Chris Fallica

FOX Sports Wagering Expert

“Bear Bets” are real wagers that Chris “The Bear” Fallica is actually making.

We’re on to Week 8, and I’ve got my eyes on a handful of games.

For those new to this space, if you are looking for a few wagers to get in on the NFL action, I have you covered. Nothing makes football better than having a few bucks on the games weekly.

Last week, we went 0-2 in this spot. 

Time to get back on track.

Last Week: 0-2 (Season: 13-10)

(All times ET)

SUNDAY, OCT. 27

EAGLES @ BENGALS (1 p.m., CBS)

I’m not going to overreact to the Eagles beating an awful Giants team last week. Yeah, they did what they needed to do, but the Giants OL/QB combo might be the worst in the league right now. It’s not like Jalen Hurts was great, and it had the earmarks of Saquon Barkley simply being motivated against the team that cast him aside. Cincinnati is getting healthier, and I think the best unit on the field is the Bengals offense. It’s a good time for the Bengals to not blow a lead on their home field and finally win one. 

PICK: Bengals (-2.5) to win by more than 2.5 points

FALCONS @ BUCCANEERS (1 p.m., FOX and FOX Sports App)

There might be a little overreaction here to the Tampa WR injuries. The Bucs are still gonna throw the ball. Maybe Cade Otton has a huge day. And remember, the backs are still capable. The Falcons laying points on the road against a team they should have lost to at home a couple of weeks back? What could possibly go wrong? 

PICK: Buccaneers (+2.5) to lose by fewer than 2.5 points, or win outright

NFL Week 8 Super Six: Can the Seattle Seahawks pull off the UPSET against the Buffalo Bills?

BILLS @ SEAHAWKS (4:05 p.m., FOX and FOX Sports App)

We don’t know if DK Metcalf is going to play, but there are still plenty of weapons on a Seattle team that might be able to pull off the upset. But I do think with Kenneth Walker, Jaxon Smith-Njigba and others, the Seahawks should put up points on a Buffalo defense that has had a tendency to do such this year. 

PICK: Seahawks team total Over 20.5 points scored

Chris “The Bear” Fallica has covered sports for nearly three decades. While college football has been his focus, he also enjoys the NFL, Soccer, Golf, Tennis, MLB, NHL and Horse Racing, with an “occasional” wager on such events. Chris recently won the inaugural Circa Football Invitational and finished in the Top 10 of the Golden Nugget Football Contest. He’s a multiple-time qualifier for the NHC Handicapping Championship. Remember, “The less you bet, the more you lose when you win!” Follow him on Twitter @chrisfallica.

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BEN PAULING is gunning to join his old guv’nor Nicky Henderson in the big league.

The move to a swish, purpose built yard in Naunton — deep in the Cotswolds — has boosted Ben’s growing team no end.

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With Cheltenham Festival and Aintree winners in the bag last season the mood at the stable is unsurprisingly buoyant as the jumps season gets going.

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And now Ben is ready to kick on and take the fight to Hendo, Paul Nicholls, Dan Skelton and, dare he say, even the sport’s all-conquering goliath Willie Mullins.

Ben, 41, said: “Last year was another career best for us but you always have to keep building. Keep kicking on.

“I want to be one of the best trainers in this country. I want to be challenging for championships one day.

“I don’t want to be training 300 horses to do that, that’s not our model.

“We try to be about quality and I’d like to think I have learnt over the years to train good horses.”

Diva Luna, The Jukebox Man and Handstands fit that bill alright and they will lead Ben’s team of around 90 horses this winter.

Welshman Ben Jones is the new No1 jockey at the yard and with owners like Harry Redknapp and Jeremy Clarkson on board, Naunton is never a quiet place.

Built from scratch on a golf course during the pandemic, Ben moved in to his new state-of-the-art yard three seasons ago and lives up the road with his family.

Wife Sophie keeps the show on the road in the office with daughters Tilia, 9, and Isabella, 7, cheering on from the sidelines.

Ben is proud as punch of Naunton Downs and so he should be with unique gallops hurtling through the middle of a golf course, huge new barns and an owners room resembling a high-end London restaurant.

But does it feel like home yet?

“It does, definitely,” says Ben.

“We tried for years to buy somewhere but nothing is cheap anymore. We even looked in Lambourn.

“Then we ended up with this and it cost less than a four-bed semi up the road. Sure, it took a lot of work but it was our dream to build and design something from scratch.

“The girls are blissfully rocking along in their own little worlds and we try and do as much as we can with them. They’re great fun and a good tonic.

“Sophie’s quite involved in the yard, she oversees a lot of it. She comes racing with me quite a lot and I think that’s quite a good way of doing it.

“If I had too much involvement from Sophie then sometimes it’d fry me.

“That’s because I’m a strong-willed person when it comes to the decisions I make. But we do it really well together and it seems to be working out.”

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Ben was always destined to work in the game. The son of a Cotswolds’ farmer, he rode in point-to-points before he nearly lost an eye in a dust-up with some barbed wire working on the farm. Ouch.

After going to uni Ben worked briefly in sales but the ‘orses soon came calling.

He said: “Farming lasted all of about five minutes.

“It wasn’t for me. I loved the countryside, I loved the outdoors but farming was never something to make me tick. I was always an adrenaline junkie.

“Riding was taken away from me after I injured my eye but I was never going to be a jockey . . . look at me!

“But racing got under my skin and I’ve always adored horses. They are beautiful creatures and I was keen to know how to can get the best out of one.

“I did some work in sales and did some breaking and pre-training. But then I went to Nicky’s and that was that really.”

Ben worked his way up the ladder with maestro Nicky at Seven Barrows.

They were some of the most formative years of Ben’s life — even if he admits the partying was nearly as important.

Ben said: “I owe a huge, huge amount of thanks to Nicky and Corky Browne, his head lad.

“But all the team at Seven Barrows were just absolutely brilliant. I learned so much from everyone.

“It was the six and a half years of my life which were definitely the most alcoholic — but probably the most educational as well!

“I loved it and I did learn how to train a good horse there.

“Nicky is one of the reasons why we’re sitting where we are now. We hopefully have an ability to train good horses.

“Everyone’s got a different personality but if you learn from a master, which Nicky is, you know, why change it?

“He always had a pupil assistant and a first assistant. They were nearly always someone like myself who wanted to train — incredibly hungry, very keen to learn, willing to work every hour.

“We did it for f**k-all money. Most of us liked to party because he was like that.

“And he used to get cross at us for various bits and bobs — like if the party had gone on too long!

“But secretly Nicky knew that when he worked in the banks in London he used to sleep on the desk most of the day because he’d come straight to work.

“So there was always that sort of like bit of a jovial relationship with us.

“When I turned up they had not had a winner at Cheltenham for two years.

“I arrived in January and in March they managed to win the Champion Hurdle with Punjabi. Not that I’m not saying it was anything to do with me!

“But everyone was focused on Binocular and he was favourite for the Supreme and got beat — he was always over-rated.

“He was third or fourth and Punjabi then won the Champion Hurdle and I was bloody thrilled.

“I said, ‘come on let’s get to the pub’. Only three people came from the yard as Binocular had got beat. I was like, ‘what the hell is wrong with you guys?’

“But it had gone stale. That summer I said to Nicky; ‘We’ve got to get rid of ten people. They’ve been here forever, I promise you they’re awful. They don’t want to be here. They just grunt and groan’.

“And we had a massive turnaround.

“Within six months we had the best parties in Lambourn! The whole place was kicking off.

“We basically had our own pub.

“Nicky said he hated it — but he secretly loved it too.”

Hendo had a tortuous campaign last year with a mystery bug wiping out his team on the eve of Cheltenham.

But he roared back just weeks later to get back in the winners enclosure at Aintree with the likes of Jonbon.

And Ben knew his old gaffer would bounce back.

He said: “What Nicky did when his horses were sick last season was just absolute genius.

“He just reset the whole thing and didn’t panic for one day.

“The best piece of advice ever given to me was from Corky — he said ‘never pull two levers at once because you never know which one works, just pull one lever at a time.’

“There is no one better at training a good horse than Nicky. Hopefully that has rubbed off on me.”

Ben has certainly had plenty of reasons to say cheers in the last few years.

After Shakem Up’arry’s Cheltenham Festival win last year Ben ensured the whole yard celebrated in style at the local — The Farmers Arms.

Owner Harry Redknapp missed out on the first few rounds as, despite his breakthrough Cheltenham win, he insisted on going to Worcester Cricket Club where was booked as an after-dinner speaker.

But Harry managed to get back to the boozer before last orders and ended up having to kip at Ben’s house.

With a restaurant on site in Naunton at the adjoining golf club, there should be many more parties to come.

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Few racing car designers have enjoyed such long and distinguished careers as Bob Riley. The American, who has died 93, was both prolific and successful in multiple disciplines over the course of more than 60 years at the drawing board.

Riley-designed cars won the Indianapolis 500, the United States Auto Club Champ Car title multiple times and just about everything worth winning in North American endurance racing. Repeatedly! His designs triumphed at the Daytona 24 Hour no fewer than 13 times.

It will be for those successes in sportscar racing that Riley will be best remembered, not just for the sheer number of races and championships won, but because the cars that accrued them carried his name. Riley & Scott took a trio of wins at Daytona in with the MkIII World Sports Car in the second half of the 1990s, while Daytona Prototypes known simply as Rileys took a further 10 in the US endurance classic during the Daytona Prototype era between 2005 and 2015, including eight on the bounce.

The MkIII open-top prototype and the family of Riley DP coupes – the MkXI, the MKXX and MkXXVI – (both spaceframe chassis designed together with son Bill) were serial championship winners. Drivers of the former took a total of eight titles on the original IMSA trail (subsequently known Professional Sportscar Racing), in the United States Racing Racing Championship, the American Le Mans Series and the Grand American Road Racing Series. The line of DPs took the Grand Am crown nine times.

“Just about everything I drove designed by Bob was incredible,” says Wayne Taylor, who won Daytona with both the MkIII and the MkXI, as well as the IMSA and Grand-Am titles with each car. “With a Riley chassis I knew that I was going to be in a position to win races and championships.

“Bob understood what was required for racing on the rough tracks in North America; he understood that you need mechanical grip. His cars were always easy to drive. That was always the big thing about a Riley.

Wayne Taylor, pictured with his team after winning the 2005 Daytona 24 Hours, enjoyed enormous success in Riley cars

Photo by: F. Peirce Williams / Motorsport Images

“He played a massive role in my career going all the way back to the Intrepid GTP I raced at the start of the 1990s. I have a lot to thank him for.”

Riley’s successes in single-seaters came as a hired hand. He started working for US racing legend AJ Foyt for the 1971 season, designing the Coyote with which his employer took third place at Indy that year. An evolution of the car Riley conceived for ’73 would give Foyt his fourth and final victory at the Brickyard in 1977.

By then, Riley had moved over to work for Pat Patrick. He would design a quartet of Wildcats for him, though not before he’d built the first Indycar to bear his name in ’74. There would be another two R&S designs built for the Indy Racing League between 1997 and 2000. Both marques were race winners in their respective series, as was another Coyote, with full ground-effects, built for Foyt in 1981. It sat on the front row at Indy, too.

Many of Riley’s sportscar designed didn’t carry his monicker, either. The Chevrolet-engined Intrepid RM-1, an IMSA race winner in Taylor’s hands in 1991, was an important car the Riley story: it was the first machine father and son designed together and can be considered the roofed forebear of the MkIII. Then there was the first Cadillac Northstar LMP that flew the flag for the General Motors brand at Le Mans in 2000 and again, in a form modified by others, in 2001.

His Ford Mustang GTP – a front-engined prototype that predated the Panoz LMPs of the late 1990s and early 2000s – was a race winner, too. It won first time out in IMSA in 1983, though never again.

Yet Riley was much more than a designer of prototypes and Indycars. His body of work was immense. A string of titles were claimed by his chassis in the Trans-Am silhouette series: 13 drivers claimed overall titles in the Riley-penned tubeframe racers. GT machinery, tubeframe or otherwise, by his hand won North American sportscar titles with Chrysler’s Dodge brand, Oldsmobile and Mazda.

Formula Ford, Super Vee chassis and a Busch Grand National second-tier NASCAR emerged off the Riley drawing board over the years. There was even a Land Speed Record car built for the salt flats of Bonneville.

Foyt took his fourth Indy 500 win in 1977 with Coyote originally devised by Riley

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Riley started out building cars in which to compete himself. The first was a C-Modified Sports Car Club of America contender built in 1959 that followed on from a pair of Triumphs, a TR2 and then a TR3, purchased during a stint in the US Air Force. The tubeframe machine known as a Lynx was powered by a Chevrolet V8 and, he would relate in his autobiography The Art of Race Car Design published in 2015, had more than a hint of of the Jaguar D-type about it.

He began his engineering career working on the Saturn space programme before moving to Ford, which seconded him to Kar Kraft to work on the project that yielded the US manufacturer four straight Le Mans victories in 1966-69. Suspension design was his focus on the Ford MkII and IV. All the while, he was building more Lynx chassis, Vees and FF1600s, in his spare time.

Riley & Scott was established in 1990 with Briton Mark Scott, a former McLaren mechanic who had moved to the USA with Teddy Mayer’s new CART operation set up on his departure from the F1 team. R&S was briefly part of the Reynard Racing Cars empire from 1999, before ownership quickly returned to the Riley family. Riley Technologies was the new name for the company.

A passion for engineering drove Riley to continue designing racing cars into his dotage. Riley never really stopped working: he worked on a new Trans-Am car this decade. Suspension and aerodynamics were his twin specialities: he was experimenting with ground-effect at the same time as that other great innovator, Lotus boss Colin Chapman, in the mid-1970s.

Bob once remarked to this author when already deep into his 80s that he was only working part time these days. In old age, he pointed out, he wasn’t getting to the workshops until until 9:30.

Riley & Scott company he co-founded with Mark Scott in 1990 helped cement Riley’s name in sportscar racing lore

Photo by: Motorsport Images

England head coach Steve Borthwick has named a group of 17 players that will receive English rugby’s first Enhanced Elite Player Squad contracts.

Fly-halves George Ford, Marcus Smith and Fin Smith have been given one of the deals but there are no tighthead props in the group.

Bath’s Sam Underhill is a surprise omission having started all of England’s eight Test matches in 2024.

The contracts – the first of their kind – allow Borthwick to have the final say on all sports science and medical matters in relation to the players, handing the England boss unprecedented influence compared to his predecessors.

“I am confident that these contracts, and our strong relationship with the Premiership clubs, will play a significant role in England Rugby’s continued development,” he said.

Northampton’s Alex Mitchell is the only scrum-half in the 17, with Ellis Genge the only loosehead prop, while Sale flanker Tom Curry has been handed an Enhanced Contract despite his long injury lay-off.

Immanuel Feyi-Waboso has capped off a breakthrough year by being included in the group, while Henry Slade has also been given a contract despite not making the 2023 Rugby World Cup squad.

Flanker Chandler Cunningham-South started England’s three Test matches on their summer tour, but has been left out of the 17.

Merab Dvalishvili still believes Sean O’Malley deserves a rematch before Umar Nurmagomedov gets his chance to fight for UFC gold.

Dvalishvili captured the bantamweight title with a unanimous decision win over O’Malley at UFC 306 in September. Following the win, it appeared the surging Nurmagomedov would be next in line after his dominant win over Cory Sandhagen at UFC Abu Dhabi, but reports have circulated that Nurmagomedov and Song Yadong are in talks for a bout. Multiple people with knowledge of the promotion’s plans confirmed to MMA Fighting recently that, as of now, the fight is not a done deal.

At Friday’s UFC 308 fan Q&A, Dvalishvili was asked by a fan why he’s afraid to face Nurmagomedov, and leaning more towards a rematch with O’Malley.

“Let’s boo to this guy,” Dvalishvili said. “I’m not scared of no one, only God.

“Where is this guy? He’s taking [another] fight. He’s scared. He’s fighting somebody else. Where is [he]? Where is [he]? Tell me. He wants to get knocked out by somebody else, and then he’s going to make excuse. He’s not going to make this fight. I’m not making fight. Dana White and Hunter [Campbell] make decision [for] who I’m going to fight next. I don’t know. I don’t make decision. I never make decision.”

So what will ultimately be next for the new bantamweight champion? Dvalishvili says he’ll let the UFC brass make the determination. But if it were his call, “The Machine” says O’Malley should be the rightful foe, as Nurmagomedov has more to show before getting his opportunity.

“If Dana White tells me I have to fight Umar, I’m fighting Umar, OK?,’ Dvalishvili said. “But, you know what? Umar doesn’t deserve to fight me. Sean O’Malley deserves to fight me, and I’m going to rematch him. He deserves it, and after, Umar has to prove [himself], and I will fight him.”