Week 7 Picks

It's even more of a lock without this guy managing the clock!

For the record, my locks of the week are a shopping 1-4-1 so far this year.  Take that for what you will (translation: take the opposite and run to your bookie).  I made up a little ground on The Junkfood Guy last week but I'm still well behind for the season.  Time to start being irrational . . .

My lock of the week this week is the winless Oakland Raiders +4 at home vs. Arizona.  This is more of a bet against Arizona than anything; they've looked shaky the past several weeks against Denver and Washington, and their DVOA is actually only 19th out of 32 despite their 4-1 record.  Oakland, on the other hand, is winless but not atrocious -- Football Outsiders has them ranked better than Minnesota, who has 2 wins this season.  Oakland led the whole way against a strong San Diego team -- they'll get it done (or lose by a FG) this week.

Week 11 Preview and Picks

Cheer up, Raiders fan.  A win over the lowly Raiders mean more to a team than a win over a contender.

With the calendar turning to mid-November and most of the playoff field largely-decided, we turn for a moment this week to the NFL’s grand prize, the Lombardi trophy.  A decade ago, one could correctly point to a playoff bye as a key step to a Super Bowl title.  A team who only needed to win two games to make the Super Bowl (at least one of which would be at home) would only be helped, the thinking went, by the extra week of rest.  But the importance of getting a bye has proven less and less important since 2005, as 5 of the last 7 Super Bowl champs (and 4 of the last 5) were playing during Wild Card Weekend.

The most important factor, experts say?  How a team plays down the stretch.  Since we’re not “down the stretch,” yet, we obviously can’t assess that for 2012, so we’ll table it for six weeks.  Instead, we’ll look at another piece of conventional wisdom: that Super Bowl-contending teams typically blow out crappy teams, something that has absolutely held true in the past 10 years.  Some facts after the jump:

Assessing Ron Jaworski's QB Rankings

Jaws released his ranking of the NFL's top 30 quarterbacks last month

ESPN analyst and former Eagles QB Ron Jaworski completed his much-hyped list of the NFL's top 30 quarterbacks last month when he named Aaron Rodgers the top QB in football.

Jaws based his a lot of his opinion on the "eye test," or what he saw in a player from watching film.  This is totally appropraite given Jaws' background as an NFL QB, as he's well-positioned to assess a player's technique or prowess in a particular aspect of football (playing against the rush, checking down, throwing the deep ball, etc.).  Nonetheless, we thought it might be interesting to compare his rankings to the weighted AV ratings we've been using in our team previews.  As a reminder, those ratings are based on on the yearly AV metric from our friends at Pro Football Reference, using the following formula:

2009 AV + 2 x 2010 AV + 3 x 2011 AV

You can see the two rankings side-by-side after the jump.

The New Coach Bump? A look at the chances of success for the 7 new Head Coaches

Will any of this year's new head coaches enjoy the success Coach Boone did in his first season?

Hope springs anew in 7 NFL cities this fall.  Fans in Jacksonville, Kansas City, Miami, St. Louis, Tampa Bay, Oakland, and Indianapolis are convinced that their new coach is the one to lead them to a Lombardi Trophy or, at the very least, that he has to be better than that clown they just fired.  But are these new coaches any more likely to see success than their predecessors?

After the jump, a look at how the 65 first-year head coaches since 2002 have fared in their first season, and what it means for the 7 teams who made coaching changes for this season.