NFL -- Week 11 Picks

So through 10 weeks of the NFL season, I'm basically once again right back to where I started, with my season record sitting at 14-14-2 after a 2-1 week with my predictions for Week 10. This week I see a bunch of big lines, but in general I find this week to be perhaps the most difficult week of the season in terms of finding games that look like easy wins. Here are my picks for the coming weekend, in no particular order as always.

1. Tampa Bay Buccaneers +3.5 at San Francisco 49ers. The Buccaneers are much better than expected this season, and they've done a great job beating the bad teams they've played all season long so far in 2010. It's always unsettling picking a team that has to travel all the way across the country, but in this case the far superior team is getting a field goal+ to play against a very bad 49ers team with a head coach with the intelligence of a below-average chimpanzee. I just can't pass up the better team and the points here, even with the cross-country travel, especially as the Bucs are 3-1 already on the road this season.

2. Buffalo Bills +6 at Cincinatti Bengals. The Bills are fresh off their first win of the 2010 NFL season, and they've been playing much better of late than earlier in the season. Meanwhile, the Bengals' season is all but over once again as that team continues to flounder in the midst of a 5-game losing streak under the "tutelage" of Marvin Lewis, another bozo who was a good coordinator some time ago but who could not be more obvious simply does not have what it takes to be a successful head coach in this league. Even though the Bengals can and should win this game, the team hasn't had a good outing in almost two months, and I just have a major problem with them giving six points to a tough young team who plays hard every week and doesn't give up to anybody. I like the Bills getting nearly a touchdown here in this one.

3. Baltimore Ravens -10 at Carolina Panthers. Here's a double-digit road favorite that I know a lot of people will scowl at, but this is about as good of a road matchup as I have seen this year. For starters, Matt Moore is out as Carolina's qb, and backup Jimmy Clausen is concussed and not likely to start as well on Sunday, leaving some guy named Tony Pike to take the helm at quarterback for perhaps the league's worst team. And just for fun, Pike will have to face the raucous Baltimore defense in his first start of the season, which sounds like a recipe for a bunch of incompletions and probably a few pick-6's to boot. And just to round out the analysis, the Panthers are 1-4 at home this year, and in those four home losses, they lost by 13 to the Bucs, by 13 to the 2-7 Bengals, by 17 to the Bears, and most recently by 31 to the Saints. They haven't had a single home loss yet by fewer than 10 points, and they're playing one of the best teams in the league in the Ravens, and they're starting some stiff at quarterback in his first significant minutes of the season. This one should be a bloodbath.

There's the Week 11 picks. There are a ton of too-big lines in my view in this week's games, but these are the ones I am most comfortable with given what I have seen about the teams involved. And the best game of the week? Giants at Eagles, on the Sunday night package, in a battle for NFC East supremacy as the Eagles look to follow up last Monday's silly beatdown of the Foreskins and their $3 million guaranteed contract to quarterback Donovan McNabb. Who signs a $3 million guaranteed contract in the NFL anyways?