The Quick Answer
Two Underdog NFL picks today for Seahawks-Broncos on Thursday Night Football: Jaxon Smith-Njigba (SEA) Higher 15.65 fantasy points and Bo Nix (DEN) Higher 14.5 rushing yards. The full case for each, the video and the current Underdog offer with code OS1 are below.
Both of my Underdog Fantasy plays for the 8:15 p.m. ET kickoff at Empower Field come from the same injury report: Denver is missing Pat Surtain II (DEN) and a lot of its safety depth, the weather in Denver looks fine for a passing game, and the Broncos' own quarterback has a reason to start running again. Underdog is live coast to coast now, so wherever you are watching from, the card is open.
The Picks: Seahawks-Broncos Thursday Night Football, October 15
| Player | Stat | Line | Call |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jaxon Smith-Njigba (SEA) | Fantasy points | 15.65 | Higher |
| Bo Nix (DEN) | Rushing yards | 14.5 | Higher |
Jaxon Smith-Njigba Higher 15.65 Fantasy Points
Do your due diligence on this number. Plenty of places with an identical fantasy scoring format list Smith-Njigba at 18 fantasy points or higher, which is where I have him, and that gap is the whole play. The Broncos secondary is in shambles: Surtain is out with his ankle on the final report, Riley Moss (DEN) is questionable with his ribs, and the safety depth behind them is thin. The forecast in Denver is clean, so there is nothing to slow the passing game down.
Sam Darnold (SEA) is keying in on Smith-Njigba ad nauseam. He leads the NFL with a 36% target share, and the game logs on ESPN read 11, 11, 14, 6 and 8 targets through five weeks for 37 catches, 583 yards and seven touchdowns. On the standard pick'em table, half a point a catch, a point for every 10 yards and six for a score, that is 22.2 points against New England, 38.0 against Arizona, 29.8 against Washington, 20.3 against San Francisco last week, and the one miss, 10.1 on five catches for 76 yards against the Chargers. Four clearances in five games, and three of them by a touchdown or more. There is nobody on the Broncos capable of stopping this man tonight, so whether it is an abundance of the underneath completions Denver allows or a big play that ends in a touchdown, the best receiver in football eats.
OddsShopper's live odds screen lines up every book's version of this market once it is posted: the live NFL fantasy points odds page puts the sportsbooks side by side, the same odds comparison the NFL Underdog picks strategy guide walks through before you enter a card.
Bo Nix Higher 14.5 Rushing Yards
This is a buy-low spot. Nix had major ankle surgery that kept him out of the AFC Championship Game last season. It did not keep him from starting Week 1, but it does seem to have taken away his desire to run: 35 rushing yards through five weeks, and on ESPN's game logs that is 2, 6, 7, 10 and 10 yards, never once over this number, on three, five, four, two and four carries. He has an extended break after this one, nine days before a soft landing spot in Arizona in Week 7, so there is no reason to protect the ankle tonight.
The schedule is the other half of it. The Broncos have had PFF's number one strength of schedule through the first five weeks, and the softest of those games by a mile was Sunday against the Chargers, where Sean Payton called the most conservative game he could draw up and Nix ran four times for 10 yards. That changes tonight with the Seahawks' pressure coming to town. A quarterback who cannot find a throw against that front takes off, and in a small sample this season Seattle has given up ground to mobile quarterbacks, which is what makes 14.5 an opportunistic number on a player who has been held in check by his own play calling as much as by anyone's defense.
If the market is new to you, player props betting explained covers how a rushing-yards line is set and graded, and the live NFL rushing yards odds board shows where the books hang the same number once it is posted.
Watch the full breakdown of both plays:
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Keep Your Million is Underdog's free-to-play survival game. Every eligible customer, all new users and most existing users, receives a virtual $1,000,000 pot in bonus funds, and the job is to protect it across up to 20 questions.
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The Deposit Match
Underdog Fantasy is also running a first-deposit match. The two lists below are the match tiers, not the map of where Underdog is available, and the size of the match depends on which tier your state sits in. The full-product tier is AL, AK, AZ, AR, CA, CO, DE, DC, FL, GA, IL, IN, KS, KY, MA, MD, MI, MN, MS, MO, NE, NH, NJ, NM, NC, ND, OH, OK, OR, PA, RI, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VT, VA, WV, WI and WY. The predictions-only tier is CT, HI, ID, IA, LA, ME, MT and WA, and Underdog has said that tier's percentage and launch may still change.
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