Buccaneers-Bears Best NFL Week 9 Player Props

This week’s edition of Sunday Night Football features a pair of surging teams in the Buccaneers and Bears, which have won two and three straight games, respectively. 

Tampa Bay still has a ways to go to completely emerge from the 0-4 hole it dug itself to open the season, while Chicago increasingly looks like a Super Bowl contender, especially after knocking off last year’s Big Game participants for each of its last two wins.

Without further ado, let’s dive into three player props to consider for Sunday night’s action. Don’t forget to check out our NFL betting trends page for game data and insights on the week ahead.

Buccaneers-Bears Best NFL Week 9 Player Props

• Caleb Williams Over 20.5 Completions
• Colston Loveland Over 49.5 Receiving Yards
• Kenny Gainwell Under 6.5 Rush Attempts

Caleb Williams Over Completions

Williams continues to display mastery in head coach Ben Johnson’s system, as the third-year signal-caller is now completing a career-best 70.9% of his passes after eclipsing the 70% threshold for the third time this season in an extremely difficult on-paper matchup on the road against the Seahawks on Monday night. 

Williams is also benefitting from having all his key targets at full health, and Sunday night, he’ll be in a home matchup against a team that should facilitate another efficient performance. The Buccaneers, as has been the case for years, continue to be very difficult to run on, and as a result, Tampa Bay is facing the league’s fourth-highest pass play rate (60.4%). That’s helped lead to the Bucs giving up 246.3 passing yards per road contest and doing so at 11.2 yards per completion (compared to 8.9 at home).

Then, the Bucs are yielding the eighth-most completions per contest (22.3), and Williams has at least 21 completions in four of the five games he’s suited up for, the only exception being a particularly difficult matchup against the Vikings that he exited early due to a hamstring injury.

Original Line Publish: 20.5

Colston Loveland Over Receiving Yards

This prop dovetails nicely with the one for Williams, considering Loveland has been one of the quarterback’s principal targets. Loveland has been especially productive over the last three games, when he’s averaged 6.7 receptions and 66.3 receiving yards on 9.3 targets per contest. Loveland is 3-0 to the Over on the 49.5 in that span, and 4-1 over his last five games overall.

Given the expectation that the Bears do their fair share of passing Sunday night, Loveland’s prop gains even more traction. Williams’ pass yards prop is over 240 as well, so expecting Loveland to account for a little over 20% of that is well within the body of work the duo has had in recent games. 

The Buccaneers’ propensity for allowing the aforementioned elevated yards per completion on the road and the fact Tampa Bay is giving up 10.4 yards per catch to tight ends further supports the bet.

Original Line: 49.5

Kenny Gainwell Under Rush Attempts

When a player has an atypical level of involvement in the offense for a week or two due to unusual game scripts, it’s always prudent to see if oddsmakers are trying to bait the public a bit by raising the lines in subsequent games. Such a scenario describes some of Gainwell’s props this week after the change-of-pace back averaged 19.5 carries for 114.0 rush yards over the last two games.

However, a Week 7, 43-13 thrashing of the Panthers followed by a Week 8 win over the Falcons played in game-long soggy conditions and in which the Bucs became the first team to win a game without completing a single pass since 1974 are textbook examples of the previously alluded to “unusual game scripts.” Sunday night’s game against a borderline elite team in the Bears on their home field isn’t going to play out like either of those two games, and as such, we should be looking at a much more normal workload for Gainwell.

Before the last two weeks, that meant an average of 3.2 carries per contest over the first six games of the season, a sample where Gainwell never exceeded three carries in any one game. Additionally, it’s worth noting the Bears are 6.5-point favorites (and climbing), and while that could help lead to a solid amount of snaps for Gainwell, they would almost certainly be leading to pass-catching opportunities as the Bucs try to chip away at a second-half deficit, as opposed to rush attempts. Chicago is also becoming increasingly difficult to run against now that Jeffery Simmons is in town, further dimming the outlook for the Bucs’ ground attack as a whole. 

Original Line: 6.5

Photo Credit: REUTERS