by Mario Mergola | Oct 15, 2015
Originally Posted on XNSports Something strange is happening in the early part of the 2015 season: teams are playing to their expected level of production. Considering each National Football League season contains only sixteen games, the sample size for a particular...
by Mario Mergola | Oct 8, 2015
Originally Posted on XNSports The first four weeks of any season operate like the first quarter of a football game — teams are trying to establish their position and opponents are getting a feel for one another. The same is true for the perception of a given...
by Mario Mergola | Oct 1, 2015
Originally Posted on XNSports It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. The National Football League is built for parity and turnover. With the exception of a handful of teams that seemingly always remain at the top or bottom of the league, the nature of the sport allows...
by Mario Mergola | Sep 24, 2015
Originally Posted on XNSports The same statistic gets thrown around every year around this time. It has become almost common knowledge that an 0-2 start lessens a team’s chances to make the playoffs to roughly twelve percent. What often gets overlooked in this number...
by Mario Mergola | Sep 17, 2015
Originally Posted on XNSports One of the best indicators of a potential misalignment between the spread and the most likely outcome of a game is perception. This column frequently illuminates games in which the perception of a team drives its expectations....
by Mario Mergola | Sep 10, 2015
Originally Posted on XNSports It begins again. Among the many traditions that surround the return of the National Football League to our weekly routine —fantasy football, tailgate parties, potato chips — the act of making predictions never gets old. In our incessant...
