BOLD PICKS
WITH
GREAT
RESULTS.

There is a kid poised to get selected in the first round by the New England Patriots.

With the recent retirement of Rob Gronkowski, the tight end spot appears a likely target for New England to fill if the right player at that position is on the board. If my crystal ball is right, then Alabama Tight End Irv Smith will fall to the last pick in the first round of the 2019 National Football League draft and the Patriots will take him.

How excited do you think his friends and family are going to be when they celebrate he is headed to a team with such a rich winning tradition? No matter if it is Smith, or another talented player selected by the Patriots in the first round, that kid's enthusiasm for beginning an NFL career is boosted by the prospect of playing for New England.

But, that kid picked next month by New England, is headed into a dreadful situation on a team that can find almost no path to victory without Tom Brady running the offense. Whether it be this year, next year, or a couple seasons down the road, Brady’s career is coming to an end. His effectiveness may already be exposed next season in a year in which the Patriots will be trying to advance to their fourth straight Super Bowl and win a second in a row.

Pure physics eliminates the Patriots for consideration of making a fourth straight Super Bowl appearance off a win. The only team to go to four straight Super Bowls was the Buffalo Bills, but they were spurred each year beginning in 1990 to atone for the sting of losing the Super Bowl the prior season.

I found out what kind of business I was running last season with the help of two talented marketing men.

The pair worked in separate offices, one in Tennessee and the other in Reno. The gentleman in the south did all the strategizing and media buys, while the man in the west picked up the pace and ran with factors when opportunities arose.

The first step implemented by the team was to drop the name Qoxhi Picks, which I had called my service since 1981. Instead, they would call the business picksfootball dot com, which was a URL that led to Qoxhi Picks. From a marketing perspective, I was not going to argue about something they saw so vital towards promotion of the site. Out with the nearly four decades of work under the name Qoxhi Picks, and in with the more marketable picksfootball.com.

The roll out of the revised website was not available when the 2018 season opened, and by the time it hit the market after the sixth week of the campaign, the picksfootball dot com site had missed marketing weeks with point spread results of 3-0, 3-0, 2-3 and 4-1 the prior four Sundays.

This is where I let my marketing team down, as the first week the rush of new business arrived, the picks went south.

There are very few things in life that one can wholly take credit for.

One of them that I’d like too, but have to bow to my brother’s son, Paul, is the point spread price information available exclusively on the Qoxhi site.

Before his teen years, Paul and his cousin, Pat, my other brother’s son, used to come to my San Francisco office to stuff envelopes and help out where they could. Pat was always interested in the colors in the ads for Qoxhi Picks.

Paul was always following the numbers.

In high school, Paul’s interest in the statistical elements of the matchups was edging towards what today we refer to as analytics. His objective was to assign each team a handicap, not unlike a golf handicap.