NFL Power Rankings Week 4
by Robert Ferringo - 9/26/2017

All I read about last week (and even touched on myself in this very space) was how awful the NFL had been through two weeks of the season. Scoring was way, way down and the games had lost a lot of their luster as a result. However, it is one thing to make an aesthetic argument against pro football, as I did, and it is another thing to really dig into the nuts and bolts of the statistics behind the NFL's early season scoring drought. And the more I read about the scoring dearth the clearer it became: the NFL was primed for a rebound.

Penn State Nittany Lions at Iowa Hawkeyes Expert Picks with Odds and Predictions
by Robert Ferringo - 9/20/2017

Danger lurks at night in the Iowa corn fields. Not in the shadows. But in the bright lights of Kimmick Stadium. After their resurrection in 2016, Penn State entered the 2017 season as legitimate National Championship contenders. And through three games they haven't disappointed, winning all three by a combined score of 141-14. But now the Nittany Lions are facing their first true test when they take on Iowa in an evening kickoff that is sure to rouse some rabble in the Hawkeye State.

NFL Power Rankings Week 3
by Robert Ferringo - 9/19/2017

NFL fans and bettors were forced to suffer through another round of uninspirting and unwatchable action in Week 2, with the Houston-Cincinnati, Buffalo-Carolina, Cleveland-Baltimore, San Francisco-Seattle, Arizona-Indianapolis and Detroit-New York games combining to average just 25.3 total points per game. And I'm not just cherry-picking some poor results. Those six games represent nearly half the league. And several other marquee games - Patriots-Saints, Cowboys-Broncos and Packers-Falcons - were blowouts that were essentially over before halftime.

Kentucky Wildcats at South Carolina Gamecocks Expert Picks with Odds and Predictions
by Robert Ferringo - 9/13/2017

All offseason I suggested that people were missing the most interesting part of the SEC race. It wasn't the three teams with the best preseason odds to win the East and subsequently get thrashed by Alabama in the title game. Instead, the more intriguing storylines concerned the four teams pegged for the bottom of the conference: South Carolina, Kentucky, Missouri and Vanderbilt.

NFL Power Rankings Week 2
by Robert Ferringo - 9/12/2017

Overreaction Monday is a very real and normal thing in the NFL. An impressive level of freak-out always accompanies the end of the first game of any NFL season, with massive leaps in logic and changes in expectations replacing rational thought. "The Patriots have issues!" "The Jaguars are for real!" "Jared Goff is a star in the making!" Those are all headlines and takeaways that otherwise sane people would glean from Week 1's results.

NFL Power Rankings Week 1
by Robert Ferringo - 9/6/2017

Football will not save us. We plunge headlong into The Fall. The known horrors of winter are deep on the horizon but approaching with certainty. Although they are almost a trifle compared to the open corruption, paranoia, demagoguery and hypocrisy that continue to flood our systems. But football is not a balm. Football is not a distraction. It is not some pet to be played with. It is not a game. Professional football is a monolith.

Expert NFL Handicapping: Five Reasons to Fade the Oakland Raiders in 2017
by Robert Ferringo - 9/5/2017

The NFL has always been a little more exciting when the Raiders have been prominently involved. Every good story needs a proper villain. And the Oakland Raiders have been professional football's reprobates through most of their existence. Yet during a prolonged period of pathetic football - they went 56-136 over a 12-year period from 2003-2014 - the Raiders had become a joke, an afterthought, and a relic of a bygone era.

2017 Big 12 Football Predictions with Betting Odds and Expert Analysis
by Robert Ferringo - 8/30/2017

The Big 12 has five teams currently in the Top 25, and a sixth (TCU) is the next team off the list. The league has only 10 teams. So if six of them are among the best 26 squads in the country then that makes the league the densest group of talent in the nation. And because the Big 12 plays a true round robin format, with every team playing one another, there aren't the same gaps and unbalanced schedule-laden mirages in this league that you get with some others.

2017 Pac-12 Football Predictions with Betting Odds and Expert Analysis
by Robert Ferringo - 8/29/2017

Perpetually underrated, the Pac-12 enters the season with a pair of national title contenders (USC, Washington), a proven powerhouse that is a sleeper threat to make the College Football Playoffs (Stanford), and a load of potential spoilers that have the talent and coaching to make a surprise run (Oregon, Washington State, UCLA). I feel that the Pac-12 North is the best division in college football (edging out the ACC Atlantic) and I think this league will have one of the most competitive and entertaining conference races in the nation.

2017 Big Ten Football Predictions with Betting Odds and Expert Analysis
by Robert Ferringo - 8/28/2017

Here's how good the Big Ten was last year: the team that represented them in the College Football Playoff didn't even win their division. Ohio State lost a tiebreaker to Penn State in the Big Ten East and watched the Nittany Lions use an amazing comeback to take down No. 6 Wisconsin in the league championship game. And when the dust settled on the season, the Big Ten finished with four teams in the final Top 10 rankings, more than any league in the country.

2017 SEC Football Predictions with Betting Odds and Expert Analysis
by Robert Ferringo - 8/25/2017

The best and worst thing that ever happened to the SEC was their outstanding run from 2008-2012, in which they won five straight National Championships. That period helped establish the false media narrative (fake news!) that the SEC was some otherworldly football conference playing at a level that was beyond the realm of normal men.

2017 Green Bay Packers Season Win Total Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 8/16/2017

Aaron Rodgers put on one of the all-time great quarterback displays for about three months last season and carried Green Bay to the cusp of the Super Bowl. As long as Rodgers is still under center, the Packers have to be considered one of the favorites to win the NFC and a legit Super Bowl threat. But will (or more importantly can) absolutely anyone on the Packers roster raise their level of play to match Rodgers? If not, it's been proven over the past two "underachieving" seasons that Rodgers can only carry this team so far.

2017 Seattle Seahawks Season Win Total Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 8/16/2017

By making the playoffs five straight seasons, winning and losing a Super Bowl along the way, and taking part in the postseason in 11 of the past 14 years, Seattle has solidified itself among the best and most consistent franchises in the NFL so far this century. And with the foundation of this current Seahawks group still intact, there is nothing to suggest that they won't continue to be a force in the NFC.

2017 Minnesota Vikings Season Win Total Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 8/16/2017

Things went sideways awfully quick for the Vikings last year. Hopes were high coming off their 2015 playoff appearance. But then Teddy Bridgewater's leg exploded in the preseason and sent this squad scrambling. They managed to find a capable replacement on the fly with Sam Bradford and actually started the season 5-0. But then Mike Zimmer's eye issues flared up, offensive coordinator Norv Turner quit, injuries started to mount, and Minnesota was forced to drag its carcass through a 3-8 close and a .500 record.

2017 Chicago Bears Season Win Total Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 8/16/2017

For the last eight years the Chicago Bears experienced relative "stability" at the quarterback position by employing one of the worst in the game. But finally, mercifully, Jay Cutler ended his injury-prone stay in the Windy City, fleeing for retirement (and then Miami; but not in that order) and taking his nonexistent leadership skills and turnover-happy style with him. Yet now the Bears find themselves in unfamiliar - yet completely familiar - territory: smack-dab in the middle of a quarterback controversy.

2017 San Francisco 49ers Season Win Total Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 8/16/2017

San Francisco has been floundering since the 49ers' ridiculous schism from John Harbaugh following the 2014 season. After one season of comically inept Jim Tomsula, the 49ers tried to get crafty, bringing in Chip Kelly. That went about as well as expected, with Kelly's utterly ill-fitting scheme leading to a 2-14 campaign. The 49ers wisely decided to move on from Kelly after just one year.

2017 Detroit Lions Season Win Total Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 8/16/2017

How the Lions perform this season will likely come down to two things: how the much-maligned offensive line holds up and how their linebackers perform. But how you feel about the Lions heading into this season really comes down to one thing: how you think of quarterback Matt Stafford. Where is Stafford on the spectrum of NFL quarterbacks? This guy has thrown for 27,000 yards over the last six seasons.

2017 Arizona Cardinals Season Win Total Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 8/16/2017

Last year at this time I felt the Cardinals had one of the best rosters in football and that they were a true Super Bowl threat. Things didn't work out that way. Instead Arizona suffered through an incredibly frustrating, underachieving season that left them below .500 but also below the radar coming into 2017.

2017 Los Angeles Rams Season Win Total Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 8/16/2017

If HBO's "Hard Knocks" did anything last year it was pull back the curtain on the fact that the Rams were going to be awful in their first season in Los Angeles. They were exactly that, winning just four times and being outscored by nearly 11 points per game. That debacle led to the firing of coach Jeff Fisher, and now the Rams are attempting to sell a fresh start to their fractured fan base for the second season in a row.

2017 Atlanta Falcons Season Win Total Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 8/14/2017

It is going to be there through every snap and every second of their season this year. Every fan is thinking about it. Every commentator is talking about it. There is no escaping the fact that the Atlanta Falcons should be entering this 2017 season as surprise Super Bowl champions. Instead they are entering it as the victims of the biggest choke in NFL history.