NFL Week 7: Oh, Lawdy.
I think it's safe to say this was a very strange weekend in the NFL. Shaun Alexander and LaDanian Tomlinson, the automatic dominant running backs in the NFL, were virtually shut down. Almost every game seemed to change hands in the last few minutes, and the 49ers were humiliated by the Redskins. (OK, that last one might not have been so strange. Sigh.)
The hurricane caused the KC-Miami game to be played on Friday, and kudos to everyone for making their picks on time. (That is, everyone aside from GiveLAaTeam’s Sean Planck, who'd I feel sorrier for had he not already won a week.) I couldn't figure out why Miami was favored…and neither could the Chiefs. They suddenly realized they have the best tight end in the league and a shockingly potent running game, and all of asudden, the Chiefs are for real again.
Congrats to Jon Phillips, Steelers fan, whose Celebrity Smackdown won the week before the Monday Night game even started. (That's two weeks in a row someone walked away with it, folks…let's get it in gear before I have to start explaining the tiebreaker system again.) Even more impressive (or sad, depending on your point of view) was that Jon didn't even make all his picks, neglecting the Detroit-Cleveland game. (I think we all would have liked to ignore that game, frankly. This week featured three of the most turgid matchups of the season, and our good friend Barmak (owner: Hell is for Gyros) said he was personally offended that the league would schedule these games.)
One of those games was Baltimore-Chicago, billed as a defensive battle. I remember a defensive battle between the 49ers and the Bears back in 1988 or 1989, that the Bears won 10-6. It was devastating…a brutal smash mouth game that exhausted Dave Dorfler (owner: IusedToBeGoodAtThis) so much he went to sleep even though it was 9 pm on a weeknight and he was 19-20 years old. This weekend’s matchup was not that kind of a game. Ugly. With the Ravens losing Ed Reed and Ray Lewis for next week, the Ravens look very, very bad.
Of course, nothing compares to the 49ers, who are trying desperately to prove they are actually worse than last years squad. The season ends with the 49ers playing Houston, and there's some solid money that the game will decide who has the 1st pick in the draft. (And lord oh mighty, somehow the Texans are FAVORED in this coming week against the Browns. I guess someone has to be favored – actually, they don't – but how crappy do you have to feel if you are a Browns fan? Wait, scratch that…not sure that the Texans wouldn't/won't be favored against the 49ers.)
Several games this week came down to the last minute, none of them more surprising than Seattle vs. Dallas. By now, you've probably seen the preposterous Drew Bledsoe interception, that led to a last minute field goal to beat the Cowboys. What's insane about this is not that the pass was bad -- and it was -- and not that they were throwing at all – though that is truly insane – but that the pass was to a stupid place. Allow me to expand: the pass, as crappy as it was, made no sense. Had a Cowboy receiver caught the pass, he would have still been miles away from anywhere a field goal could have been attempted for Dallas. That means the PLAN was to chuck it up in the air, TWICE. That. Makes. No. Sense.
And look, Green Bay is 1-5 also, largely due to the Paul Edinger field goal that was something like 5068 yards. Which cleared the upright by a mile. Somehow this will prolong Mike Tice's coaching career, and that's a real shame. (I'll just keep asking until it gets answered: what does the guy have to do to get fired?)
One of the games that the final score didn’t reflect was the Eagles-San Diego game. Really, San Diego won this game for almost the entire 60 minutes…and then all hell broke loose. A blocked field goal returned for a TD, and suddenly San Diego is 3-4, and the Eagles still can consider themselves the class of the NFC, even if that might not be true. San Diego is a far better team than their record states, but with Denver and Kansas City in their division, they’ve got problems.
OK, enough of my yammering…off to see how many members of the Bush administration are gonna get indicted this week. It’s Christmas in October!