NFL Week 11: What in tarnation?

I went to Candlestick - call it what you will, but it's Candlestick Park - yesterday and watched my beloved 49ers beat the NFC Champion Seattle Seahawks. Now...that's pretty big stuff. Surely, Seattle is a pale imitation of what it was last season, and the 49ers capitalized on that - but that's their third win in a row, and the team is now 5-5, just one game out of the lead in the NFC West. That's so impressive for a team no one really expected anything out of this season.

The game was great, from start to finish the 49ers looked poised, determined and they took advantage of several mistakes by Seneca Wallace, who is not looking like a Wally Pipp to Matt Hasselback anytime soon. (And...is Wallace white? Man, I could have sworn he was African-American but it didn't look like it from our section. And yet, I digress.) Jerry Rice retired officially during halftime, and I'd say that this pumped the team up but they were already up 20-0. Yes, they shutout the Seahawks in the first half completely. The score could have even been higher. And I'll just say this - Frank Gore is a frickin BEAST. He runs downhill and runs angry, and those are two pretty important things in a running back. He's here to stay.

I'm not buying tickets to the Super Bowl, or even the post-season, just yet - but it's nice to see a team improve, instead of falling into a perpetual cycle of patheticness. See: Raiders, Oakland or Cardinals, Arizona.

In the meantime, our Pick 'Em is a real barn-burner today. Jenn Cuthill's Ben Toothlessberger has been putting up big points week after week and she has the lead going into tonights' game. However, three teams are one game behind and all have picked the Giants (while Jenn chose the Jags) - those are Todd Shriber's Team T, his wife Amy Shribers Mommy and Me, and Jeff Mester's children MesFamKidz. Let the record show that the rest of the league was lapped by two chicks*, a team comprised of two children under the age of 10 (maybe younger) and a guy named Todd with calves the size of a small rural state. We should all be a bit humbled.

In any case, more later, but it was a good weekend.

*Chicks being, of course, a loving name for two of my favorite people.