Free NFL Handicapping Tools

While we provide picks and selections for those folks not wanting to do the work themselves, deep down our belief is that you'll have far more enjoyment and satisfaction if you make your own decisions.

Maybe you've been relying on touts to tell you who to bet your whole life, or maybe your own attempts to pick winners have been a little less than successful.

No worries, we're here to prove that some helpful tools and a new attitude can have you making NFL and NCAA selections that can compete with those high profile "sports betting personalities."

Free tools, columns, handicapping prediction engines
We offer all kinds of free handicapping resources updated weekly for the coming games:

ACTIVE FROM WEEK TWO TOOLS

Full Story
A simulation engine that shows you the likelihood of one team covering.

Bet Tracker
Courtest of our friends at SportsInsights.com comes a sweet tool that shows you what percentage of bets are being placed on either side. Do you believe in the wisdom of crowds or prefer a contrarian view?

Game Pages
The game pages attempt to put a lot of the different factors for a game onto one page that you can peruse.

Overlays
Our drive chart stats and play-by-play ratings are independently used to make projected scores.

DC/TO
The DC/TO combines drive stats with a touch of turnover difference theory.

U.P.M.
The "Ultimate Prediction Machine" plays out every matchup on a drive by drive basis to compute confidence values for each team covering.

Turnovers
"Turnover Difference" theory has been a powerful handicapping method for over twenty years. Are turnovers the product of skill, or to some degree a function of luck?

CSM - "Contrarian Bridgejumping"
Cumulative spread margin looks at how teams have been performing on a points basis against the spread set on their games. Another favorite feature for contrarian thinkers.

Trends
Our Trends columnist doesn't throw out all kinds of different angles, but focuses on one time tested pattern in each week. The results? His plays have been 168-133 (56%) since the inception of the column.

Injury Report
Arguably the best research we've ever done, leading to methods that have been resoundingly successful when followed blindly. Injuries do matter in the NFL, but you have to know how to quantify them!

Inside The 20
Red Zone handicapping came into vogue with the arrival of this column at TMW -- what happens when you predict scores using ONLY the red zone stats for a team?

Drive Stats
The origins of TMW were when we first started tracking drive by drive outcomes for teams back in 1997. Still a powerful handicapping factor, and a sentimental favorite of the staff.

Play-By-Play Ratings
Moving beyond the drive level, you head into play-by-play territory. We pioneered the concepts now more widely used, and our PBP ratings are a popular way of getting deeper into the details.

Down-By-Down Stats
Not all downs are alike, and looking at past down-by-down performance for teams has potent implications on future performance.

Red Zone Stats
Straightforward breakouts of how teams are doing on offense, defense, and net in the always important red zone.

Research Articles
When you've been publishing research for a decade as we have, there are some huge archives to wander through. Here are some of the more popular historical pieces we've done.

ACTIVE in LATER WEEKS

TMW Past Performances
Our secret weapon for '06, combining the 'Week That Was' ratings into one nifty package.

L5 U.P.M.
The "Last Five Games UPM" as the name suggests uses a more recent view of a team's performance in the simulations.

Falcon PP's
The Falcon was a subscriber looking to handicap football in a similar fashion to how he analyzed a horse race, complete with "speed figures."

Regressor
Taking regression to the numbers, this feature builds statistical models under a multi-stage scheme to predict future performance.

...so don't be shy, get on board the football handicapping train and start your own sports betting success story!

For more help, visit the Message Boards

While we will diligently try to answer their questions and concerns, let me tell you our dirty little secret: we don’t want to be a tout service.

Now this may seem a little strange given that we do offer all manner of free picks and expert selections.

Here’s the thing though: we believe people who engage in sports betting should handicap the games themselves.

With sports bettors the mentalities seem to be split into two primary camps – one that "everyone else" -- (linemakers, touts, big bettors, ‘computer groups’, etc.) knows more than you, or the other that you can just base your bets on casually watching the games and reading the newspaper.

The mantra we preach is self-reliance, with the caveat that it can take years to learn all the nuances of handicapping.

So if you will, the goal of TwoMinuteWarning is really to be a kind of sophisticated ‘Daily Racing Form’ for the sports bettor – full of features geared towards wagering-oriented analysis, and backed up by research into what factors actually do exert predictive influence over the outcome of games.

Why then, you may ask, do we not market ourselves in just such a fashion? Well, here’s the second dirty little secret: we want to convert people.

Not mind you to relying on our site for their ‘data source’, but to change their thinking to where they want to engage in some methodical analysis of their own about who to bet in a given week. Rather this than pay someone else to tell them what to do, or to take a flyer on the favorites du jour.

So recognizing that the vast majority of sports bettors simply want you to tell them "bet Pittsburgh" or some such thing, we have come to terms with the fact that making the case they should learn to handicap themselves will usually fall on deaf ears at first.

Sports handicapping is a fantastic hobby for a person, requiring perception, learning new skills, using judgment, and ultimately people who practice the craft derive much more satisfaction and excitement from their sports betting endeavors then the folks who are content to leave the decision making in the hands of somebody else.

Moreover, there are numerous medical studies that show one of the keys to maintaining health and mental alertness as we age is to be deeply involved in a complicated analytical pursuit. It’s not just more fun, it has health benefits!

Now if this rant has been successful and you are feeling inclined to improve your own handicapping skills, try using some of our free tools to make your own picks, or for a really simple start, begin each week by making your own line for each game, before you have seen the posted official point spreads.

Again, the intent of this is to suggest that you stop watching ‘reality shows’ and start living one of your own. Or, to put it another way, you’ve got a brain, use it!