Remember when NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was more than just Mr. Jane Skinner? When he ruled the NFL with an iron fist? I can still remember where I was when Sean Taylor was murdered in bed during a home invasion and Goodell fined his family $50,000. Maybe I’m a little off on details, but damn, where did that guy go? You would think that during an age of CTE and kneeling players and franchises jitterbugging up and down the California coast, ol’ Give ‘Em Hell Goodell would have stepped on a landmine or two for the league’s sake. Make himself the story to distract the press from all the other unpleasant business. Not this new-and-improved Roger. Right about the time the league needs a Trumpian commissioner, they’ve got an Obama-esque “Who, me?” figurehead running things now. “I read about the player protests in the Monday morning papers, same way all of you did.”
Whatever. The Chiefs are 4-0 after a stiff challenge by the visiting Redskins. The Rams are an impressive 6-10 team, DeShawn Watson is the greatest Houston quarterback since JJ Watt, and there is no sugarcoating it: The Raiders won’t be building on last season’s success this year. To the ScheduleMobile!
AFC WEST
Kansas City @ Houston – Wherein the legend of DeShawn Watson grows…
Baltimore @ Oakland – Life without Carr’s gonna suck
LA Chargers @ NY Giants – The Resistable Force meets the Movable Object
Denver – Bye
If the Chiefs are a paper tiger, it’s apparent that it won’t be a division opponent exposing them. The Broncos appear to be one of those rare teams that are imbalanced in favor of the defensive side of the ball, like the 85 Bears, 00 Ravens, or 13 Seahawks. But you’ve got to have, at minimum, a caretaker-game manager QB whose main job is to not screw things up. Only six QBs have thrown more INTs than Trevor Simian so far. If he can’t straighten things out, The Broncs have Brock Ostweiler waiting in the wings. (Gives the phrase “QB Depth Chart” a whole new meaning, no?) Meanwhile, in Oakland, Derek Carr has a broken back which figures to hamper his mobility in the pocket. Was it because his O-line let him get decked over the Anthem Protests? If it is, I love the logic: Because I hate Trump, I’m going to do whatever I can to ruin our Super Bowl chances. And the Los Angeles Chargers are off to a fast start in the Josh Rosen/Sam Darnold draft sweepstakes. (Theory: a bureaucrat once fused the middle initial D with the last name Arnold generations ago and the family just went with it)
This is all disappointing. After the season the AFC West had last year, this year looks like the worst sequel to a hit since City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold. I mean, KC finishes well ahead of Denver, Denver goes like 9-7, the Raiders backsliding and the Chargers tanking. Sound about right? Not exactly the photo finish of last year, is it?
AFC NORTH
Jacksonville @ Pittsburgh – Only because they’re the home team
Baltimore @ Oakland
NY Jets @ Cleveland – Okay, THIS is the week Cleveland finally wins
Buffalo @ Cincinnati – Hate to do it, but neither team is as good or bad as their record
OMWC hasn’t been this distraught since the crossing guards started wearing bodycams. His beloved Baltimore Ravens just ain’t worth a damn. Yes, they are 2-2; do wins over Cleveland and Cincinnati even count? They’ve scored 16 points in their last two games. Not “averaged”, total. Joe Flacco, the Ravens quarterback known nationally as “Joe Flacco”, was once the subject of a fairly heated debate a few years back. The question then: Is Joe Flacco an elite QB? This is Flacco’s 10th season. His current QB rating is 65.0, career 84. He’s only gone over 90 twice. His TD/INT ratio is 186/123. At this point, it’s pretty clear that Flacco is not an elite QB. Meanwhile, the Pittsburgh Steelers sit atop this pile o’crud with STEVE SMITH still under center, Mikar Epplin at head coach (they’ve merged into a single entity by now), and Odell Beckham, Sr. as the star wideout. I’m tempted to predict losses for all four teams every week for the rest of the year, even in division games.
AFC SOUTH
Kansas City @ Houston
Tennessee @ Miami – Chris Gaines had a better comeback than Jay Cutler’s having
Jacksonville @ Pittsburgh
San Francisco @ Indianapolis – Must miss TV
SETTING: Deep in the BOWELS of HOUSTON TEXANS corporate HQ, February 2017
BOB MCNAIR: Flunky!!
FLUNKY (rushes in): Y-yes, sir!?
BOB MCNAIR: Flunky, I’m an NFL owner. My team is in the same state as the world-famous Dallas Cowboys, the five-time Super Bowl champions. Do you realize what that makes us? A laughingstock. Every year at the owner’s meetings, those guys really give me the business. Ya know what that’s like?
FLUNKY: Sir, I live out of my car. I sleep in the stadium parking lot.
BOB MCNAIR: Getting a jump on tailgating, eh, Flunky? That’s good thinking. Anyway, those damn Cowboys always have the leg up on us: five Super Bowls, household name, the big stadium…Mrs. Jones is so…ravishing…
FLUNKY: Sir?
BOB MCNAIR (snaps out of it) Flunky, the Cowboys got this Dakota Fanning character out of Buttfuck, Kansas and won thirteen games with him. He’s young. He’s exciting. He’s Afro-American. We got lots of those people here in Houston – I want a colored quarterback too if Dallas got one!
FLUNKY: Afro-American? Those people? Colored?
BOB MCNAIR: Yeah?
FLUNKY: It’s just so…hacky, making the incompetent boob a racist.
F. STUPIDITY, JR.: Look, I watch the late-night talk shows. This is comedy gold, believe me.
BOB MCNAIR: I am not a racist!
FLUNKY: Sir, even if we draft a black QB, even if he projects as good or better than Prescott, we don’t have that offensive line. We don’t have Ezekiel Elliott running the ball.
BOB MCNAIR: Look, we’ll take that kid out of Clemson. He damn near beat Alabama twice, he’ll do fine with us. When have I ever steered us wrong?
FLUNKY: What about-
BOB MCNAIR: Besides Ostweiler??
***
AFC EAST
New England 19 @ Tampa Bay 14 (F – 10/5)
Buffalo @ Cincinnati
Tennessee @ Miami
NY Jets @ Cleveland
Go Bills! That was the team of my youth, right there…Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas, Andre Reed, and the greatest of them all, Bruce Smith. Those guys were awesome. Yes, they lost four Super Bowls in a row, but they’re the only franchise to get to four in a row, and they only should have won one of those games. The second game against the Cowboys was winnable, but they went to pieces after the Thurman Thomas fumble. Oh well. Maybe this is the year the longest current playoff drought in the NFL comes to an end!?
NFC WEST
San Francisco @ Indianapolis
Seattle @ LA Rams – Rams come back to Earth a bit
Arizona @ Philadelphia – BIRD FIGHT!!
1) The LA Rams have been a surprise.
2) Surprises are not known to be long-term things.
NFC NORTH
Carolina @ Detroit – building on last week’s big win
Minnesota @ Chicago – The Bears have already won their game this year
Green Bay @ Dallas – the dreaded Sophmore Slump is in effect
So about a year ago, the Detroit Lions revealed that they would not only be changing uniforms soon, they might even choose a new color scheme that didn’t involve Honolulu Blue. And it didn’t – the Lions have a new blue.
Two things annoy me about the new unis. 1) Silver numbers? Silver doesn’t exactly pop against blue the way white does. I know there’s always a temptation to do things differently, to have your brand stand out in some way, but silver-on-blue is just trying too hard. Granted, not this hard.
2) Why change the font again? For a very long time, every team but the Chicago Bears wore jerseys featuring some variation of the varsity font. Then, in the 90’s, a lot of teams figured out that it might help branding to create a team-specific font. It was a little jarring in some cases, but such a big change was reasonable from a business standpoint. I just can’t figure why you’d create a new font, build that brand, and start again. The Cowboys went from Varsity to Family Guy Varsity some 30 years ago and haven’t changed. The Steelers haven’t changed in decades since leaving Varsity behind. There’s plenty of scope for variety even when you leave some elements intact. Besides, if you change fonts too frequently, something like this could happen.
NFC SOUTH
New England 19 @ Tampa Bay 14 (F – 10/5)
Carolina @ Detroit
Atlanta, New Orleans – Bye
Carolina winning in New England and the Falcons and Atlanta losing at home to the Bills – Go Bills! – is basically the NFC in microcosm. Almost anyone can win the NFC this year. I’m on record in saying that Seattle has lost a step, but the way the rest of the conference is playing they may end up back in the Super Bowl after all. No, I’m not backtracking. If they were to win enough games to earn a bye and get enough breaks over two games, they could still do it. The most likely outcome is the one that happened last year: a good team gets hot and plays their best football just as the playoffs start up. There’s no NFC team that’s going to go in 15-1, 14-2 this year. 12-4 will probably be good enough for two home games this year.
NFC EAST
LA Chargers @ NY Giants
Green Bay @ Dallas
Arizona @ Philadelphia
Washington – Bye
Ezekiel Elliott averaged 5.1 yards per carry a year ago as a rookie; through four games this season, he’s at 3.6 YPC. And he’s got bruised ribs. Maybe the Cowboys might want to reconsider appealing his suspension? A little R&R, let those ribs get right…he’ll be a lot fresher in December. Just putting that out there.
PICKS
Week 3: 9-6
Week 4: 6-9
TOTAL: 15-15
Comments
39 responses to “This is New Testament Roger Goodell: NFL Week 5 Preview”
BOB MCNAIR: Flunky, I’m an NFL owner. My team is in the same state as the world-famous Dallas Cowboys, the five-time Super Bowl champions. Do you realize what that makes us? A laughingstock. Every year at the owner’s meetings, those guys really give me the business. Ya know what that’s like?
It’s like this?
Aren’t you suppose to put your picks in bold or something?
I did, but they didn’t survive the trip over. My picks:
Houston over KC
Baltimore over Oakland
Giants over Chargers
Pittsburgh over Jacksonville
Cleveland over Jets
Cincinnati over Buffalo
Tennessee over Miami
San Francisco over Indianapolis
Seattle over Rams
Philadelphia over Arizona
Carolina over Detroit
Minnesota over Chicago
Green Bay over Dallas
Just started Zardoz. Me, the wife, a bottle of bourbon, and the greatest movie ever.
Just don’t let the movie convince her the penis is evil.
I think your wife is going to have some serious questions for you shortly
Nice fucking tackle. They’ll probably eject the kid from the game.
What game?
Fucking refs are destroying the game.
Ohio State.
Established media targets competing Youtube personality, insinuates they are crypto-racist
gee, its almost like a formula or something. The Pewdiepie-treatment
I have no idea what any of that says.
he’s the most popular music critic on Youtube.
Fader (a 3rd-tier hiphop magazine) decided to run a hit-piece, claiming he’s a racist…. because… well, he had a 2nd channel devoted to “Meme reviews” that triggered SJWs. never mind that he’s married to a black woman. He doesn’t toe the woke-line.
its basically another example of legacy media attempting to Un-person someone…. where someone is declared a member of the “Alt-Right” because they dared to suggest that Pepe-memes aren’t actually indicative of a white-supremacist conspiracy.
Heh, OK. Watching the rando in that picture flap his gums about anything seems like something I would not enjoy but what do I know.
Heh, people watch videos of others playing video games… there’s no accounting for taste.
The whole demonetizing because of advertisers is bullshit. Not only do they demonetize videos that are hardly offensive, and not demonetize content that is more offensive (but not anti-SWJ). But viewers of actual right-wing bigotry still buy stuff. YouTube is a narrow caster, not a broadcaster. Having one standard, even if it wasn’t a ridiculous standard, for the entire platform is silly.
Razorfist showed that they do not demonetize videos based on content, they simply blacklist all of a creators’ content.
HT: someone here a few months ago
It’s a bit more complicated than that.
Yeah, but the ramification of the policy, no matter how it’s implemented, crushes content creators’ revenue streams in unpredictable ways.
DB came up and knocked the receiver right out of his socks and caused a fumble. Refs called it an incomplete pass, and ejected the kid for targetting.
They need to fix this crap. It’s becoming really annoying that you’re pretty much guaranteed 1 ejection per game.
Even the idiot announcers said it shouldn’t have been a targetting call. It was just a ferocious, well timed hit. The kind of thing you go to a football game to see.
I was shocked when they reversed one last week (2 weeks ago) where the FSU kid did everything they want. Head up, used his shoulder, tried to fleet below the falling receiver’s head. If they had called that targeting, you would just have to give receivers flags.
Go Bills. I too jumped on the bandwagon as a kid in the 90s. Those teams were fun to watch, until the Superbowl that is. That second one they would have shuffle passed their way to victory if Jimmy Johnson wouldn’t have seen them practicing it on the news a couple nights before the game. Hated the media ever since. Oh, and I still hate Scott Nor wood.
Packers at Cowboys should be interesting. Both teams have playoff contention and both are banged up.
While I long for a 63-0 shellacking of Dallas in Jerryland I’ll settle for 28-27 with Bryant being denied the winning TD.
Go Bills!
That your yard or is it a pic from Buffalo 66?
Little of both.
Nice
So do they make it this year?
??♂️ I have no idea, I don’t even watch football. But I did live in Buffalo for some years where it kind of rubs off on you.
Flacco is a streaky quarterback. He (rarely) gets on streaks where he is as good as any quarterback in the game. Then he will get on streaks where he is below average. Right now he is below average.
THis^^ When hot, he’s one of the best long ball throwers in the game. That’s why he’s got a lot of turn-overs, too.
I’m pretty annoyed by football at the moment. This is mainly because the local high school’s football field is separated from my backyard by a small wooded area, and they have a powerful PA system. I’m sitting on my patio and I know both that someone just made a 74 yard play, and that they play shitty music, very loudly, between plays.
What I’m trying to figure out is how many damned games of football a high school’s teams play in a week? Cause it seems like quite a few, and they blast the PA till 1 AM on some nights… I mean, damn I’m old, but those players parents are exactly the parents who complain endlessly about much quieter college parties in town (it would be hard to be louder, without a _large_ PA system,) at earlier hours. Noise seems to be a huge problem in this town, unless it is a huge PA system blasting music t an entire neighborhood at 1:00 AM on a Monday morning. In which case it is OK, cause _our_ kids.
Amashi. Learn from Minnesoda.
Imagine Goodell as one of those leftist nannies trying to imagine his vision of utopia onto the world and his posturing makes sense.
Also he’s a former Jet employee who kissed the right ass and figures that the rise in the NFL’s popularity was due to his shenanigans rather than in spite of them.
OMWC hasn’t been this distraught since the crossing guards started wearing bodycams.
Here’s the worst part: SP (a Packers fan) got us primo seats at Lambeau for Packers-Ravens next month. Before the start of the season, I gleefully fantasized about being close enough to the field to actually hear Aaron Rodgers’s bones breaking when Suggs ground him into the turf. At this point, I’m bracing for 3.5 hours of continuous razzing from her.
the local high school’s football field is separated from my backyard by a small wooded area, and they have a powerful PA system. I’m sitting on my patio and I know both that someone just made a 74 yard play, and that they play shitty music, very loudly, between plays.
My house in Indianapolis was about a mile and a half as the crow flies from Ben Davis High School. After they updated their football stadium (bigger than where I played in college), I could hear the goddam PA from my front porch.
You’re an Indianapolis guy and an Ohio State fan? I gotta party with you P Brooks.
Well I’m pretty much corpsefucking this thread, but good job F. Stupidity on the McNair dialog. Takes me back to the Halcyon days of KissingSuzieKolber before they imploded in a big SJW shitstain.