Blocking

An NFL tight end must be able to pass and run block to be considered an asset. College tight ends are often used as receivers in college offenses, so it can be difficult for a tight end to stand out as a good blocker. That is why all college tight ends are encouraged to take advantage of blocking situations when they come up.

Strength

An NFL tight end would ideally be a mixture of a running back and a linebacker. He would have the field presence of a running back and the strong build of a linebacker. Hockey news writers mention the need for strength when players are trying to work in the corners or stay in front of the net. In football, strength for a tight end means having legs that could kick through concrete and arms that could block even the strongest defensive tackle.

Great Hands

Some teams elevate the tight end position to a primary receiver position in many plays. The New England Patriots and Green Bay Packers utilize their tight ends as receivers on a regular basis. But in most NFL offenses, the tight end is an important outlet if the quarterback gets in trouble. A college tight end needs to show that he has great hands and the ability to catch a ball that is not always thrown as a perfect spiral.

Balance

Speed is a great asset for any running back, but if he does not have supreme balance then all of the speed in the world is not going to help him. There are several tests that scouts do at the combine and during college pro days to test a running back’s ability to maintain his balance.

Blocking

A running back needs to be able to run, but he also needs to be able to stay in and block. A running back that cannot, or will not, block on passing plays is a liability to any pro team. In the NFL, a running back needs to know how to square his shoulders and take on a rushing linebacker.

Catching

A running back needs to have good hands to be a professional, and that means being able to catch the ball as well as hold on to it during a run. Even hockey news writers know that a running back needs to be able to come out of the backfield and give the quarterback a reliable target to be a star in the NFL.

Durability

An NFL running back plays 16 games a season, which is considerably more than the 12 games a season a college running back plays. A running back who has a tendency to get injured late in a season will probably not fare very well in the NFL.

General Manager Tendencies

NHL hockey blog writers learn how to judge the tendencies of hockey general managers to try and make trade deadline predictions. In football, general managers either draft players based on team needs or taking the best player available. Spend some time understanding the priorities of each general manager to help develop your mock draft. If a general manager has a tradition of taking the best player available, then you can create your own list of top players and follow along. If a team drafts based on positional needs, then you will need lists of the best college players at each position and follow along.

Evaluating College Talent

Luckily for you, there are plenty of online betting websites that give insight into which college players will be drafted. The top two or three picks are often solidified in the days leading up to the draft, and that can save you a lot of time in creating your mock draft. You will need to create your own lists of college players and rank them where you think they should be ranked based on NFL scouting reports. This can take a lot of time, but it can also be a lot of fun.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Spend the time to create more than one mock draft each year and then analyze how close you were in each one. Developing mock drafts helps you to understand the NFL teams better and can be a great asset in your betting activities.

Pick 11 – Kansas City Chiefs

David DeCastro – G – Stanford

Part of the success the Chiefs experienced in 2010 had to do with keeping quarterback Matt Cassel healthy. When the Chiefs lost Cassel for half the season in 2011, things did not go so well. The key in the draft will be protecting Cassel.

Pick 12 – Seattle Seahawks

Luke Kuechly – ILB – Boston College

The Seahawks don’t really look like it has any kind of plan for rebuilding, but it does need an inside linebacker and Keuchly is the best choice.

Pick 13 – Arizona Cardinals

TRADE

The Cardinals need a lot to become a better team, but Arizona can use this pick to trade down and pick up a veteran offensive lineman from a team like Pittsburgh. If Arizona keeps the pick, then it may take the best available offensive lineman which could be Riley Reiff.

Pick 14 – Dallas Cowboys

Fletcher Cox – DE – Mississippi State

The Cowboys are building a strong defense. The secondary has benefited from moves made in free agency, and now the Cowboys will look to improve its pass rush with Fletcher Cox.

Pick 15 – Philadelphia Eagles

Michael Floyd – WR – Notre Dame

Floyd is the perfect pick for the Eagles. He is fast, smart and can play the deep patterns on the other side of the field to take some pressure off DeSean Jackson and give Michael Vick another deep target. Floyd won’t affect the NBA scores in Philadelphia, but he should be able to put up points for the Eagles.

In a survivor pool, all of the participants pick one team to win each week. If your team wins, then you move on to the next week and you cannot pick that team again for the rest of the season. If your team loses, then you are out. It is a little more cut and dry than following March Madness odds, and it is a lot more challenging than trying to pick who will be moving at the NBA trade deadline. Participants are asked to pay in to the pot each week and the person that survives the longest wins the entire pot. But you can make it a little more complicated than that if you want to.

One of the ways to entice people to join a survivor pool is to offer week one refunds and losing buy ins. Week one refunds simply means that the people who buy in on week one and lose will get their money back. It only happens on week one and it only happens for the losers. It can entice more people to give it a try if they feel they have nothing to lose. You can also offer people the chance to buy in if they have lost, but the losing buy in price would be double the standard bet. You can decide if loser buy ins have to pay the double bet for the rest of the season or just the first week.

The first condition that makes a rookie quarterback successful is that the rookie must be named the starter in training camp and start in week one. It is similar to asking a hockey player to come in at the NHL trade deadline and turn a struggling team into a winner. Without experience in that team’s system, it is difficult to do. When an NFL rookie quarterback has to come in and play off the bench, the statistics show that he is not nearly as successful as a week one starter. There are exceptions such as Ben Roethlisberger and Tom Brady. But bettors use statistics, and the statistics show that week one starters are more successful.

The other factor that helps out a rookie quarterback is a good defense. If a team enters the season with a top five defense and a rookie quarterback as the week one starter, then that rookie quarterback has a much better chance of success than rookies in different situations.

One of the things that many bettors try to do with totals is complicate them with things like points per quarter, total yards gained or some other factor that really has little to do with over-under. All you need to develop a decent over-under betting system in football is team and league scoring averages. If both teams involved in a game average more points per game than the league average, then bet the over. If both teams score below the league average, then bet the under. The trick comes when there is one team that does not follow the average.

If you run a hockey blog, then you know how unpredictable teams can be on any given night. But in football, teams tend to stick with their patterns. If you have a team that scores below the league average playing a team that scores above the league average, then you can average out their defensive and offensive numbers to get your totals bet. For example, if the league average is 20 points per game and one the teams in your game scores an average of 14 points per game, then you can average that out and get 17 as the points that team can expect to score. Plug that number into your system and you will get a more accurate totals bet for any football game.

When you read the Super Bowl odds each day, you will see a positive number associated with one team and an equal negative number associated with the other team. The team with the negative number is the favorite and that number is the point spread for the game. A little further down the line you will see a number that is often not marked as anything or it could be marked with a +/- indicator. That is the over-under and it is the bet that allows you to bet on the total number of points that will be scored in the game.

Hockey blog fans are familiar with the concept of over-under because it is used in hockey betting all of the time. If the over-under for the Super Bowl is 45, then you can either bet that the combined score will be 44 or less, or you can bet that the combined score will be 46 or more. If the combined score is 45, then it is a push. For example, the over-under for Super Bowl XLVI is 55 points, which means that the Patriots and the Giants would have to combine for 56 points or more for an over bet to win. Since the Pats and Giants are high-scoring teams, then an over bet may be a good one to make and another way to make money betting on the Super Bowl.

The bookie software sets the lines based on several conditions. But when a high-scoring team plays a low-scoring team, the line will almost always skew towards the high-scoring team. As a matter of fact, the five highest scoring teams in the league in any given season usually win at least 60 percent of their games against the spread. All you have to do is determine if a team is a top-five scoring team and then place your bet. It is that simple.

Another easy indicator of how a team will play is its home and away record. If you write or follow any other sports website such as a hockey blog, then you know that teams tend to establish patterns of winning and losing on the road. After the midway point of the season, you can use these tendencies to make some money. If a team has a winning record at home, then you can take the bet that it will win its next home game. More often than not, you will be right.

A proposition bet is not a typical bet to determine which team will win or which team will lose. It is a side bet that gives lines on things like who will win the coin toss, the over-under on how many yards a quarterback will throw for, who will be leading at halftime and who will score the winning touchdown. NFL fans like these proposition bets because they can be a great way to pad the winnings for a night. But proposition bets also have a challenging side that every bettor needs to be aware of.

There are no standard lines for proposition bets. That means that the line for who will win the coin toss on site A is different than the line on site B. That means that bettors may want to do a little looking to find the best lines on proposition bets to make sure they are getting the best possible odds. The danger in this for the betting websites is that the sites with the best odds will get all of the action and the sites with the lower lines will not see any additional revenue.

Many of the proposition lines are based on historical information. But, in many cases, it can just be a gut feeling that tells you which bet to take and how much you should put down.