Posted at 10:00 AM EST. Odds are subject to change.

Minnesota +3½ -110 over Buffalo

8:15 PM EST. The headline screaming all week is that Kyler Murray is out, ruled out Thursday with a hamstring strain, week to week, no injured reserve. The headline is real. It is also mostly beside the point, because the Vikings were never riding their offense anywhere this season. They are 6-1 because of the meanest defense in football, and that defense does not have a hamstring problem.

Brian Flores is sending extra rushers on nearly three quarters of dropbacks, a blitz rate nobody has tracked higher in a decade, and the result is the hardest team in the league to score on. Andrew Van Ginkel has 6.5 sacks, Dallas Turner has six, and last week this unit held a Detroit offense that scores on everybody to 19 points on the road. Fair warning, stated plainly: if one quarterback alive can punish a blitz happy defense, it is Josh Allen, who has thrown for 1,793 yards and 11 touchdowns and run for 270 yards and nine more scores, while James Cook has 707 rushing yards at 5.1 yards a pop. Buffalo has the most points in the league, has topped 30 in three straight games and five of seven, and just bullied Baltimore 36-10. Nobody here is pretending the Bills cannot score. The bet is that in that dome, with that crowd noise and Flores throwing the kitchen sink at him, Allen spends enough of the night on his back and off schedule to keep this thing in the low 20s, where a home dog with a hook lives like a king.

Which brings us to the understudy, because Carson Wentz is nobody's idea of a white flag. This is career start number 101 for the man. In his relief work this season he has thrown for 276 yards with three touchdowns and zero interceptions, and Minnesota won both games he played in. Kevin O'Connell will hand him Justin Jefferson, Jordan Addison and T.J. Hockenson, Aaron Jones to lean on, and a Buffalo defense that is the soft underbelly of an otherwise terrifying team, giving up 352 yards and 25.9 points a game. The ugly truth, printed in full: the Vikings offense ranks 29th in the league at 279.4 yards a game, has scored the second fewest touchdowns in football, and managed 15 points against a lousy Detroit defense last week. Minnesota is not winning a track meet on Monday night. It is winning a knife fight in a phone booth, at home, with the best defense in the sport and three and a half points in its pocket. That is a fight we will pay to watch every single time.

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