NFL Power Rankings Week 4
by Robert Ferringo - 9/28/2016

True knowledge is knowing that you know nothing. Socrates was one of the world's great minds and a massive fan of irony, ethics and a strong vertical passing game. And his insight into the comical worthlessness of human understanding has never been more apt heading into Week 4 of the NFL season.

NFL Power Rankings Week 3
by Robert Ferringo - 9/21/2016

Just two weeks into the season and you can smell the stench of panic coating teams throughout the NFL. Everyone knows the gruesome numbers about the probability of a team that starts the season 0-2 making the playoffs (it is somewhere just north of 10 percent). But it is even worse for teams that start 0-3, as only five clubs in the history of the NFL have been able to turn their seasons around after losing their first three games.

NFL Power Rankings Week 2
by Robert Ferringo - 9/14/2016

Lost in all of the talk about Jack Del Rio's decision to go for a two-point conversion, and thus the win for Oakland over New Orleans last Sunday, was the fact that so many NFL still coaches still don't know when the right time to go for two is. And that idiocy was on full display in Week 1 of the 2016 season.

2016 Pittsburgh Steelers Expert Predictions and Season Win Totals Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 9/9/2016

Allegedly the Pittsburgh Steelers have one of the most talented teams in football and are a Super Bowl contender in the wide-open AFC. However, injuries, suspensions and all manner of impediments continue to keep us from seeing what this team can do at full strength. So is the potential for a championship a myth or not?

2016 Kansas City Chiefs Expert Predictions and Season Win Totals Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 9/9/2016

With a season win total of 9.5, I can't exactly say that the Chiefs are underrated heading into the season. And even the most optimistic of Kansas City fan would acknowledge that this team doesn't quite have the look of a Super Bowl contender. Yet despite that I still feel like Kansas City's brain trust of Andy Reid and Alex Smith still don't get the credit they deserve.

2016 Indianapolis Colts Expert Predictions and Season Win Totals Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 9/9/2016

If you watched the Colts at all this preseason, it's as if you could feel the anxiety and the tension surrounding this team. From owner Jim Irsay's reaction to the cancelled Hall of Fame Game to the hostility any time someone is asked about the friction between coach Chuck Pagano and embattled general manager Ryan Grigson, there are just not good vibes surrounding this Colts team. And I think the reason is that a lot of people know that they are going to lose their jobs in six months.

2016 New Orleans Saints Expert Predictions and Season Win Totals Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 9/9/2016

The Saints have had back-to-back losing seasons and have finished 7-9 three times in four years. They appear to be a franchise flailing rather than the dominant NFC South power we saw between 2009-2011. With Drew Brees and Sean Payton they still have a chance. But this team has a lot more questions than answers heading into the 2016 campaign.

2016 San Diego Chargers Expert Predictions and Season Win Totals Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 9/9/2016

San Diego is one of the sunniest places in the country. So it is ironic that a dark cloud hangs over this Chargers franchise. The specter of a move from the city that has hosted this team for over 50 years has cast a pall on this entire organization. Add in public relations disasters, poor front office management, and then some run-of-the-mill bad luck (injuries, etc.), and the Chargers are a team that really doesn't know what direction it is going.

2016 Oakland Raiders Expert Predictions and Season Win Totals Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 9/9/2016

After nearly two decades of being one of the biggest jokes in the NFL, the Raiders enter the 2016 season as Everybody's Sleeper Team. Every bobblehead media member has been gushing over Oakland for the past three months, and for the first time that I can remember this team enters the season with legitimate expectations.

2016 Atlanta Falcons Expert Predictions and Season Win Totals Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 9/9/2016

I feel like at this time last year if you had offered Atlanta and new head coach Dan Quinn an 8-8 season with some breakout performances by some young players they would've snatched it up in a heartbeat. However, the way things worked out the Falcons did go 8-8 but ended last season with a bittersweet feeling after becoming just the seventh team in NFL history to start the year 5-0 and fail to make the playoffs.

2016 Tampa Bay Buccaneers Expert Predictions and Season Win Totals Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 9/9/2016

When I look at Tampa Bay, I see a lot of style but not a lot of substance. The Bucs haven't finished above .500 since 2010, and with a new coach and some new systems it appears their decade-long rebuild may still be ongoing. Add in the fact that the Bucs are in a division featuring more experienced coaches and quarterbacks and more established systems, and I think it is a tall task to ask Tampa to move up in the standings.

2016 Tennessee Titans Expert Predictions and Season Win Totals Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 9/9/2016

The Titans have been one of my sleeper teams each of the past two seasons. And each of the past two seasons I have been wrong. They have gone a combined 5-27 the past two seasons. The combined total of those two years wouldn't even have been good enough to beat their season win total (5.5) for either of those seasons.

2016 Cleveland Browns Expert Predictions and Season Win Totals Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 9/9/2016

Hue Jackson is taking the reigns on a top-to-bottom rebuild within one of the worst franchises in sports. The Browns have posted just two winning seasons since their return to Cleveland in 1999, and they have won four or fewer games three times in five years. Jackson took a hatchet to the Browns roster this preseason, and the result is a team that, in the short-term, is significantly worse than the one that won just three games last year.

2016 Carolina Panthers Expert Predictions and Season Win Totals Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 9/8/2016

The Panthers are the last of the pure Cover-2 Teams in the NFL. Now, when you hear someone say "Cover-2" you probably think that it is just a defensive scheme. And it is. But a Cover-2 Team buys in, wholly and completely, to the philosophy that has made this one of the indelible systems of the last quarter century.

2016 Denver Broncos Expert Predictions and Season Win Totals Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 9/8/2016

The defending Super Bowl champions are lords of the NFL landscape. And on one hand you have to give Denver a load of credit for hocking a major loogie in the face of generally accepted NFL dogma. The Broncos won last year's championship in spite of, rather than because of, its quarterback play. And after several years of deluded NFL thinking that passing, points and high-powered offense wins games, the Broncos proved - yet again - that the more violent, physical team wins on the football field more often than not.

NFL Power Rankings Week 1
by Robert Ferringo - 9/8/2016

Summer is dead. Winter is coming. The war drums are sounding on the horizon and echo over the hills. This symphony of ritualized violence, brought to you by the National Football League and the global telecommunications apparatus, is about to commence. And We will all follow the tune. We will allow ourselves to ingest that mystic concoction of gambling and brutality that we've come to know so well. It dulls our collective senses to the ruse that is the NFL. The League, run by the most loathsome and vile collection of sociopaths this side of the "Suicide Squad", has allowed The Game to become diluted.

NFL Betting: Home Underdogs a Solid Strategy or Myth?
by Robert Ferringo - 9/7/2016

People ask me for advice on NFL betting all the time. My first two suggestions are always the same: know your enemy and play against the general public. The first thing that any football gambler has to admit is that the oddsmakers that set NFL lines are much, much better at their job than gamblers are at theirs. Not only do oddsmakers have a far greater understanding of the math involved - and this is where I note that my tagline at Doc's Sports is that "Gambling isn't magic - it is mathematics" - but they also have a keener instinct and understanding of the betting market.

2016 Buffalo Bills Expert Predictions and Season Win Totals Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 9/7/2016

Big, bad, blustery buffoon Rex Ryan is ready for Phase 2 of his plan to demolish hope, decency and disciplined football in Upstate New York. With both arrogance and incompetence in equal, and ample, supply, Ryan is proving again to be the latest example of the Peter Principal in action in the NFL.

2016 New England Patriots Expert Predictions and Season Win Totals Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 9/7/2016

Does anyone doubt that the Patriots, despite Tom Brady's four-game suspension to start the season, are still the class of the AFC East, the division which they have dominated for nearly 20 years? You shouldn't doubt it. Because if you give Bill Belichick a solid defense, an offense stacked with skill position talent and experience, three of four home games to start the season, and a legit motivational tool to get his team to play with a chip on its shoulder then I think you have a winning mix.

2016 New York Jets Expert Predictions and Season Win Totals Picks
by Robert Ferringo - 9/7/2016

Some franchises simply can't handle success. The New York Jets are one of them. After serving as a nice surprise in Todd Bowles' rookie campaign, winning 10 games and missing out on the postseason on the last day of the season, New York should've had a wave of momentum coming into the offseason. Instead, the Jets spent the summer feuding with their starting quarterback and top defensive player, only to cave in and re-sign both late in the summer. Those contract disputes have given the Jets a bit of an unsettled feeling coming into a crucial season.