sara.ziegler (Sara Ziegler, sports editor): Week 14 of the NFL season brought us a couple of marquee matchups between top contenders — along with a few head-scratchers. Let’s start with the thrilling game between New Orleans and San Francisco. neil (Neil Paine, senior sportswriter): Amazing game. Salfino (Michael Salfino, FiveThirtyEight contributor): It’s probably good for […]
Last season, the Chicago Bears were one of the NFL’s great success stories. Picked by our model to win just 6.6 games, with only a 19 percent chance of snapping the team’s seven-year playoff drought, Chicago instead flourished under second-year quarterback Mitchell Trubisky and first-year Head Coach Matt Nagy. The Bears went 12-4, won the […]
gfoster (Geoff Foster, sports editor): The Divisionals returned normalcy to the NFL. All four home favorites won outright – three of them covered the spread comfortably. There will be no wild card team making a run this year, which seems like a harder and harder path to the Super Bowl. But let’s start with the […]
The NFL’s wild-card round may have been a brutal showcase of grind-it-out defense and uninspired offensive play-calling. But at least it threw another intriguing wrench into what was already shaping up to be a chaotic postseason. Three of the four favorites (according to FiveThirtyEight’s pregame Elo ratings) lost on opening weekend: the home Texans, Ravens […]
For decades, the draw play has been one of the NFL’s most reliable tricks to fool overeager defensive lineman. The play mimics a pass — in the action of both the quarterback and the offensive line — until the last second, when the ball is handed off to the running back. When it works, the […]