Keep it simple

It looked deceptively easy. Sixteen games, with the home team favored in all but a couple of them. Turns out that none of the Gehlke Bros wanted to play maverick, however, as we mostly agreed with the Vegas oddsmakers and picked our way to a safe, vanilla-bland slate of Week 3 predictions that resulted in few splits and no real shift in the season standings.

Glenn and Sean traded victories — or is that defeats? — in their only two deviations from the status quo. On Sunday, the Ravens delivered the visiting Browns their third straight defeat, 28-10, which gave the Senior Bro the advantage heading into Sunday night. The Junior Bro got even when Dallas got its first-ever victory at Green Bay, 27-16.

That Green Bay win also helped Ben keep pace in the standings, but he lost a little ground to his dad when the 49ers defeated the Lions and the Chargers grounded the Jets on Monday night. Nonetheless, he remains confident of his ability to hang with the leaders until the end of the season.

In the end, home teams won 12 of the 16 games, which resulted in a lot of accurate predictions for our trio of professional amateur prognosticators. Glenn and Sean tied for the week's best record at 11-5, while Ben went 10-6. We all correctly picked Atlanta, Buffalo, N.Y. Giants, Tennessee, Washington, Denver, Seattle and Philadelphia. We also concurred in inaccurately predicting that Tampa Bay, Minnesota, Miami and Jacksonville would lose.