The Patriots' Comeback Wasn't (Quite) As Unexpected As You Think It Was

This is Tom Brady. Tom Brady is good at football. Look at Tom be good at football.

By Jeremy Conlin (@jeremy_conlin)

I'll be up front - I'm still not totally prepared to talk about this game rationally. There's a 40% chance that I died on Sunday night and this is just the afterlife that I've chosen for myself (and it just happens to be remarkably similar to the life I was living previously - right down to the ongoing recovery from a recent surgery).

That being said, I feel like everything I've heard and read about the Super Bowl over the last day-plus has been expressing abject incredulity that the Patriots were able to mount a comeback. I'm here to present a few loose, scattered thoughts that hopefully apply some degree of logic to how and why it happened.

The Fine Line Between a Legendary Comeback and an Epic Collapse

By Joe Parello (@HerewegoJoe)

Whether you're a New England fanatic or a Patriot hater likely determined your mood this morning.

Those cheering on Brady and the boys will likely spend the entire day re-living the Pats' epic comeback against the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl 51 last night. Down 28-3, New England scored 31 unanswered points from the 2-minute mark of the third quarter on to capture a 34-28 overtime victory.

The game was historic for a number of reasons, most notably that Tom Brady both broke the single-game Super Bowl passing record, and captured a record-setting fifth Super Bowl title and fourth Super Bowl MVP. It was also the first overtime game in Super Bowl history.

In the process, Brady bounced back from an opening three quarters of getting beaten and bruised (and let's be honest, looking frazzled while missing some WIDE OPEN receivers), to find his usual flawless form, and deliver pinpoint passes on the final five drives of the game.

But the moments Pats fans are likely re-living the most are Julian Edelman's ABSURD catch in traffic, and James White's game-winning touchdown run. Both plays will no doubt become a part of Super Bowl lore, next to recent moments like Tyree's helmet catch, Holmes' end zone snag and Butler's goal line interception.

OH MY GOD, JULIAN EDELMAN! #SB51 #Patriots https://t.co/YtvHwsaCbT

— NFL (@NFL) February 6, 2017

Of course, the other side of that coin is the collapse of the Atlanta Falcons.

Bob Lobel: Brady and Belichick's Last Rodeo?

By Bob Lobel (@boblobel)

This is not our first rodeo, not by a long shot. 

"Not the first rodeo" has become a popular phrase to calm people down around here, but remember this: Sunday is a lot closer to being the last rodeo than the first for our coach and quarterback. We know it and feel it, yet we totally deny it. 

What's left to accrue after this seventh Super Bowl appearance? What's left if they get a ring to put on all fingers, as opposed to having just four? 

NFL Conference Championships Primer (With Picks): The Road To Houston

Super Bowl hero Malcolm Butler covering All-Pro receiver Antonio Brown should be one of Sunday's best matchups.

By Jeremy Conlin (@jeremy_conlin) and Joe Parello (@HerewegoJoe)

We have about seven hours of football left until we know which two teams will head to Houston and battle it out for Super Bowl 51. Based on how the regular season went, we got the two teams you probably expected to see out of the AFC (you could make a case for Oakland, I guess, but Derek Carr's injury took care of that), and while we didn't get the teams you would expect from the NFC, we did get the No. 2 seed in the conference and the team that beat the No. 1 seed, so you can't say the teams are undeserving.

Most fittingly, though, is the quarterbacks who we have left. We have the two who finished as the best quarterbacks in the league by virtually any metric under the sun (Ryan and Brady), a quarterback on a nine-game winning streak with a QB rating in the ballpark of 120 (Rodgers), and a quarterback with two Super Bowl rings who has all the potential in the world to throw for 500 yards and 5 touchdowns on any given Sunday (Roethlisberger).

And think of the potential Super Bowl matchups. Patriots-Packers. Patriots-Falcons. Falcons-Steelers. Packers-Steelers. Not one potential dud. That wouldn't have been the case if the Chiefs or Giants had advanced this far. Let's all consider ourselves lucky.

NFC Divisional Round Primer (With Picks): Favorites

Vic Beasley going against Seattle's struggling offensive line could be the story of Saturday afternoon.

By Jeremy Conlin (@jeremy_conlin) and Joe Parello (@HerewegoJoe)

Both Jeremy and Joe had success picking NFC games last weekend, zeroing in pretty quickly on the idea that Seattle was just a terrible matchup for Detroit, and that New York just didn't have the offensive firepower to keep pace with Green Bay.

Both home teams held court in the Wild Card round, but it seems like the top two seeds in the NFC are relatively beatable (especially considering Seattle already beat Atlanta this season and the Cowboys have averaged just 316 yards of total offense over their last six games, and the team they're playing against has now won seven straight games, and most of them have been rather convincing). The last time the No. 1 overall seed failed to make the Super Bowl from the NFC was 2012, so it remains to be seen if Dallas can keep the streak alive.

That's still a month away though. For now, we deal with Round 2.

Inside the NFL Film Room: Could the Bucs Be Sneaky Good?

With a reinvigorated running game led by Doug Martin, could Tampa Bay be a spoiler in the NFC?

By Joe Parello (@HerewegoJoe)

Look, I don't want to jinx Florida teams coming off wins (my piece on the Dolphins' new offensive and defensive schemes came just days before the Dolphins were throttled by New England), but Tampa Bay may not totally stink.

Seriously.

While they are in last place in the NFC South, the Buccaneers are 3-4 with a young and talented team that is improving and discovering its strengths each week. This may not be a playoff team this year, but if rookie quarterback Jameis Winston can continue to develop, Tampa Bay could mess up things for a bunch of teams left on its schedule.

Let's take a look at what the Bucs are starting to do right.

The Return of the Muscle Hamster

After a fantastic rookie campaign in 2012 that saw Doug Martin rush for over 1,400 yards and 11 touchdowns, the Tampa Bay running back formerly known as Muscle Hamster fell off a bit the last two seasons.

Part of that was health. Martin played in just 17 combined games in 2013 and 2014, but Martin and Tampa Bay's woes on the ground went deeper than that. Averaging just 3.7 yards per carry over that span, Martin saw his production sink to just 45 yards per game in 11 starts last season, a far cry from the 91 yards per game he churned out as a rookie, and way down from the 4.6 yards per carry he averaged in 2012.

But now Martin is back, though he doesn't want us to call him Muscle Hamster anymore (too bad, because that's the best nickname ever). Martin is again averaging 4.6 yards per carry in 2015, and rushing for 87.5 yards per game in seven starts. He's on pace for 1,400 yards this season, but how has Martin gotten back on track?

NFL Week 6 Primer (With Picks): Just The Picks, Ma'am

Von Miller and Denver's league-best pass rush will face off with suddenly red-hot Josh McCown and Cleveland's prolific passing offense.

By Jeremy Conlin (@jeremy_conlin) and Joe Parello (@HerewegoJoe)

Around 2:00 a.m. Thursday night/Friday morning, I (Jeremy) forgot that I hadn't written the picks column yet. I desperately wanted to sleep, so we're skipping all the bells and whistles and getting straight to it.

Here Are The Picks We Agree On (Home Teams in CAPS)

Atlanta (-3.5) over NEW ORLEANS

Somehow we both saw this coming and didn't do anything about it. We both feel stupid.

Denver (-4.5) over CLEVELAND

JC: Josh McCown has been low-key on fire of late (385 yards per game over his last three, 6-1 TD-INT ratio), but Denver's defense has shut down everyone that's been put in front of them. Eventually, the Broncos offense is going to heat up, and when they do, they'll win big.

JP: Dear God, Cleveland's offense against Denver's defense is the marquee matchup of the week! 

NFL Week 3 Primer (With Picks): A Crummy Slate With Some Big Lines

Pete Carroll and the Seahawks are 0-2, but still give over two touchdowns this week to the injury-depleted (and horrible) Bears.

 By Jeremy Conlin (@jeremy_conlin) and Joe Parello (@HerewegoJoe)

Look, we all know that Jeremy wasn't going to go 13-2-1 every week. Nobody is going to nail 84.3 percent of their picks for a full season. If anyone ever does that, they're a wizard. Ask them who really killed Kennedy.

But Week 2 was a little bit of a regression. Really, not so much of a regression to the mean, but a regression far past the mean and a collision into suckitude. All the teams that came through for him in Week 1 (St. Louis, Miami, San Francisco, Tennessee) flopped, and the teams he made hay betting against (Minnesota, Oakland, Washington) all of a sudden won games outright as underdogs.

Joe wasn't as good Week 1, but still above board (9-6-1), but fell even harder in Week 2. His strategy of intentionally finding games to disagree with Jeremy on backfired, and he went 1-2 in disagreements, expanding Jeremy's lead even further. 

Through two weeks, we haven't really learned much other than the NFC East and AFC South are both hot garbage, the NFC West might not be as good as we think it is, and the AFC East might be the best division in football (so far).

The Patriots look like the clear favorite in the AFC, while the Packers and Cardinals appear to be the class of the NFC for now. Our best guess is that the Patriots will pace the AFC just about all season and a repeat appearance in the Super Bowl will depend on postseason health and matchups, while the NFC will be topsy-turvy for the next month or two before a favorite emerges around Thanksgiving. Who that is, we have no idea. Let's just get to the picks.

Joe & Daphne's Preview: The NFC South

By Joe Parello (@HerewegoJoe) and Daphne Parello (@DaphnePup)

Daphne and I return to discuss the NFC South, a division that was among the worst in league history last year.

Reigning champion Carolina captured the division crown with just seven wins in 2014, and perennial contender New Orleans enters full rebuild mode next to inconsistent Atlanta and the hard-luck Bucs of Tampa.

Can anybody in this division actually make some noise in 2015? Daphne and I investigate.

NFL Week 16 Primer (With Picks): Losers Leave Town

It's been a down year for the Falcons and NFC South as a whole, but a win in New Orleans this week would lock up a season sweep of the Saints and, likely, a home playoff game for Atlanta.

 By Jeremy Conlin (@jeremy_conlin) and Joe Parello (@HerewegoJoe)

Atlanta at New Orleans. Baltimore at Houston. Kansas City at Pittsburgh. Indianapolis at Dallas. Seattle at Arizona. Denver at Cincinnati

All six of those games hold a tremendous amount of importance regarding either playoff berths or playoff seedings. The winner of the first will almost certainly win the NFC South. The loser of the second game will almost certainly miss the playoffs (and if the loser is Houston, they will). The loser of the third receives a shotgun-sized hole to their playoff hopes. The loser of the fourth almost certainly loses out on the No. 3 seed in their conference. The winner of the fifth will take the NFC West and a first-round bye along with it. And the winner of the sixth will set themselves up nicely for a first-round bye in the AFC bracket.

Let's not mess around. Let's get straight to the picks. Also because I'm 20-9-3 over the last two weeks and can see Joe in my sights.

-Jeremy

Underdog Update:
Last Week: 7-7-2
Season: 108-112-5
Home Dogs, Last Week: 1-4
Home Dogs, Season: 29-36-1

NFL Week 6 Primer (With Picks): Hey, We're Doing a Little Better Now

Peyton Manning joined Brett Favre in the super-exclusive 500 TD passes club, and just generally had his way with Arizona last week. Not to toot our own horn, but we totally saw it coming.

By Jeremy Conlin (@jeremy_conlin) and Joe Parello (@HerewegoJoe)

Jeremy's taking a break from leading these pick pieces, so I (Joe) will be guiding you through our games of the week and making my picks first.

Last week was a big week for me, as I took my first steps back toward tying Jeremy, and finishing the year with at least a .500 record, but stupid Jeremy still finished with a winning record on the week (you can see our results for last week, and the whole year, at the bottom of this post). Actually, we both had pretty good weeks, despite a bunch of "WTF?" games.

Cleveland came back from 8,000 points down to beat Tennessee, the Broncos put a beating on Arizona's normally solid defense, Jacksonville hung with Pittsburgh for 55 minutes, Carolina woke up from a two-week coma and Tampa Bay looked like a competent football team for the second week in a row.

To quote the great Vince Lombardi, "what the hell's going on out here?!"

Football Roundup: Good, Bad, and Ugly

Are Andy Dalton and the Bengals the best team in football?

 By Jeremy Conlin (@jeremy_conlin) and Joe Parello (@HerewegoJoe)

Every week, editors Jeremy Conlin and Joe Parello bring you the good, the bad, and the ugly from the pro and college football weekend that was.

The Good

Cincinnati Bengals

The Bengals look like the best team in football, outscoring opponents by 47 points over their first three games (best in the league) and surrendering just 33 points (also a league-best). Their rushing attack certainly leaves something to be desired (they're averaging just 3.6 yards per carry) but Giovanni Bernard has emerged as one of the best out-of-the-backfield weapons in the league, and the Bengals' screen/swing/checkdown offense is so prolific that it doesn't quite matter that they can't run the ball effectively (yet). They're off next week, and then have a brutal stretch of at New England, home for Carolina, at Indianapolis, and then home for Baltimore. If they can go 3-1 there (very possible), we could be looking at Cincinnati getting to 12 wins and securing a first-round bye.

-JC

NFL Week 2 Primer (With Picks): The Year of the Underdog?

Underdogs like Ryan Tannehill and the Miami Dolphins were inordinately successful in week one. We explain why that trend may continue throughout the season.

 By Jeremy Conlin (@jeremy_conlin) and Joe Parello (@HerewegoJoe)

Week 1 is in the books. The lesson is always "don't overreact to Week 1." If you're good at this whole picks thing, just stick to your guns from Week 1. That's what we did last year - after getting creamed in Week 1 (Jeremy was 5-10-1, Joe was 6-9-1), we just rolled it all back and turned it around Week 2 (Jeremy was 9-6-1, Joe was 10-5-1). Vegas overreacted, we didn't. And it worked for us.

Everyone comes into the year with a few preconceived notions, and a few of those get challenged in Week 1. If you thought the Rams would be able to survive without Sam Bradford, you got a rude awakening. If you thought the Panthers would regress horribly and Tampa Bay would pick up some of that slack in the NFC South, you might have left Week 1 pretty confused. If you thought the Patriots and Saints were potential 13-3 juggernauts (gulp), you might be scrambling to re-calibrate. But we preach caution. Don't completely change up your strategy based on 60 minutes of football. There's plenty more to come.

There is one trend that's worth keeping an eye on, which Bill Simmons actually covered in his 2014 Gambling Preview, but it came into light in Week 1 - last year, favorites covered an inordinate amount of spreads (52.2 percent, the third-highest number in the last 25 years, according to the Sporting News). But, in the years following inordinately successful favorites, the lines swing the other way, and favorites cover just 47 percent of spreads. The last two times favorites covered more than 52.2 percent (last year's figure), the following seasons saw swings of 13.2 percent (from 57.8 in 2005 to 44.6 in 2006) and 6.4 percent (from 52.9 in 1998 to 46.5 percent in 1999).

So what happened in Week 1? Underdogs went 11-5 against the spread. Hmmmmm....

NFL Week 1 Primer (With Picks)

It's an interception! No, it's a touchdown! Who cares, football is back, starting with Green Bay making its return to Seattle for the first time since the "Fail Mary" tonight.

 By Jeremy Conlin (@jeremy_conlin) and Joe Parello (@HerewegoJoe)

It's here, you guys.

It's finally here.

It took eight months, but meaningful football games are back, and they're here to stay (through February).

I feel like I say it every year, but I have never been so excited for football season. It might actually be true - maybe every successive football season is more anticipated than the last. There are so many things to be excited about, starting with anywhere from five to seven potential juggernaut teams sprinkled throughout the league (Denver, New England, Seattle, New Orleans, Green Bay, and possibly Philadelphia and San Francisco, depending on how optimistic you are).

Former playoff teams like Houston, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore could all bounce back in a big way. San Diego and Chicago have emerged as sleepers with high-octane offenses. Carolina and Kansas City look to hold on to the success that they found last year. Cleveland, Minnesota, and Jacksonville all have new first-round quarterbacks who could see substantial playing time this year. And in case you didn't notice, I just named more than half the league, every division is represented, and there's plenty of more excitement to be had for the teams I didn't mention.

Football, baby. Football.

Game(s) of The Week

Green Bay @ Seattle (8:30 p.m. Thursday, NBC)

As per usual, opening night features the defending Super Bowl champion squaring off with a high-profile foe. You forget it now, but the Ravens were, in fact, the defending Super Bowl champions on opening night last year. On only two occasions has the defending champion lost on opening night, and on only one occasion has the home team lost (the Ravens as defending champions lost on the road in Denver when a scheduling conflict with the Orioles forced the game out of Baltimore; the Giants in 2012 lost at home to Dallas). That might tip the scales towards Seattle, but more on that later.

Long And Suite Preview: The NFC South

The hopes of the Carolina Panthers rest squarely on the shoulders of Cam Newton

By Jeremy Conlin (@jeremy_conlin) and Joe Parello (@HerewegoJoe)

The NFC South has been in flux as much as any division in football, as it's had three different division winners in the last three years - only the NFC East can match that. Last season, the two teams at the top of the division got there by improving their record by four (New Orleans) and five (Carolina) wins. As the late, great William Costigan once said, "families are always rising and falling in America." To re-appropriate the turn of phrase, teams are always rising and falling in the NFC South.

The NFC South was probably the second-best division in football last season (it's a decent argument between the NFC South and AFC West). The Falcons and Buccaneers did both go 4-12, but both sported the point differential of teams at least a win better - the Falcons would have expected to win 5.9 games, the Bucs 5.3. And at the top of the division, the Panthers and Saints were both convincingly top-5 teams in the league. They just had the misfortune of running into the NFC West buzz-saw in the playoffs.

And again, the division is in flux. After being ravaged by injuries in 2013, the Falcons should storm back towards playoff contention. After winning the division on the strength of their defense and opportune play-calling, the Panthers might take a step back after losing their two best wide receivers from a year ago (Steve Smith and Brandon LaFell) and re-vamping their secondary. The Buccaneers have climbed out from under the Josh Freeman saga, picked up a new head coach, and should have star running back Doug Martin back to 2012 form, when he was 3rd in the league in yards from scrimmage. And the Saints, well, they're still the Saints.

The Official NFL Week 1 Primer

Will Joe Flacco again be jumping for joy in Denver?

By Jeremy Conlin (@jeremy_conlin) and Joe Parello (@HerewegoJoe)

Week 1. It's here. No more screwing around. Football. We're not even going to bother with a real intro.

Game(s) of The Week:

Holy crap there are too many to count:

Baltimore @ Denver (8:30 p.m. Thursday; NBC)

Last year's Super Bowl champion? A re-match of the most exciting playoff game in recent memory? Peyton Manning in a night game? Last year's AFC Champion against this year's AFC favorite? Opening night? Yes please.

-JC

Long and Suite Preview: The National Football League

Both our editors are high on Rodgers and the Pack, but where will they finish in 2013?

By Jeremy Conlin (@jeremy_conlin) and Joe Parello (@HerewegoJoe)

Well, we're almost here.

We've already covered every division in the league individually - if you missed them, you can find links in the sidebar to the right. Now we're here to recap all of that and make picks and predictions for all the things we haven't already covered.

To start, we're going to go through every team in the league one more time. In the table below, we've listed every team, their over/under line for wins this season (with corresponding odds for each pick), followed by our predictions. You'll notice that our final predictions may deviate from the picks that have been appearing in each of the divisional previews - that's because we made those picks almost a month ago and in some instances, new information has come to light, and in others, we just decided that our original prediction was too optimistic (or pessimistic). The picks below will serve as our "official" predictions for the season.