Falcons vs. Panthers odds preview, game and player prop bets, and top football betting promo codes

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The Atlanta Falcons have the best possible chance to rebound after they lost both their Week 14 game and the NFC South lead to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers last week. The Falcons travel to the NFL’s worst team, the one-win Carolina Panthers, knowing that only a win will do.

Below, we offer some best bets and prop picks for the game, as well as how best to bet on Sunday’s clash.

The Falcons’ defeat to the Bucs, which came despite the third 300-yard game of Desmond Ridder’s career, means Tampa Bay is now leading the lackluster NFC South, but it’s all a matter of tiebreakers at the moment with Atlanta and New Orleans Saints also 6-7.

What that means is that every single game in the division is vital with just four Sundays of action left in the 2023 regular season.

The Falcons will have this one circled as a must-win game. The Panthers are terrible and rookie Bryce Young is making an unfortunate case to be the most underwhelming No. 1 draft pick in recent memory.

Carolina went down 28-6 to the Saints in another divisional matchup last week despite its offense outgaining New Orleans 303 yards to 207, 204 of those yards coming on the ground as they failed to reach the end zone for the first time this season.

These two teams met in their respective season openers back in Week 1, when Young went 20-of-38 for 146 yards and threw a touchdown and two interceptions while Falcons’ rookie runner Bijan Robinson had 10 carries for 56 yards with six catches for 27 yards and a receiving touchdown. The Falcons (-3 on the spread, ballpark -165 on the moneyline) are favored as repeat winners here.

Kickoff at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte is at noon CT live on FOX.

The Falcons have been one of the most unpredictable teams all season so proceed with caution, but it’s hard not to think they’ll cover here considering the substandard quality of their opponent and the fact they simply cannot afford to lose to an inferior divisional opponent.

The Panthers are 3-9-1 against the spread, having covered just three times all season, and have missed covering by an average of more than 5.5 points per contest. Given that Atlanta’s offense looks like it’s belatedly figuring things out, we’ll take the Falcons to win by more than a field goal. The Falcons have the better running offense and defense and the better record against common opponents this year. It might even be worth considering an alternative odds line to boost your payout.

This seems like a game ripe for the under. A middling pass attack against a horrible pass attack and two of the bottom nine overall scoring offenses go head to head with neither team exactly overflowing with confidence.

The Panthers have the third-worst offense at a 15.2 scoring clip, while the Falcons aren’t much better with a 24th-ranked 19.3 points per game. These two teams have only hit the over in nine out of 25 games between them this year and we’ll take the under here.

Last week, Atlanta totalled 434 yards of offense, led by Ridder’s 347 aerial yards. While the QB’s arm was a key weapon against the Bucs, there’s one way the Falcons can set themselves up perfectly for a bounceback win this week: attack the Panthers on the ground.

Atlanta is currently ranked sixth in the NFL in rushing yards with an average yeards-per-attempt figure of 4.1. The Falcons handle the ball an average of 31.7 times per game, running the ball on 48 percent of plays this season and 52 percent over their last three games.

Now, they get to face the worst run defense in the NFL. The Panthers are dead last in both opponent rush EPA and opponent rush success rate and Atlanta just needs to lean on rookie Robinson and Tyler Allgeier to give themselves a huge edge. Allgeier was the rushing leader for the Falcons last week with nine carries for 40 yards (4.4 per carry), which is 8.5 more than his over/under total this week. More pertinently, he has hit the rushing yards over in 11 of his last 13 games.

The Panthers’ porous run defense has also allowed the most rushing touchdowns (21) in the league through 14 games this year.

Alongside Allgeier, Falcons rookie running back Robinson has 790 total rushing yards (ninth in the NFL) this year and is averaging a solid 4.7 yards per carry this season (11th in the NFL) and 60.8 yards per game. He has already recorded four rushing TDs this season and now he’ll get a chance to have fun against arguably the worst run defense in football. If he and Ridder want to switch it up, Robinson also has 40 catches on 61 targets for 320 yards and three receiving TDs.

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