by Mario Mergola | Jan 31, 2018
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The 2017 season was, as expected, vastly different from the outlier of 2016. Underdogs, once again, had the edge, erasing nearly all of the gains made by ‘easy favorites’ the year before. “Nearly...
by Mario Mergola | Jan 17, 2018
It is always interesting how one season spills into the next. Last year, the chalk in any given fractal had success. The favorite – both for the playoffs and the game, itself – won the Super Bowl. The ‘easy’ teams to pick covered nearly every...
by Mario Mergola | Jan 11, 2018
The National Football League certainly has its share of surprises on a given week. For the opening round of the 2017 playoffs, it was not that Tennessee erased an 18-point deficit at halftime and won in Kansas City. Nor was it the perennial losers from Jacksonville...
by Mario Mergola | Jan 4, 2018
As I started writing my picks article for the Wild Card Round, I found myself pointing to long-term goals for each team; mainly because one of the eight in action, this weekend, can win the Super Bowl. With that, I stepped away from the column, worked on this...
by Mario Mergola | Jan 4, 2018
If sports have shown us anything over-the-years, it is that the playoffs – in which an entire season is on-the-line – rarely disappoint. Even when the matchups appear to be one-sided, we are almost always treated to a show at one point-or-another. This is...
by Mario Mergola | Dec 27, 2017
There is a fairly common belief that Week 1 of any given season is the most difficult to predict. Wrong. While it is true that we don’t entirely know what to expect from a team before we have seen it in meaningful action we do, at least, know the intention. We...
