2014 Week 10 Review & Week 11 Picks

Week 10 Review (Week 2-3, Season 21-29, All Time 124-108-2)

In what is now becoming comical, our picks went 2-3 again in week 10. Yet again, each game was incredibly close and could have gone either way in the final minutes. While games and margins can be predicted with a reasonable level of certainty in the long run, there remains a large amount of variance in team performance on a week to week basis and bad luck is to be expected. At some point, we expect the tide to turn and we will continue to pick our games the same way we have over the last 3 seasons. 

Week 11 Picks

Cleveland -3.5 vs Houston

We have liked Houston over the course of the season, and Cleveland has had its disappointing moments for us this season, but we do not think this is a great spot for Houston. Houston's success had been the result of excellent running from Foster who will not be playing in this game. Additionally Houston will be starting Ryan Mallet at QB, who we believe is being overvalued. Mallet is expected to be good because he has extreme talent and spent 3 seasons under Brady and Bellichick, but in reality he was a player the Patriots tried and failed to trade on multiple occasions. The limited tape that does exist on Mallet is not fantastic and we do not expect him to have a great day. We also like that Cleveland's defense has been playing better recently and we believe their once stellar running game should get better the farther removed they are from the Alex Mack injury.

San Francisco -4.5 @ New York

From the view of most people, these two teams have been very disappointing this season. However, we have actually been impressed by San Francisco's defense. We predicted that they would struggle without Bowman and Smith, but they have exceeded our expectations. While they will now be missing Patrick Willis for the rest of the season, they are getting Aldon Smith back this week, and we think their defense will continue to improve. Additionally, it seems like the pass first offensive experiment may finally be ending in San Francisco, and we believe that they will run all over a very weak New York run defense. We like San Francisco to make another statement on the road this week. 

New England +3 @ Indianapolis

First, it is important for us to admit where we were wrong. We thought New England's offensive line struggles would continue deeper into the season, and we are completely surprised by how miraculously this unit has turned it around. This offense is now equally fearsome compared to this defense. The same can not be said for Indianapolis. While their offense is off the charts, we think their defense, which largely relied on scheme to get pressure, has been figured out. Much like the Houston defenses of 2010 and 2011, this Indianapolis defense will crush bad QBs but will get shredded by great QBs. We think Tom Brady comfortably falls into the latter category, and we like the Patriots to win on the road.

Pittsburgh -6 @ Tennessee

Normally we do not like to pick teams like Pittsburgh whose performance is highly variant from week to week. At the same time,  we just can't imagine Tennessee scoring a lot of points in this game. Tennessee's offense has been amongst the worst in the league, and we do not think Pittsburgh's offense will have to perform at its highest level to win this game handedly. We like Pittsburgh to bounce back.