I’m definitely not gonna finish up the week before kickoff tonight, so here’s what you shouldn’t expect from New Orleans-Chicago. I’ll follow up with the rest of my hopelessly off-base predictions for this week later tonight or tomorrow.<\/p>\n
New Orleans (+3) at Chicago<\/b>
On paper, both of these 7-6 teams are still in the playoff hunt. In reality, only the Bears, who can still win the NFC North title, have a legitimate shot of extending their season into January. They need to win this game to keep their hopes alive, however. Plus, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re at home. And they come in with a giveaway\/takeaway differential of +6 as compared to the Saints\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 -4 (and, notably, the gap is largely result of the Bears\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 DBs picking off a lot of balls and Drew Brees<\/a> throwing his fair share of picks — not an unreasonable number of them, but enough). So I suppose I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll take the home team and look for them to win it by four.<\/p>\n