Saturday kicks off a stretch of NFL action with games scheduled on five out of six days, starting with two games with massive implications for the AFC playoff race in Texans vs. Chiefs and Steelers vs. Ravens. Patrick Mahomes is expected to start for Kansas City despite suffering a high ankle sprain on Sunday as the Chiefs try to maintain their two-game lead over the Bills in the race for the No. 1 seed, while the Ravens need to beat the Steelers to keep the AFC North race undecided heading into each team's Christmas matchup.

If you're a SportsLine subscriber, you can get all my picks, which in a typical NFL week number can near double digits, at the same time as I make them by downloading the app and signing up for alerts on my expert page. That's crucial, as you might not have access to the same lines from the Las Vegas contests, which don't move after they're posted mid-week. This week, I'm backing the loser of last week's "game of the year" and taking the Detroit Lions -6.5 against the Chicago Bears.

This line was Lions -8 on the lookahead, and Chicago certainly didn't do anything to improve its market rating in a 30-12 loss to the Vikings on Monday. Yet the line has shifted largely due to the continued rash of injuries affecting the Lions. I'm not sure those matter much in this matchup; Detroit should still be able to run the ball effectively without David Montgomery as the Bears defense has been awful for much of the season, particularly against the run. Alim McNeill is another big loss on the Lions defensive line, but the Bears offense has been a mess since Thomas Brown was moved from newly appointed OC to interim head coach. A successful performance for them would be getting to 20 points, while I can't see the Lions stopping short of 30, even if the short-week Thanksgiving game ended up being a much closer final score.

I've been SportsLine's No. 1 NFL against-the-spread expert from 2017-23, going 636-534-34 against the spread to put me up about 49 units on those picks at SportsLine. I've also delivered a 56.7% hit rate on my Vegas contest picks from 2015-23, which is exactly what you're getting below. And that run includes two finishes in the money, including finishing 18th out of 2,748 entries back in 2017.  

Get the rest of my Vegas contest picks for Week 16 below.

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