qualifying quarterbacks. He has as many touchdowns as Tua Tagovailoa, who played in four less games (more if you count the partials). He is 18th in QBR and 18th in passer rating.
This is not your father’s Tom Brady, though he may be old enough to be your father.
He was a part-time player for the entire offseason, and the offense suffered as a result. They had hardly any growth in SBR all year and ended with an average of .567 points scored per minute of possession time.
That’s almost half of what the Cowboys did, and the lowest of any NFL team who has started one quarterback for 17 games. They did see a 5% bump after the bye week in SBR, but still below .6 points per minute.
If you only account for after the bye, they are trending up nicely but still would be projected to only score in the 0.7-0.75 points per minute range, and that’s before you account for the Cowboys defense.
Dallas’s defense has had stretches of dominance, and they have had stretches of incompetence. Their x3.7 bounce rate makes them the most inconsistent defense in the postseason. There is a caveat, though. Even with that inconsistency, their SBPR is still only .549 points per minute of possession time.
This Bucs offense is not scary, and even accounting for their upswing after the bye week, they are still only projected to score 18 points in this Cowboys vs. Buccaneers prediction.
Of course, now that I have written this, Tom Brady will throw for 400 yards and five touchdowns, and he will add another chapter to his mythology.
Cowboys vs. Buccaneers Prediction
Cowboys 28, Buccaneers 18
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