As Daytona Fin pointed out, the 6.5 was an outlier and available at only one spot -- Cantor Gaming -- and only in the early going. My two friends and I played it after some hesitation and missing the early juice. We found out later that another group planned to play it later in the day. We apparently beat them by only a few hours. It was worth a dime apiece. This year Cantor not only dropped their limit on that prop but they aren't agreeing to raise the limit for regular customers. Normally you can manage that type of advantage if you are a known regular customer and will give them business throughout the year.
Las Vegas sportsbooks make mistakes. Sometimes blatant mistakes. I've tried to emphasize that over the years but for some reason the preferred reputation of all-seeing and all-knowing prevails on message boards and elsewhere. People want to believe that if Las Vegas hangs a number, then that's the perfect number and all kinds of sophistication went into the process. Meanwhile, it's often one guy assigned to a particular category and he's at home munching on pizza while deciding what numbers to use. His biases go into the process. The Cantor guy conceded last year that the Dolphins were closer to 7.5 based on mathematical application of the projected pointspreads but he decided to use 6.5. That's called shading the number.
Unfortunately the mistakes aren't as prevalent as they used to be. That's why I'm no longer in town full time. Neither are many of my friends from that era. We got spoiled by knowledge that certain sportsbooks would always screw up the same categories, like forgetting that college basketball over/unders are not balanced by half. The second half is higher scoring by more than 10%. Some books would butcher that at the start of every season. Nowadays with all the corporate mergers, and emphasis on a conservative approach from upper management, the gaffes are rarely available and you have to actually pick winners. Where's the fun in that? I liked it better when it was off the cuff, like the Dunes sportsbook manager throwing hockey totals on the board within minutes of me asking him what happened to them, on the first day of the playoffs. Then I had to restrain laughter when he threw them up 1.5 or 2 goals higher on every game than Gary Austin's was dealing them down the Strip. They were the only two joints booking hockey totals in that era, mid '80s.
Anyway, as Walrus and ckparrothead pointed out, the Dolphin stats last year equated to a lower number of wins than we achieved. There are many versions of that. The ones I looked at, and some I compiled myself, generally pointed to 7.2 to 7.5 wins when blended.
It's hardly true that the sportsbooks would have plummeted the number to 5 or thereabouts if the Martin saga were already underway, or somehow could have been forecast. As always, happy adjusters have poor instincts and take it too far. The power rating was in the 7.5 range so that's where it would have stayed. Public money forced the closing number to 8 wins, and most spots with juice on the over.
I would say Tannehill underachieved, regardless of the offensive line or other variables. His base number should be considerably above 6.66 yards per attempt. Some of that was self inflicted and can be reasonably expected to improve in 2014. We didn't run the ball often enough, nor utilize play action or snaps from under center nearly as much as we should have, given a quarterback on Tannehill's level. I spotlighted those variables prior to last season. They make sense for young moderate quarterbacks, not merely Tannehill's specific skill set.
We also underachieved in the Jets game to end the season. The Bills game a week earlier made sense but there were several factors pointing to an uptick performance against the Jets. Actually there were indications both ways. None of them were as negative as our effort that day.
BTW, it's interesting that so many posters remember that 6.5, and it was actually rounded down to 6 in the OP. Very much representative of human nature. Nobody preferred to emphasize the fact that the number closed 8, and it was 8 long before the start of the season. My dad the psychology and sociology professor used to talk about that all the time, the need for people to feel slighted and then joyous that they overcame the dismissal. It shows up in politics all the time. A winning candidate and his handlers invariably love to spotlight an early outlier poll. We were down by 8 points, they'll exclaim, often from the podium itself during the winner's speech, and on the political talk shows. Disregard that the cherry picked poll was not representative of the state of the race at any point in time.
