NFL Power Rankings Week 4
by Robert Ferringo - 9/25/2018

September has flown by, and after this week the first quarter of the NFL season will be in the books. Some teams are flying high, either meeting their lofty preseason expectations (Rams) or blowing their projections out of the water (Dolphins) altogether. But just like you would be foolish to call a game after the first quarter, you would be foolish to think that there aren't dozens of twists and turns, ups and downs, and wins and losses remaining in this season. Stay frosty.

NFL Power Rankings Week 3
by Robert Ferringo - 9/18/2018

Overreaction Week lived up to its name, as the underdogs - spurred by massive line overreactions to Week 1 results - cleaned up. Teams taking the points went 11-5 against the spread last week with seven outright winners. And those seven wins don't include Cleveland's near-miss in New Orleans or the tie that Green Bay took at home against Minnesota.

NFL Power Rankings Week 2
by Robert Ferringo - 9/11/2018

There is a comically large build up and anticipation for the opening week of the NFL season. Inevitably the results of the Week 1 games lead to an irrational overreaction by fans and gamblers alike on the Monday and Tuesday following the openers. The sportsbooks know this. In fact, they count on it. And they generally use that rush to judgment against desperate bettors in Week 2.

NFL Power Rankings Week 1
by Robert Ferringo - 9/4/2018

Does the preseason matter? The general consensus is that it does not. And there is plenty of evidence, both anecdotal and statistical, that suggests that NFL Preseason performance is not an indicator for how things will go in the regular season. After all, the Cleveland Browns went 4-0 last season, right?

NFL Power Rankings Preseason Edition
by Robert Ferringo - 8/16/2018

Hope is for the tourists and coke fiends. I don't deal in Hope. I deal in information. Information always has been and always will be hard currency in the gambling game. In this Dark Era of Fake News, that currency can be hard to find, and people can find themselves vacillating between an information overload and information void. No one knows what is going on. No one knows what the Rules are anymore. And no one knows what dangers are lurking around the corner of the next snap.

NFL Power Rankings Week 17
by Robert Ferringo - 12/26/2017

God, I hate Week 17 of the NFL season. Momentum and motivation are the two buzzwords this week. But the problem is that it is nearly impossible to gauge how these men are going to respond to wildly divergent motivations this weekend. Some teams are playing for the postseason while others are playing out the string.

NFL Power Rankings Week 16
by Robert Ferringo - 12/19/2017

The favorites pummeled the sportsbooks again last week, going 10-4 against the spread. (The Patriots-Steelers and Cowboys-Raiders games were both a 'push' at most books). That now means that blindly betting the NFL favorites has turned a profit in six of the last seven weeks, and over the course of the last six weeks the chalk has posted a gaudy 57-33 ATS mark (63.3 percent).

NFL Power Rankings Week 15
by Robert Ferringo - 12/12/2017

Very few things annoy me as much as listening to people that think they know about football betting talk about football betting. They always have the same talking points about "sharps" and "underdogs" and "line movements" and "the public". But, generally speaking, the overwhelming majority of people outside of industry-specific media have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to the NFL betting market.

NFL Power Rankings Week 14
by Robert Ferringo - 12/5/2017

As we come down the stretch of the NFL regular season, all of the attention shifts to the high-intensity battles for postseason positioning. Whether it is divisional races, battles for the No. 1 seed in each conference, or the desperate scramble of teams for that final Wild Card position, the best teams in pro football will be front and center over the final four weeks of the NFL season.

NFL Power Rankings Week 13
by Robert Ferringo - 11/28/2017

Every week I look around the NFL and laugh at some of the quarterback matchups. Blaine Gabbert? Blake Bortles? C.J. Beathard? Tom Savage? Quarterback play in the NFL has never been worse than it is right now at this moment in our history. But last week I found a position group that may be even more pathetic than the current crap crop of signal callers: NFL coaches.

NFL Power Rankings Week 12
by Robert Ferringo - 11/21/2017

It's Thanksgiving week, so this will be the rapid-fire version of Doc's Sports NFL Power Rankings. And with that in mind, let me take this time to let you know what I am thankful for: The New England Patriots. I know that after the Dallas Cowboys the Patriots are the most hated team in the NFL. And I am not going to make any value or moral judgments on their litany of crimes against sportsmanship over the past 20 years. Their fans are easy to hate. A lot of their players over the years have been easy to hate. Bill Belichick is eminently hateable. I understand.

NFL Power Rankings Week 11
by Robert Ferringo - 11/14/2017

Football is really not nearly as complicated as people make it. If you run the ball and play good defense you are generally going to win more games than you lose in the NFL. It's not rocket science. And even as the league has changed the rules to stimulate more passing (and, in theory, more scoring) the fundamentals of this sport have been unchanged for over 100 years.

NFL Power Rankings Week 10
by Robert Ferringo - 11/7/2017

We are now at the halfway mark of the NFL season. I know we're heading into Week 10, but the overwhelming majority of teams have played eight games this year so it is basically halftime of the NFL year. Here are three random league trends that have presented themselves in the first half of the season that we will continue to track the rest of the way:

NFL Power Rankings Week 9
by Robert Ferringo - 10/31/2017

Let me first say that I think, generally speaking, that NFL officials do a pretty solid job relative to other sports. NBA refs probably have the easiest jobs. MLB umpires are generally outstanding and do the best of all professional sports. And I literally can't watch college football sometimes because the officiating is so grossly incompetent. So relatively speaking, NFL officiating is pretty solid.

NFL Power Rankings Week 8
by Robert Ferringo - 10/24/2017

I have been doing Doc's Sports Power Rankings for 13 years. And during that time one of my goals each year is stability. I like to take the early-season chaos of wins and loses and, eventually, settle towards a period of stasis with my rankings.

NFL Power Rankings Week 7
by Robert Ferringo - 10/17/2017

Last week I said that Week 6 would be full of surprises and that the massive spreads would create some opportunities. That was exactly the case, as all four teams that were favored by 9.5 or more points - the Patriots, Falcons, Redskins and Broncos - all failed to cover the spread. Two of those teams lost outright as double-digit favorites and the end result was the first windfall weekend for the sportsbooks on this NFL season.

NFL Power Rankings Week 6
by Robert Ferringo - 10/10/2017

Last week was another example of the volatile nature of the NFL. After a month of the players pounding the sportsbooks, Las Vegas got its revenge thanks to a host of high-profile losses in games with one-sided action. The Steelers losing by 21 points at home to the lowly Jaguars was by far the most befuddling result of the weekend. But the Bills, the Giants, the Texans and the Cowboys all cost the players big by losing in gut-wrenching style.

NFL Power Rankings Week 5
by Robert Ferringo - 10/3/2017

The Gambling Gods giveth, and the Gambling Gods taketh away. I have seen all manner of insanity occur in the final seconds of sporting events. If you bet on sports as much as I have for as long as I have, you eventually get to the point where you think you've seen it all. However, even I was left dumbfounded and speechless at the last five seconds of the Redskins-Chiefs game on Monday Night Football.

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.

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.