by Mario Mergola | Oct 29, 2015
Originally Posted on XNSports The National Football League is in the middle of a reversal. The early part of 2015 featured an odd, but distinct set of outcomes. As a whole, favorites were cruising to victories at an unsustainable rate. Games that would normally be...
by Mario Mergola | Oct 22, 2015
Originally Posted on XNSports It was only a matter of time before the league pulled the rug from under the collective feet of the football-watching world. As detailed in last week’s column, favorites — and, more accurately, ‘popular’ picks — were enjoying an...
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...
