POWER RATINGS I
1. Soul 13.96
2. Zona 13.27
3. Sharks 8.2
4. Predators 4.41
5. Kiss (-1.17)
6. Gladiators (-2.82)
7. Storm (-12.83)
8. Steel (-16.26)
The top 2 teams are easily Soul and Zona.
Will lean Soul to win the Arena Bowl.
The Soul are better in the passing skill areas like QBPR diff and ave per pass diff.
Zona is much better in TO's , +17 to +5
Soul have had alot of very bad fumble luck. They have fumbled 14 times and lost 13 of those. They have forced 14 fumbles and recovered just 6 , they are -7 in fumbles recovered but even in fumbling and forced fumbles, a 7 fumble diff, the most in the league.
Zona is +9 in fumbling /forced fumbles and +9 in recovered fumbles, which is reasonable.
Zona is better in the skill part of fumbling which is the ability to not fumble and the ability to force fumbles at +9 to Soul 0, but recoveries seem to be more random luck then anything else, and the Soul have received loads of very bad fumble recovery luck and these type things have shown tendencies to regress as games go on.
Yet Soul still rank no. 1 because of being better in the passing skill areas which are more repeatable and predictable.
Zona is no-where near as good as their point margin of 18.88 pts per game, where-as the Soul are a bit better then their pt margin of 12.94.
MY LINES.............................................
we give 3 pts to home field advantage
Soul -29.79 over Storm
Zona - 32.53 over Steel
Kiss -4.65 over Gladiators
Sharks -.79 over Predators
The obvious play here is Sharks over Predators with a 7.79 diff to the actual line.
The down-side is Sharks are coming off 2 big wins by 19 and by 14 where-as Predators are coming off 2 losses at the hands of the 2 best teams, Soul and Zona so there could be some regression coming for both teams.
Predators are also in a revenge spot from losing to Sharks in last years playoffs in the first round.
I think the book factored this into the line setting it to high thinking players would back Predators off these things.
I would expect Predators to win SU and lean Sharks to cover at this time.