Fantasy Football

If you were surprised by anything that happened this week, then we don’t really know what to say. You should only be surprised that anyone you associate with was actually surprised. This, in a nutshell, is why we generally do not toy around with gambling on the NFL. Despite our success in the regular season, we’re having a difficult time understanding why anybody gambles on the NFL regularly, much less why it’s so immensely popular.

Basically, the best argument going against a college football playoff are their supposed template: The NFL playoffs. If the goal is to determine who the best team was all season (or at the end of the season), then it certainly seems like there is a glitch in the system. Unless the past five years or so have been a complete anomaly. I mean, you can’t compensate for teams not rising to the occasion, that’s on the teams themselves. But is anyone really convinced that any of these teams (with the exception of the Steelers) is the best the NFL had to offer?

Sure, you could call it sour grapes. After all, I went 1-3 in picking winners, and was 3-5 if you include my record against the line. But we had three road teams win, two of them handily (Philly, Arizona) and only one favorite actually show up. It can’t be entirely coincidental that the only home team to win was also the last game of the week. As they watched their counterparts be dispatched by uber-confident wild card teams. It wasn’t exactly a week where just my premonitions were under attack, but rather just conventional wisdom was assaulted by the stampede of parity that has dominated the NFL for about half a decade (and has reached a boiling point now).

I mean, if you’re a die hard NFL fan, aren’t even you having a difficult time taking any of this seriously? Our NFC representative in the Superbowl is going to have no better than a 9-6-1 regular season record. Pragmatics would probably tell you that both the Cardinals (in playoffs by virtue of playing in weakest division) and the Eagles (needed two other losses in week 17 to even qualify for the playoffs) shouldn’t have been in the playoffs in the first place. Essentially, we are looking at the polar opposite of Major League Baseball, where the inequity is palpable but as a result manages to make room for the occasional legitimate upset here and there. That’s opposed to the NFL, in which every team is more or less on equal footing (though some have geographical advantages) but where every team is vulnerable to a loss from virtually every other team. Especially in the playoffs.

At least the Titans Cheerleaders are reliable.

As much as it pains me to say, but it seems that the only franchise that manages to live up to expectations as a #1 seed anymore is the Patriots (and also the Eagles the year they played each other). Certainly that sounds asinine on the heels of being on the losing end of the biggest upset in Superbowl history (or one of them), but for three years they came through accordingly. Who else can we say that about? At least they actually made the Superbowl last year and didn’t lose in the fucking divisional round. Jesus.

So yeah, the biggest disappointment over the weekend was that none of it seemed out of the ordinary. Outside of the Panthers clearly sleeping on the Cardinals, whom they only narrowly bested earlier in the season. We mentioned it before but we’re only kidding at the time in suggesting that maybe the Cardinals were pulling the wool over our eyes by losing so many games in such an embarrassing manner at the end of the season. The logic being that although they would (theoretically) be foregoing home field advantage, their opponents would be caught off-guard when an actual NFL team took the field. Again, at the time, we were only kidding.

Well, while I think they were inconceivably lucky throughout the course of that Falcons game, this strategy certainly worked against the Panthers. Who couldn’t have taken the Cardinals any less seriously than they did. Everyone is quick to (rightfully) jump on Delhomme for the six turnovers he alone accounted for, but if the team as a whole had actually approached this game as anything more than a formality, then they might have occasionally put a defender on Larry Fitzgerald, whose at least a top three receiver in the NFL.

But it goes without saying that the turnovers did them in. You might recall that while we were making picks during the regular season, Delhomme’s penchant for multiple turnover games was a constant point of stress for us. Naturally, because my gambling luck has been shit for about four months now, he saved said game for when we actually picked them to cover.

Anyway, that’s the only game we have plans to cover with any manner of depth. I’d like to get onto this website and detail every game in a flummoxed tone that would convey my disbelief, but I can’t lie to you people. That was the only game we watched and were somewhat stunned by, and really it was just a repeated turnovers from a quarterback whose prone to repeatedly turning the ball over. This brings my now abhorrent playoff record (if you include picking winners and against the line) to an epically bad 6-10. With the Eagles accounting for three of those correct picks.

Again, no fantasy commentary, we’ll try to right the ship later tonight.