Pro football oddsmakers and handicappers both will say that in the playoffs it’s never a good idea to shoot at shadows.

“Everything, and I mean everything, is situational,” says Peter Korner owner of The Sport Club, one of the top oddsmakers in Las Vegas. “That’s not to say we ignore past results, but what’s happening right now is usually more important than what happened weeks ago.”

Bettors should keep that in mind as they play this weekend’s divisional games -- Jets/Patriots, Ravens/Steelers, Packers/Falcons and Seahawks/Bears.

The Seattle-Chicago matchup provides a good example. The Seahawks defeated the Bears, 23-20, in Chicago way back in Week 6. Bettors have latched on to that result, looked at the 10 points the Seahawks are getting, and have flocked to Seattle by a margin of 57-43 early this week. But that ignores other factors -- Seattle’s historic lousy play away from home, the fact that the Seahawks had only one win this year against a winning team (to 9-7 San Diego, which was playing horribly early in the year), and the rest that Chicago got last week as the No. 2 seed in the NFC. To say nothing  about the energy that Seattle had to expend to beat New Orleans, or the fact that the Seahawks needed the best run (and game) of Marshawn Lynch’s career to win.

In Pittsburgh, a similar dynamic is at work. The Ravens went into western Pennsylvania and gritted out a 3-point victory early in the season before Pittsburgh won later in the year, in Baltimore and also by 3. Even steven, right? Not quite. Baltimore defeated Pittsburgh while Ben Roethlisberger, perhaps the second-best [Brady] big-game QB in the league, was still serving a suspension. Charlie Batch had only 126 yards passing in that one, and in the next matchup Roethlisberger had more than double that.

Bettors, especially parlay players, would be wise to avoid wasting ammunition by shooting at shadows. With that said, the bet here is to go with the two rested favorites on both ends -- the Bears and lay the 10, and the Steelers -3.5.