Until Joey Harrington starts using his middle name like an assassin, no three words will frighten football gamblers more than "The Obvious Game." You never want to have money on the Obvious Game. It's like buying a WNBA franchise or investing money with Cecil Fielder.

What's the Obvious Game? It's a more nefarious version of a bandwagon pick, in which you unwittingly back a popular pick and realize it too late. This isn't like riding the wave of a hot stock; you're better off going the other way and betting that a disproportionately large number of gamblers could never be right about anything. Remember, when people gamble on sports, more often than not, they lose. That's why nobody has ever said the following: "I used to be a bookie, but too many of my customers were winning and I couldn't afford it anymore."

Savvier gamblers learn to sniff out Obvious Games based on experience, just like people learn to flick past any cable movie with Whoopi Goldberg based on experience. But it's easy to miss the signs. For instance, when I was making my picks for last week's column, here was my inner thought process as I debated the Bengals' giving 6½ in Cleveland:

I'm not crazy about that Bengals team, especially on the road with that defense ... but how could anyone back Derek Anderson and the Browns? They looked gawd-awful in Pittsburgh in Wee- ...

STOP! Right there!

That's the first way to sniff out the Obvious Game, when you can't make a valid case for picking the other team. The second method depends on your group of friends. We'll call this the LeRoy Factor. I have a friend who's notorious for altering the outcome of sporting events simply by wagering on them. He doesn't lose every time, but his track record is frightening enough that I've seen people beg him not to jump on their bets right before a game. (We're calling this friend LeRoy because I always wanted a friend named LeRoy.) Right before the 2007 baseball season, after LeRoy wagered five G's on the over for Dice-K wins (14 and a half), a mutual friend called to warn me, "I hope you're not too excited for the Dice-K era." Up until that point, I wasn't scared of Dice's adjustment to American life, or the jump from Japanese hitters to American hitters, or even that he might throw out his arm with that goofy 300-pitch warm-up routine. But LeRoy's backing him? That scared the crap out of me.

You know the rest: Dice raised his record to 13-8 on Aug. 4 before a tired arm sent him into a Goose-like tailspin; now he's stuck at 14 wins, and if he doesn't get the "W" in one of his last two starts, it could end up being LeRoy's most famous gambling jinx yet. But should we blame LeRoy or the "over" for having been too obvious in the first place? When something looks too good to be true in gambling, it usually is.

Which brings us back to Week 2, the week everyone and his degenerate brother loved the Bengals. On ESPN.com's valuable "Who Picked Whom" page, nearly 90 percent of the Pigskin Pick'Em participants went with Cincinnati. On Wagerline.com's equally valuable "Consensus Picks" page, over 83 percent of its clients were backing the Bengals. For Las Vegas' official line, an influx of Cincy money shifted the spread from 6 to 7. To make matters worse, the Bengals needed only to win outright to cover their end of a two-team tease, so they were drawing even more action from teaser lovers. By Saturday afternoon, I was already regretting the Cincy teases I would have made if gambling were legal.

We reached the tipping point on Sunday morning: In my picks pool that I run with my buddy Gus, everyone "doubles" on one game per week (a best bet that counts as two wins or losses). We have the pool split into two conferences; the guys from my conference (12 in all) e-mail their doubles to me. Any time four or more guys double on the same team, the LeRoy Alarm starts going off, and if my friend Nick doubles on the game, the LeRoy Alarm becomes louder than a fire engine siren. (If the Obvious Game was Pam Anderson, Nick would be Tommy Lee AND Kid Rock.) So once Nick weighed in with his obligatory Cincy double, I became convinced something fishy could happen and even warned three of my gambling buddies.

(Did I switch my pick in the pool or bang the Browns money line? Of course not. Remember, I'm an idiot. Don't ever forget this.)

Four hours later? Browns 51, Bengals 45.

Look, everyone lost last week -- the underdogs went 12-3-1. But there was something especially cruel about that Browns game, like the gambling gods were shoving it in our faces or something. Fifty-one points for a team that scored seven the previous week? Two long runs and 200-plus yards for the corpse formerly known as Jamal Lewis? Five TD passes for Derek Anderson, the fantasy hero who didn't start for a single roster across the country? What were the odds that Cincy would score 45 points and lose in Cleveland? 100,000-to-1? A million-to-1? It almost seemed like a vast karmic conspiracy.

Which raises the big question ...

Once an "Obvious Game" emerges, does that emergence somehow alter the outcome of the game?

If there WAS a connection, that would imply a tipping point where too many people were rooting for the same thing, so they swayed the outcome with their collective bad luck like 50,000 Earl Hickeys combining into Super Earl. That seems a little farfetched, although I'm not ruling it out. A more realistic answer could be found in the psychology used by 1-900 gambling experts, the ones who brag about unsubstantiated records ("I'm 47-5 against the spread this season!") and "guarantee" winners every week. You know why they do it? Because gambling addicts love the concept of a sure thing, even if it's probably a pipe dream. So seedy experts play up crap like "This is my Monday night lock of the year!" because that's the stuff people want to hear.

If you have a gambling problem, you don't want to concede that anything can happen in any given game. You want to believe in sure things. You want to believe there's an answer to the gambling puzzle. You want to believe you can make money every week simply by gambling. So you fork over money for "expert" picks hoping those "locks" will turn out to be actual "locks." Invariably, you win a couple of them, and that's when you're hooked for good. In reality, you have a 50/50 chance to win a spread wager every week, only you're paying a 10 percent vig on every defeat. Those odds never change. Deep down, the gambling addicts know this. And they don't care.

Casual gamblers think the same way, only their thought process is much more innocent and unrefined: Looking at the lines, they may stumble across Cincy-Cleveland and say something like, "Oh, that one's easy, Cleveland stinks, Cincy's going to kill them," then feel like a know-it-all when it plays out that way. If it doesn't happen, they can't feel bad because only a fool would have picked the Browns. By backing the safest pick on the board, they never have to worry that they don't know what they're doing. It's a risk-free pick.

The fact remains, nobody knows what they're doing. How could we ever pretend to figure out a league in which the underdogs went 12-3-1 in Week 2? For God's sake, even the Guy Who Knows Things is floundering. Last weekend, he texted me to say how much he liked my Week 2 picks, with one exception: Tampa over New Orleans. He didn't like that one. He was wrong. Again, nobody knows anything ... we just pretend we do. So maybe the Obvious Game isn't a force of nature as much as a manifestation of our own inadequacies. By taking the Browns last week, you would have been admitting that there's no rhyme or reason to anything that happens in sports. And nobody wants to believe that. Just remember we had this conversation when you're losing money on the Panthers or Broncos this weekend.

In a related story, my pregnant wife who doesn't watch football is 20-9-3 through two weeks. And yes, she took the Browns last week. Of course she did.

Jaguars (+3) over BRONCOS

Obvious Game No. 1. I'll be going the other way, thanks. While we're here, right after Janikowski's apparent game-winner in Denver that was nullified by Mike Shanahan's last-second timeout, can you imagine if the Raiders dumped Gatorade on Lane Kiffin because they thought it was his first win, then a soaked Kiffin had to watch Janikowski's next kick plunk off the upright, followed by Denver's subsequent game-winning drive? Have we ever had a false-alarm Gatorade bath before?

FALCONS (+4) over Panthers

I loved how Bobby Petrino summed up Joey Harrington's problems this week: "He just needs to open it up and play with confidence. Play to go win the game." In other words, Joey has no confidence, he can't open it up, and he's playing to lose the game. Other than that, he's been great. Fortunately for Joey, he's involved on the good end of Obvious Game No. 2 this week. Although he'll probably kill that theory, too.