Greg Cote's wild-card weekend picks

I have been doing these NFL picks for 27 years, since 1991, and while I won't say my 2017 regular season was the predictions equivalent of the Cleveland Browns going 0-16, I suppose an argument could be made. Overall, I was below average. Against the spread, I was below awful. There is no use trying to put a cherry on a bowl of [bleep]. My final overall mark of .609 tied for my sixth-worst ever. But I can swallow that as simply a down year. It's the ATS record of .432, dragged down by last week's impossibly embarrassing, worst-ever 2-13-1, that has me wishing my performance could be redacted from the public record. I feel like breaking the internet or stealing papers off people's lawns like Melinda Dillon in "Absence of Malice." My previous worst season vs. the Evil Betting Line was .449, in 2006. I cannot explain the bottom falling out this season. Just a year earlier I'd been .560 ATS, which is really good. My career percentage ATS is still .504 _ not bad picking every game rather than just cherry-picking. Anyway, we move on. We lift our chin up and put one foot in front of the other and call it life. On to the playoffs!