Week 5 of the NFL 2024 season begins in Georgia as we have an NFC South dust up in the Thursday Night Football as the Atlanta Falcons play host to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in a match which will see the winners finish the night on top of the division.
Both teams have made what you would call positive starts but at the same time they have both put in performances which will cause concern so each will be looking for a strong showing here to build from moving forward.
Atlanta Falcons
The Atlanta Falcons are 2-2 for their season which is a respectable start to a year which was always expected to be better than the ones which immediately went before it with the addition of Kirk Cousins at quarterback. You would have expected the offense to take a while to build up a head of steam given how little game time starters get in pre-season these days. That was certainly the case with the Falcons and while there is still huge improvement in them, they have won two of their last three and look to be moving into decent nick despite the offensive struggles.
Although they are only 2-2 for the year, the two losses were against the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Kansas City Chiefs, both of whom have started the season very positively so we shouldn’t hold that against the Falcons. Wins over Philadelphia and New Orleans are a positive and if there is more to come on offense, which there should be, then Atlanta aren’t in bad shape. They might want their defence just to tighten up a touch in an ideal world.
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Tampa Bay Buccaneers
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers head to Atlanta on top of the NFC South with three wins from their opening four matches which is very much a solid start. The loss to the Denver Broncos in week three opened up a few doubts about them but I guess it is hard for every team to impress all the time. If there were any doubts opened up by that defeat to the Broncos they went a long way to silencing them when they destroyed the Philadelphia Eagles.
On paper, the Buccaneers have an offense which should be the envy of plenty in the NFC so when they are on song they can do damage to any side and with the exception of that Denver match their defence has stood strong. The good thing for that defence is they have faced three decent looking offenses in Washington, Detroit and Philadelphia and none of them have scored more than 20 points against them. That certainly bodes well here.
Betting
I’m not a massive fan of playing the match betting on a Thursday night but I can’t bring myself to avoid backing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at odds against. There is certainly a case that there is a lot more to come from the Atlanta Falcons this season, especially on offense, but improvements don’t tend to come around on short weeks so it might be that we see that upgrade in performance levels coming along next week rather than this one.
This feels like a bad matchup for the Falcons because the Tampa Bay defence are going to come hunting Kirk Cousins in numbers and this could be a bit of a bloodbath there as Cousins isn’t seemingly able to move around too much since his injury and he looks a sitting duck. The question then is whether the Buccaneers can get the job done on offense but they might not need to be putting up 30 points or anything like that in this game and with Baker Mayfield starting to look good I think they have enough offensively to take advantage of the openings their defence will create when containing Cousins.
Tips
Back Tampa Bay Buccaneers to beat Atlanta Falcons for a 3/10 stake at 2.10 with William Hill
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