NFL Thoughts -- Week 15

Cardinals' QB John Skelton: 5-1. Kevin Kolb: 2-5. 'Nuff said. Given the young man a chance.

Tony Sparano is gone, but the Dolphins just keep on playing every game like it's their Superbowl. Miami beat the formerly high-flying Buffalo Bills on Sunday 30-23, behind Matt Moore's best game of the season and Reggie Bush's first 200-yard rushing game in as long as I can ever remember in the pros.

Sticking with the newly-departed coaches' teams, it's hard to read too much into the Chiefs ending the Packers' bid at a perfect season. But, I have to say that as I watched Aaron Rodgers over the past few weeks and certainly in his post-game presser on Sunday afternoon, he seems to have had a lot more invested in this run at perfection than he is letting on. It will be interesting to see if there are any long-term effects for the Packers who might have just lost the #1 thing that they as a team were keying on for most of 2011.

It's hard to get excited as an Eagles fan when the team's limited playoff hopes are based on Philly winning at Dallas next Sunday in a must-win game for both teams, and then beating the Skins at home to close things out. With the way this team has played in the 2011 regular season, anyone who looks at that and sees 2-0 just hasn't been watching this team this year, in particular on defense.

Nnami Asomugha was called for yet another holding penalty late in the first half as the Jets were trying to mount a comeback against an early Eagles onslaught on Sunday. That makes at least half a dozen times this year that Asomugha has blatantly held a receiver who had beaten him and was about to make an easy touchdown score. As much as getting value for Kevin Kolb is proving to have been a steal of a trade this past offseason, the Asomugha signing is without a doubt the Eagles' brass's worst move of 2011.

The NBC Sunday night coverage continues to be the worst commentating available on any major sports network. Especially painful continues to be the in-studio guys, with Tony Dungy seeming more suited for missionary work or possibly religious oration than commenting on NFL games, the Rich Eisen-like banality of Dan Patrick, and the contrived too-cool-for-school attitude of Rodney Harrison. These guys even make Chris Collinsworth's one-sided commentary seem professional and riveting.

Lesean McCoy punched in his 15th, 16th and 17th rushing touchdowns of the season this weekend, solidifying his spot atop the list of best non-quarterback fantasy football players in the NFL in 2011. McCoy's 20 total touchdowns now puts him comfortably ahead of Patriots' breakout tight end Rob Gronkowski's 15 receiving plus one rushing td, and even with Calvin Johnson's huge performance this weekend against the Raiders, Megatron remains a distant third with 14 total touchdowns. To think that this team with McCoy, Michael Vick and DeSean Jackson on offense, plus Jason Babin and his 17 sacks on defense to go along with Asante Samuel and big-name additions Asomugha and Dominick Rodgers-Cromartie at corner, would be sitting at 6-8 and hoping for a mathematical miracle to sneak into the postseason with a .500 record in an uncharacteristically weak NFC East, this is just everything that makes the NFL so great for all of us.

Speaking of great offensive threats in the league today, I think it's fair to say that Aaron Rodgers officially has competition for the league's MVP. While I think Rodgers would have won it walking away if the team went undefeated for the season given the year he is having, now that the Packers have fallen back down to the realm of mortal NFL teams, I don't see how what Drew Brees is doing right now can be ignored any longer. While Rodgers has thrown for 4360 yards (4th in the NFL), an NFL second-best 68.1% completion percentage, and an eye-popping 40 touchdowns vs just 6 interceptions through 14 games in 2011, Brees has been up to the task, posting 4780 passing yards -- on pace next week to break Dan Marino's all-time single-season passing yards record with a full game to spare -- and a mind-numbing 71.5% completion percentage. Though not as amazing as Rodgers' here through Week 15, Brees' touchdown to INT ratio is also a very impressive 37 touchdowns to just 11 picks. Each player has some areas where they are clearly the best, and I guess I might lean ever so slightly towards Rodgers if I had to pick at this moment, but in my mind with the Packers' loss, this race just got officially up for grabs thanks to the Chiefs on Sunday afternoon.

I thought Tim Tebow played pretty well -- for Tim Tebow -- against the Cheatriots on Sunday. In the end it was a big double-digit loss for the Broncos, but Tebow ended the day a robust 11 for 22 for a 50% completion percentage (his highest of any game this year), and with 194 total passing yards -- also, amazingly, his highest for the year. I imagine that John Elway was fairly unsure of how he should be reacting to his quarterback's performance against the AFC's best-looking team at the moment, but Tebow did run the ball well, and Tebow started off very strong before his team got bit by the turnover bug and gave a great team in New England too many chances to build up a lead.

That New York Giants loss this weekend at home to the hapless Redskins has got to go down as the most gutless performance of the entire NFL season so far. I mean, the Giants are at home in New York Jersey and playing the Redskins who just gave up 34 points at home to the Cheatriots last week and 34 also at home to the NY Jets the week before, and they manage to put a straight-out bagel until the final minutes of a game that was already long since over? I betcha Bill Cowher is on a plane out to Westchester County right now to look for a new house to buy. What an utter collapse.

It's a shame that right now the Bengals and Jets would play down to the third tiebreaker if each team wins out over its last two efforts in the 2011 regular season. With identical records of 8-6 overall, and identical conference marks at 6-5, the decision would turn on better overall winning percentage over common opponents, with the two teams even having performed identically there, but with the Jets being 2-0 against the Bills while the Bengals are only 1-0. Though it certainly feels like the wrong team and the wrong quarterback in Mark Sanchez are ahead in that seemingly silly category, this one really should still be decided on the field as the Jets are fixing to face the crosstown rival Giants in a do-or-die game at home followed by traveling to the keyed-up Dolphins in Week 17 who you know would just love to ruin the Jets' season (again), while the Bungles have on top the beatable Cardinals at home, followed by an end-of-season home-game clash with the Ravens, who might not be playing for anything that week after Baltimore's crushing by the Chargers on Sunday night.

Even with all the shenanigans and mathematical possibilities in the NFC East, the AFC West might be the most interesting division race in all of football here as we enter the home stretch. With the Broncos' loss to the Pats this weekend, and the Raiders failing to capitalize on last-second drive against the Lions, while the Chargers stepped up and crushed the AFC-North leading Ravens, and even the Chiefs sneaking a win against the heretofore undefeated Packers, things just got a whole lot narrower over there with two games still to play. Denver is still one game up with 2 winnable games left to play -- at Buffalo and at home against Romeo Crennel's rejuvenated Chiefs -- while, just one game behind at 7-7, Oakland (at Kansas City, and home vs. the Chargers) can obviously take care of its two closest rivals head-to-head, and San Diego faces the toughest path (at Detroit, and at Oakland) to finish the season. Even the Chiefs bringing up the rear still have games left against the Raiders at home and then at Denver to finish the regular season off, so what happens in that division is very much up in the air, especially if the Tebow magic fails to come back next week against a finished Bills squad.

Goodbye, Andy Reid

Goodbye, Andy Reid.

It's been a good run. A great run, in fact, in a lot of ways. Except the ones that *really* matter. But it really has been a fun 11 years here in Philly, especially compared to some of the schmike we had as head coaches during the 80s and 90s. And I truly have little doubt that at your next team (my money is on San Diego at the moment), you will have loads more regular season success.

I want to be clear about one thing as you leave this team following the unmitigated disaster that is the 2011 Philadelphia Eagles regular season. Obviously, a lot of the blame for this putrid year falls on the front office’s shoulders, for bringing in guys like Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie and Nnamdi Asomugha, neither one of which, it is now clear, can cover their way out of a paper bag. And for not paying speedy wideout DeSean Jackson what he deserved coming into this season, and bringing in a guy like Asomugha at 25 times DeSean’s salary instead. How the front office could have expected DeSean to react, other than exactly the way he has, under those circumstances, is patently ludicrous. Those were hideous moves, obvious wrong moves and I don’t see how people can much blame you, Andy, for that stuff.

But that said, everything else wrong with this team in 2011 pretty much falls squarely on your shoulders. Lets put aside for a minute the fact that you have never won the big game in your life, despite being the #1 seed in the NFC three times in your 11-year tenure, and despite losing the NFC Championship twice at home to inferior teams. On a week in, week out basis, your clock management is laughably bad, and always has been. The use of time outs on this team under your tenure has been enough to make anyone physically ill, and clearly, you have been the major contributor to that. The 2011 season has, sadly, been no exception to this rule.

Similarly, the way you manage unhappy players should be the stuff of legends by now. DeSean was 100% right to be pissed off coming into this season, and after not getting a deal as the season wore on while guys like Chris Johnson did finally get their money and get pizznaid. But come on, Andy, with the benching and the sitting DeSean out for drives, entire halves of games, etc. Andy, you are just too much of a hardass to be able to deal effectively with today’s modern day NFL player, especially the prima donnas that populate the wide receiver position in today's game. We’ve lost parts of like four separate seasons now during your 11-year regime as head coach because of disgruntled wideouts whom you simply have no clue how to handle, while most other coaches in the NFL seem to have figured out how to coexist so much better than you have. Why is it Philadelphia that always seems to have these huge throwdowns between you and the wide receivers, while almost nowhere else do things ever seem to spiral this badly out of control, and result in multi-game benchings, kickings off of the team entirely, etc.?

DeSean will probably still make his money when he signs with the Giants in a few months, albeit probably a little less than what he should have been paid this year by the Eagles after what has been a pretty well disastrous 2011 for him as well as for this team. The Eagles did DeSean wrong, over and over and over again this year. Including you, Coach Reid, not insisting that offensive coordinator Marty Mohrenweig integrate DeSean better into the offense this year. Over the past couple of seasons, DeSean was *constantly* being targeted downfield, at the beginning of games and all the way through to the end, and that strategy undeniably worked very well for the Eagles. This season, however, right from the getgo, all of sudden DeSean just hasn’t been targeted downfield even close to as much, and our offense has suffered greatly as a result. Who (other than the Denver Broncos, obviously) has a good offense in today's NFL without any real downfield threat in this league? It’s an absolute joke, and you, Andy Reid, are about 80% at fault for that. DeSean has literally been targeted around 33% as much as he was last season, all while the team's offense has downright sputtered in many of its games despite being the top 1 or 2 most prolific offense in the league in 2010. How you, as the head coach of this team, could just stand by while this has occurred week after week after week this year is beyond me, and beyond any of us.

And lets don’t even expound on what has happened to the team's defense under your watch, especially here in 2011. Promoting this idiot Luis Castillo -- our former offensive line coach -- to Defensive Coordinator this past offseason has got to be the single stupidest decision made in the NFL by any team or any head coach in at least a year, maybe as much as a decade. I mean, who ever promotes an o-line coach to be a defensive coordinator on a team that struggled mightily on defense in the past season, and then on top of that who also added a number of big-name personnel through free agent signings and trades in the offseason to boot? Who does that? Who else ever thinks that could work in this league? Completely foreseeably, Castillo has been an abject failure, a complete and total bomb, as D-Coordinator, and that one falls 100% on you as the head coach of this team. Not 66%, not 80%, but 100% squarely on you and you alone. And to compound things, you have just stood by and let Castillo suck it up worse and worse and worse all season long, doing nothing to change things up and nothing to get more involved in calling the plays on defense. And my god, could our corners other than Asante Samuel be any worse? Possibly??? Rodgers-Cromartie and Asomugha have been the single worst cornerback tandem in as long as I can remember in the NFL, just two totally worthless players who cannot cover anybody, ever. Asomugha himself has probably been among the bottom two or three starting players in the NFL this season, either getting beat, or committing a blatant hold or pass interference because hes about to give up a touchdown what, 10 different times this year? And yet you do nothing. And this isn't even mentioning the tackling in general on this team, which has been atrocious ever since the very first play from scrimmage against the Eagles this season, when the Rams' Steven Jackson ran for a 54-yard score from behind midfield. Who knew what a harbinger of things to come that one play would be for the 2011 Eagles defense? Well, Andy, your hand-picked guy has led the way with this defense, starting with a couple of the team's biggest offseason pickups, and it has just gone from unthinkable to hideous to putrid as the season has worn on. Last Thursday's 31 points given up to the laughable Seahawks with my dead grandma at quarterback was just the latest in a season full of embarrassments on the defensive side of the ball, and all the while, you have done nothing, nothing at all, to improve things or shake things up. You have simply stood by and fiddled while the Eagles' season burned to ashes.

And lastly, while we're on the topic of Week 13's Seahawks loss, the way this Eagles team has just given up here these past couple of weeks, it is just inexcusable and, once again, absolutely, positively all on your shoulders as the head coach. There is just nobody else to blame for the complete and total lack of heart on this team, none. As far as im concerned, we could take Mike Vick, LeSean Mccoy, Brent Celek and Alex Cooper on offense, and Trent Cole and Jason Babin along with Asante Samuel on defense, and throw every single other player on the team out and start over. At first it was just DeSean Jackson throwing in the towel on the season out of frustration and anger, but now, in a very similar story during your 11 years leading the team in Philadelphia, it has infected the whole team just like it did with TO –- the Eagles are all now a bunch of non-caring losers on this team, plain and simple.

In summary, I blame you as our head coach about 75% overall for the problems of this year’s Philadelphia Eagles. Which, after 11 years of consistently blowing clock management in-game and of rock-solid consistency in stepping down in the big spots, it is clearly time for you to move on. We need to bring in someone new to head this team in 2012, someone with a fresh face for these players, and for these fans who so clearly deserve better. Someone who will not get embarrassed in almost every game by letting the clock run out before we can kick field goals, someone whose players are not so ill-prepared that they are constantly wasting much-needed timeouts before the time when we actually need them. Someone who, while being a disciplinarian, understands far better than you do how to coexist with the ridiculous personas and out-of-control mindsets that, like it or not, now populate all professional sports in this country, with football being absolutely no exception whatsoever.

I want to say again that I truly am thankful for what has been a solid 11 year run in Philadelphia. Believe me when I say, I honestly do not expect to bring in another head coach who will find a way to win five NFC Easts in 11 years. That's never happened before here, and it probably never will again. But like mostly all other Philadelphia Eagles fans at this point in time, I am way beyond the point where I would trade five division titles in 11 years, all for just one Superbowl victory. In a split second. And although I have little doubt that you will take the Chargers, who have long suffered under the hand of the legal idiot known as Norv Turner in San Diego, or some other similar team, and in just a season or two turn them into an 10-6, 11-5 or better type of team. When it comes to regular seasons, you have proven yourself to me beyond a doubt, and I don't doubt that you will have many successes in the regular season to come, nor that you will walk right back into a head coaching job should you so desire within weeks of your firing by the Eagles after this disastrous regular season comes to a close. But the fans of Philadelphia, which despite the recent success of the Phillies, has always been a football town first and foremost, deserve better than you. We deserve better than to go into every season just waiting for the implosion between you and our star player, and always knowing that no matter how good we perform in the regular season, the playoffs are always looming right around the corner, where we know going in we are going to come up just short, and get out-coached when it counts the most.

Give me Bill Cowher. Give me Jeff Fisher. For Christ's sake, go and find a way to bring Jon Gruden back here where he was the O-Coordinator many years ago and got his start before finding his way to the Monday Night Football booth. But most of all, just give me some hope. At this point, now that this disastrous regular season is more than 3/4 gone, Eagles fans just want hope for a championship more than anything else, and you, Andy Reid, are simply not the guy who can bring us back that hope.

Happy Trails, Andy. I will always think fondly of your 11 years here. And when we do finally host that parade down Broad Street with the Superbowl trophy floating by with our name on it, I will think back to the moment of your firing, with a smile.

NFL -- Second Quarter Update

Although we're technically not quite through the halfway point for many of the teams in the NFL due to bye weeks, I figure we are close enough for me to get my thoughts about the state of the league down "on paper" here now. Of course a lot has gone on as usual in the No Fun League, but here are some of my thoughts that maybe go just beyond the normal stuff you'll hear about and read about at all the usual sites.

Lions wideout Calvin Johnson has the same pompous streak in him as the Eagles' DeSean Jackson. This is pomp and circumstance drives these guys to be among the best performers and the greatest deliverers of big plays at their positions. But it is also the same pomp and circumstance that leads Calvin Johnson to repeatedly "pull a DeSean" and taunt the opposing team on many of his big touchdown plays. Calvin, if you keep stopping at the 1-yard line and waiting for your opponents to nearly tag you before taking it into the paint, you're eventually going to blow a big score in a huge spot. Just ask DeSean how that feels, and how his coach reacts when it happens.

Tim Tebow sucks. This was already obvious, but I just don't understand what his supporters are looking at after this most recent effort in Week 8. You can give the guy credit for last week's sick comeback win over the hapless Dolphins, but to do so you have to flat ignore the fact that Tebow was 4 for 14 for 40 total yards passing through 56 minutes of that game, and the needed an unbelievable fumble by Dolphins qb Matt Moore to even have a chance to come back like they did. Against the single worst team in the NFL. You may love God, you may love the Florida Gators, but you can't do shiat to change the fact that Tim Tebow is an abject waste of space behind center. After Week 8's 18-for-39 performance for 172 yards, one touchdown, one pick-6, and a fumble leading to a score as well, plus 7 sacks, we're now looking at a guy whose accuracy (47% thus far this year) is among the worst you'll ever see of any player allowed to start in this league. I know it looked a couple of weeks ago like John Fox had no choice but to give Tebow the rest of the 2011 regular season to prove himself one way or the other, but this guy is so foul at the quarterback position that I just don't see how Fox can feel secure in his own job if he keeps putting Tebow out there much longer.

And speaking of dicksuckitty quarterbacks, how the hell is nobody even talking about how awful Kevin Kolb has been so far this year for the Cardinals? After being traded to the Cardinals by the Eagles in the 2010-2011 offseason in exchange for cornerback Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie plus a 2nd-round pick in 2012, and heading to a team with former NFL best wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald perennially highly productive tight end Todd Heap among his targets, Kolb has put up a paltry 57% completion percentage so far in 2011, to go along with 7 touchdowns, 7 interceptions, and five fumbles to boot. So far Kolb has done more to justify a benching than he has to explain why he was worth even a single late-round draft pick, let alone a 2nd-rounder plus an established NFL player. And pretty soon people aren't going to be able to ignore it any longer -- and I don't care how white Kolb's skin is.

Jacksonville Jaguars rookie quarterback Blaine Gabbert is also probably worth mentioning while we're on the topic of hapless hurlers in the NFL. I know he is a rookie so I don't want to write his ass off after just six games, but in addition to perhaps the league's worst mullet, Gabbert has posted a 69-for-143 throw record for a putrid completion percentage of 48% -- including two games this month with an under 40% figure -- with just four touchdowns and two picks for a qb rating of 69.4. And believe me, if you've actually sat and watched him play over his six real chances so far this year, Gabbert hasn't even been close to that good. This league is full of quarterbacks who were flat-out hideous in their rookie seasons but who ended up being great NFL stars, but even most of those qbs were more productive than this right from the getgo, so there might be some cause for concern here.

The Cincinnati Bungles might actually be not-horrible this year! After this weekend's blowout of the shitty Seahawks, the Bungles are 3-1 on the road, and the GM made the best move in the past decade-plus for this franchise by duping the crap out of the Raiders into getting a 1st- and a 2nd-round draft pick in exchange for interception machine Carson Palmer earlier this month. The Bungles certainly do not hold a candle to the class teams in the AFC this year, but at 5-2 as we near the halfway point of the season, it may be time to stop discussing this team like we have every other year of the past, what? 15? 20?

The San Francisco 49ers are 6-1, despite ranking in 31st place out of 32 teams in passing, and despite giving up passing yards to opposing quarterbacks more readily or worse than three-quarters of the teams in the league today. What's the 49ers' secret? Fabulous coaching from rookie head coach Jim Harbaugh, playing in without a doubt the worst division of my entire lifetime, and, most of all, controlling the run on both sides of the ball. Rejuvenated back Frank Gore headlines the NFL's 6th-best rushing attack through seven games here in 2011, and meanwhile the team is allowing the 2nd-fewest rush yards per game at just under 75 yards on the ground. Like the Bungles in the AFC, the Niners have no prayer whatsoever of holding up against the truly great teams in the NFC -- in particular with a guy like Alex Smith taking the snaps -- but Harbaugh has done in half a season what many (myself included) expected former coach Mike Singletary to do but could not even approach doing in a couple of seasons at the helm in San Fran.

The Washington Redskins are absolute shit. You had to know this even after the team started the season 2-0, but my god, is there honestly any worse franchise in all of football today? I mean, this team has only made the playoffs three times since 1993. Holy shit, just think about that. In contrast, the division rival Eagles have appeared in the postseason 9 out of the last 11 seasons, the Cowboys have been there in 11 of the past 20 seasons, and the Giants have been in the postseason in 8 of the last 16 years. In the Redskins' last three games, runningback Ryan Torain has led the team in rushing with an unbelievable 22 yards in Week 6, and now 14 yards in the team's Week 8 crushing at the hands of the Buffalo Bills. 14 yards as your leading rusher, and it's not even an outlier? Is that stat even serious? Meanwhile, current starting quarterback John Beck is just the latest in an amazingly long line of consecutively shitty qbs, following up on Rex Grossman, a worthlessly old Donovan McNabb, Jason Campbell, Todd Collins, Mark Brunell, Patrick Ramsey, Tim Hasselbeck, Shane Matthews, Danny Wuerffel, Tony Banks and Jeff George, which is every hurler to start a game for the Skins since the 2001 season. This team is going nowhere fast and at this point has once again assumed their rightful position at the bottom of the NFC East, a place Daniel Snyder must be getting very used to since taking over the team in 1999 as his team has recorded only two finishes better than 3rd place in the division since 2000.

Staying in the NFC East for a moment, Eli Manning is quietly having a pretty solid season for the Giants, following up on his worst season as a starter in 2010 for the Giants with an efficient and productive effort consisting of a very respectable 63% completion percentage and 1778 yards over 7 games so far this year. Very importantly, Manning has cut down on his 25 interceptions from 2010, tossing up only 5 INTs thus far through 7 games in 2011 to go along with 11 touchdowns. Although the Giants are sitting pretty right now at 5-2 with a full 2-game lead in the NFC East, we're about to learn just how much Manning has cleaned up his act since 2010 as the team's schedule is about to get a lot tougher, with its next six games featuring matchups at 6-2 New England, at 6-1 San Francisco, vs. an upstart Eagles team, at 6-2 New Orleans, vs. the 8-0 Packers, and then at the currently 3-4 but always tough divisional rival Cowboys. Given that the Giants have not played consistently well so far in 2011, it's a safe bet that the NFC East will look a lot different a month and a half from now than it does today nearing the midway point.

Watching Tony Romo lead the Cowboys on two long drives only once the game had become 34-0 with 11 minutes to go on Sunday night against the Eagles reminded me just how much this guy loves to pad his stats with worthless yards and touchdowns late in games. For a guy with lifetime 4th-quarter stats as "good" as Romo's, he has got to be one of the least clutch players in the NFL today, very possibly the literal worst, and this is a trend that looks to me only to be getting worse here in 2011. And my god, will somebody please find someone for the Cowboys to stick at center who knows how to snap a ball to the quarterback, at least a little bit? I can say with confidence that I've never seen during my lifetime anyone consistently make shitty snaps for such a simple play, and retain his job week in and week out.

Which brings me to my beloved Eagles. The Eagles took a big step towards pushing for the NFL East crown this year after their horrid 1-4 start to the 2011 regular season, with Sunday night's absolute blowout defeat of the hated Dallas Cowboys at home in every single aspect of the game lifting the Eagles to 3-4 and a tie for second place in the East through nearly half of the 2011 regular season. With the Packers, Niners and Saints looking like near-locks to win their respective divisions, and with the Bears, Lions, Buccaneers and Falcons all ahead of the Eagles (plus the Cowboys still tied) through Week 8 of the year, the Eagles are likely going to need to win the East to have any real shot of playing in the postseason this year, but this week's win over the Cowboys combined with the Redskins' loss at Buffalo this week positions the Eagles at 3-4 within striking distance of the Giants, with a bunch of winnable games coming up in the second half of the schedule, including games at home against the Bears, Cardinals and Redskins, and road matchups with the Giants, Seattle and Miami, in a division where 9 wins might just be able to take it in a tiebreaker. Star runningback LeSean McCoy just better learn how to hold the ball, though, as he is bound to lose some game-crushing fumbles in the near future if he doesn't stop cupping the ball loosely against his right wrist while nearly fully extending his arm while running for 100+ yards in almost every game.

NFL Thoughts -- Week 3

What a wild week in the NFL.

I'm not sure which is the most embarrassing aspect of the start of the 2011 Philadelphia Eagles regular season:

First, there's the o-line's complete inability to prevent quarterback Mike Vick from sustaining a different and serious injury every week of the season. I mean, I know this guy runs around like a maniac and I know he's kinda thin to be putting himself in some of the situations that he does, but let's face it: the Eagles' protection of the qb and the pocket has been laughable for many, many years.

Secondly, there is the team's woeful lack of preparedness for Vick's missing games, the most obvious outcome imaginable to most mere fans but yet somehow totally unforeseen by the Eagles brass, who for the second straight week have sent Mike "the Statue" Kafka out to the field to protect a lead. And then watched that lead quickly slip away as the Eagles offense -- which probably would be more productive if run by Franz Kafka than Mike Kafka -- cannot keep the opposition off the field for more than a minute or two of game time when it counts. The team went and signed Vince Young in the offseason to be Vick's backup, but where the shite is he? Get his ass on the field or get me a more viable option than Kafka for now 1/8 of our season, and counting as Mike Vick sustained a broken right (non-throwing) hand in the second half of this week's game against the Giants.

And then not to be outdone, let's not forget the Eagles' vaunted "dream team" pass defense. You remember, that incredible, historical collection of all-time great cornerbacks in Asante Samuel, Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie and Free-Agent-of-the-Year signing Nnamdi Asomugha, right? Well, how's eight passing touchdowns allowed in the past two games sound to you? Asomugha has convinced me already in several instances how athletic he is. Now he needs to show me that he can, you know, stop the people he's covering from scoring touchdowns. Until that starts happening, and until the team can find a way to protect Mike Vick, it's looking like it could be a long season in Philadelphia.

Elsewhere, although I may not be 100% sold on some of the real upstart teams so far through three games, I think we can start to make some credible generalizations about some of the teams expected to be among the league's best and the league's worst. For example, the Cheatriots are obviously a great team, but that defense just plain sucks. Again. It's been some years since there was a strong unit playing on that side of the ball at Gillette stadium, and this year certainly will not see an end to that streak. The Cheats are going to win a lot of games in the regular season like always, but they can't stop anybody, period, right now giving up by far the most yards in the NFL, more than 10% more than even the 31st place team defense in the NFL, and some 180% more than the current defensive yardage leaders in the Dallas Cowboys.

Speaking of teams with surprisingly not-good defenses, let's not forget about my Eagles -- in particularly, surprisingly, against the pass -- and also, what about those J-E-T-S Jets Jets Jets? Currently slated around the middle of the pack in yards allowed through three games (against Dallas, the Jaguars, and the Raiders, two of those games at home), the Jets have been particularly vulnerable to the run, where they currently reside in 31st out of 32 teams in rush defense thus far through three games of the season, and the team continues not to look good, even when it wins big. We're going to find out real quick whether the Jets are improved from last year and ready for another playoff run, as the team's next six games are at Baltimore, at New England, vs. Miami, vs. San Diego, at Buffalo and vs. New England, which I would venture to say the team would go 1-5 in if they play equally as good as they have thus far in three games in 2011.

And let's turn our attention briefly to the reigning superbowl champions in Green Bay, who are happy at 3-0 right now but whose defense is looking downright porous in their own right. Through three games (one against offensive juggernaut New Orleans, but the other two against the much more tame Panthers and the Bears), the Pack has ceded the 4th most yards in the NFL, including allowing 1078 yards through the air, which is 15% above the 3rd-worst pass defense and just a couple of first downs behind the hapless Cheatriots in this department. The Packers have allowed the 10th most points scored in the league thus far, resulting in nearly 25 points allowed per game, which will still win the Packers a lot of games this season but which is not close to where this team should be or wants to be.

And I also think the Falcons are worth mentioning, who mostly everybody had picked for another post-season birth this year but who so far are damn lucky to be 1-2 through three games in 2011. If Mike Vick doesn't go down with a concussion and leave the game in the thoroughly unprepared hands of Eagles' third-stringer Mike Kafka in Week 2, the Eagles' 10-point 4th quarter lead at Atlanta almost surely holds and that team is looking at 0-3 right now. And yet still the team has lost both of its road games so far, both to teams they were expected to beat in the Bears and now most recently the Buccaneers. The Falcons have currently given up the 8th most points in the NFL through three games, and the passing offense is currently sitting in 18th in the NFL, and the rushing offense at 19th, both of which were expected to be well above average on the season. The Falcons better shape things up in a hurry or they might be looking at Detroit taking away their playoff spot right quick in 2011.

And on the other side of the coin, like I said I may not be totally sold on the Bills' greatness overall just yet, but the offense in Buffalo is certainly clicking on all cylinders to start the new season. The team is currently rushing for the fourth most yards in the NFL, while passing for the 11th most for a combination of gaining the 3rd most yards in the league (431 per game) and leading to the single highest-scoring team in the league at 37.7 points per game through three efforts thus far this year. While the first defeat of the Chiefs doesn't look like much, the Week 2 win over the Raiders is already looking all the more impressive for the Bills, and the way they managed to get Tom Brady to make mistake after mistake this past weekend says it all about where this team is at at this point in the young season.

And no discussion of the year's big positive stories so far in the NFL would be complete without mentioning the Detroit Lions, who are so obviously for real that I don't think you could find anyone who is actually watching these games who would ever disagree at this point. The team has probably the best defensive line in football, and although they have not been all that in defending against the pass, the overall team defense has given up just 46 points in three games, good for fourth-best in the league thus far in the young season. And let's not forget that young, high-powered passing offense that has scored the fourth-most points per game so far this season while seeing young quarterback Matthew Stafford produce to the tune of a 110.7 overall qb rating through three games. Things are shaping up for quite a race in the NFC North in 2011.

2011 NFL Post-Season Predictions

Finally this past weekend I had time to put the finishing touches on this post, which for the record was written over the couple of weeks leading up to the start of the 2011 NFL regular season. And what a wild Week 1 it was, which will quickly become apparent when you see some of my picks for the postseason this year in the NFL.

NFC East: Eagles
NFC North: Packers
NFC South: Saints
NFC West: Cardinals

NFC Wildcard: Cowboys, Bears

NFC Almost's: Falcons, Lions, Rams

AFC East: Cheatriots
AFC North: Steelers
AFC South: Texans
AFC West: Chargers

AFC Wildcard: Jets, Ravens

AFC Almost's: Chiefs

So, that is a total of four new playoff teams I am predicting in 2011, two in the NFC (Cardinals and Cowboys, replacing the Seahawks and the Falcons), and two in the AFC (Texans and Chargers, replacing the Colts and the Chiefs). Four out of twelve ain't bad, but over the recent past that's still not as much annual turnover as the NFL has seen in its slate of post-season participants, so there are likely some more surprises to come this year. I just think the Seahawks have fallen behind both the Rams and the Cardinals given the moves of this past offseason, and for some reason I decided to hitch my prediction this offseason to Tony Romo, the greatest step-down-in-the-clutch artist in the NFL today, over Matty "Ice" Ryan. Pure. Genius. And in the AFC, I am expecting the Chiefs to impress again this year but they are going to have trouble winning their division again due to a much harder schedule and not being overlooked by their opponents this year, while the Colts are in my mind finished without Peyton Manning at the helm.

I'm not typically one for making detailed post-season predictions for later rounds here without even knowing who is playing who, who is injured, etc. But I will say that I think the Cheatriots look once again to be the class of the AFC if they stay healthy and are likely to show up in the superbowl again this year, while the picture in the NFC is a bit murkier, between the Eagles and the Packers. I'll take the Packers over the Cheatriots in the superbowl in a repeat for Green Bay. Since, just like the Red Sox over the Dirty Decade in Boston, the Cheatriots have never won a damn thing since they haven't been allowed to cheat.

NFL Is Back and Just Like Before

Although I still have not posted my completed set of predictions for this year's twelve NFL playoff teams -- that should definitely be done within the next day or two -- I just had to mention a couple of things I noticed from the Week 1 games. It's amazing really, how much the more things change, the more they stay the same in a lot of ways, and the beginning to the 2011 NFL regular season so far rang very similar in a lot of ways to what we saw in 2010 in corresponding situations.

For starters, the Saints-Packers game last Thursday to start the 2011 NFL regular season, if that was not a continuation of 2010, I don't know what is -- in particular for Aaron Rodgers and the Packers offense. But both quarterbacks and both offenses, really -- Rodgers went an extremely efficient 27 for 35 for 312 yards, 3 touchdowns and no picks, and Saints qb Drew Brees chipped in at 32 for 49 for 419 yards, also with 3 touchdowns and no interceptions. If those two teams had played at the end of the 2010 regular season, we probably would have seen the exact same thing, with more or less the exact same outcome. But when Aaron Rodgers and Drew Brees battle it out to a 132.1 and 112.5 qb rating, respectively, I'm definitely getting shades of last year all over again.

I should also mention along these same lines that that entire Cowboys / Jets game last night was like one big massive glitch in the matrix deja vu. I mean, the Jets pretty much got outplayed from start to finish. The Jets defense simply could not come up with the big play when they needed it through 58 minutes in the field, and they allowed the opposing offense to move the ball enough to grab and maintain a fairly comfortable lead. Jets qb Mark Sanchez made a couple of crucial mistakes and led the team on a couple of inept drives in huge spots, including late in the 4th quarter when the game should have been by all rights over. But then suddenly it's a ridiculously bad play leading to a touchdown runback for the Jets' defense late in the game, and then the opposition completely collapses again on offense in an unthinkable, Brett Favreian moment for Tony Romo. Even that pick by Romo, over to the sidelines, in the final minute of a game, with the game tied so that the only thing Romo cannot do is throw an interception, haven't we seen that exact thing not all that long ago our of the exact same quarterback in Romo, in that exact same, tie-game-final-minutes-drive spot? I definitely remember it, I think against the Giants a couple of seasons ago on a national game. So the Jets pull out a victory after sucking it up pretty much on both sides of the ball for 98% of the game, and Tony Romo steps down hugely and ridiculously in the biggest moment of the game. Sound familiar?

The Bears were another team that basically picked right up here in 2001 where they left off in 2010. As I wrote about last week, if there was ever a team with low expectations after making the NFC Championship game the year before, and basically losing nobody of real significance in the offseason, it is this year's Chicago Bears. And yet, despite once again being picked against by basically everybody this week with the Falcons coming to town -- just like we saw everyone doing last year whenever the Bears played in a big game, over and over again -- Jay Cutler did the same thing he did over and over again in 2010 that led his team to the conference finals in the first place -- he played great. Just as I felt watching Atlanta get drubbed out of the postseason at home by the Packers in the first round of the playoffs last year, it was clear right from the getgo that the Falcons were outmatched this weekend, and just like last year, it was Brain Urlacher and the Bears' ferocious defense making the big plays to make sure the team held on for the big victory.

Even the Eagles basically showed up in St. Louis for the start of the 2011 regular season the same way they played through most of 2010. Philadelphia fell behind early after the defense gave up a gaping hole and a nearly 50-yard run on the very first defensive play from scrimmage on the season -- with the big play being a constant problem for the Eagles; defense all through 2010 including especially in the postseason against the Packers -- but then the Eagles turned it on and basically blew out the Rams from then on. Michael Vick threw for 187 yards with two touchdowns and no interceptions -- recall Vick's amazing touchdown to interception ratio in 2010 -- and Vick chipped in with 98 yards rushing as well on the day, joining with 122 yards on the ground and two total touchdowns from runningback LeSean McCoy, and 6 catches for 102 yards and a score from star wideout DeSean Jackson to create a three-headed onslaught on offense that no team could withstand.

And speaking of the Eagles, then there was Donovan McNabb, the aging, too-old-for-the-league veteran. D-Mac's line on the day with his new team in Minnesota? 7 for 15, for 39 yards, one touchdown and one pick, for a passer rating of 47.9. And this guy was behind center for every offensive snap for his team on the day, which mustered a total output of 28 yards in the air. 28 yards passing, with McNabb at the helm all the way through. This is like Washington from 2010 all over again for Donny Mac, isn't it? Only this time, we might need to rename the JaMarcus Russell award if things don't pick up in what could be a looong year for McNabb and the Vikings.

Of course, there were a few areas where things were completely different from 2010 as well, including the bitter blowout of the colts at the hands of the Oilers, and the Bills absolutely schmeistering Todd Haley and the Kansas City Chiefs. I was also surprisingly impressed by Rex Grossman and the Redskins, who took it to the New York Giants and called into question just how good the men in blue will be in the NFC East during 2011, what is likely to be head coach Tom Coughlin's last season in charge in the Big Apple. But for me, it was more the similarities than the differences that stood out about the Week 1 action this year as compared to my recent memories of a lot of these teams and a lot of the players making the big plays for them.

2010 Philadelphia Eagles in Review

Well, it was another great regular season for Andy Reid and the Philadelphia Eagles.

With the emphasis on the word "regular".

Once again, Andy Reid pulled a rabbit out of a hat in the 2010 regular season, in a year in which he traded away his longtime starting quarterback -- within the division no less, for nothing but a couple of middle-round draft picks -- and then saw his new Quarterback of the Future go down with an injury in the first half of the first game of the season this year. Fastg forward four months, though, and the Eagles had finished the year 10-6, not trying or playing most of the starters in the meaningless last game of the season as it is, and claiming the team's first NFC East title in four years, but the sixth divisional crown in Andy Reid's 12-year tenure as the head man in Philadelphia (2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2010). Six titles in 12 years in the toughest division in football is an amazing feat if you think about it, and the job Reid did in the regular season this year given the way things started off is right up there with the best performances of his head coaching career the way I see it.

There were a couple of specific highlights to the 2010 regular season in Philadelphia. First and foremost of course is Mike Vick, whose resurgence became clear to all this year as he put up 3000 yards, a 62% completion percentage, 21 touchdowns and just 6 interceptions over just 12 games. If you extend that out to a full season, it looks like a 4000-yard year with 28 touchdowns and fewer than 10 interceptions. It was a great year for Vick, who came back from the depths to become in my view the second-best quarterback in the league all things considered. Sure a guy like Manning is a better pure thrower, Phillip Rivers was more productive through the air, but those guys just did not strap their teams on their back and lead them to victory quite like Mike Vick did in 2010. Combined with all that passing production, Vick also rushed for 676 yards in those 12 games, and tacked on another nine touchdowns on the ground. Again, you extend these figures out to a full season, and Vick would be looking at over 4000 yards passing, 900 more yards rushing, 28 passing touchdowns, 8 inteceptions, and 12 rushing touchdowns on top. 4900 yards of production plus 40 touchdowns on the season, and only 8 picks. Of course it's never as easy as just extrapolating from 12 games to 16, and certainly Vick's numbers trailed off a bit as the season wore to an end, but the point is, this was a truly remarkable season for Mike Vick, one that many people don't seem to grasp. But you wonder why he's going to finish in second in the league's MVP voting, over guys like Manning and Rivers whose pure passing numbers exceeded Vick's own? Those total production numbers above are why. Rivers' final 2010 numbers were a nearly identical 101 passer rating, 4700 yards passing, 52 yards rushing, 30 total touchdowns (all passing), 13 INTs, and his team was inconsistent and missed the playoffs, going 8-8 overall. Rivers is an awesome quarterback, but Vick's year was better when you look at everything as a whole. And Manning's 2010 numbers tell a similar story: Qb rating of 91.8, 4700 yards passing and just 18 yards and zero td's on the ground, 33 passing touchdowns, and 17 costly interceptions, and his team also had a down year just like the Chargers. You give me the choice, and I'll take Vick's season over either of those guys hands down. Vick is not close to Tom Brady (111 QB rating, 3600 yards, 37 touchdowns -- one of them rushing -- and just 4 interceptions, in 16 games), but otherwise, Vick's performance in 2010 was the highlight of the Eagles' season bar none, and the guy is hands-down deserving of 2nd place in the MVP voting based on the above.

The other extreme highlight of the Eagles' 2010 season -- unfortunately the high point for the year for the Iggles -- was the incredible comeback against the hated Giants in Week 15. Down 31-10 with under 8 minutes to go in the game, Mike Vick not only led the Eagles to tie the game over about six minutes of play with three beautiful drives, but the team even managed to win in regulation when DeSean Jackson took the final-seconds punt from the Giants back 60-some yards for the last-second touchdown and a 38-31 victory in what turned out to be the single biggest game of either team's regular season. As exciting as that game was itself, and the amazing comeback and even more amazing last-second runback, the reason this proved to be such a big highlight for the Eagles' regular season -- other than how poorly we performed in the post-season -- was that this game proved to utterly crush the spirit of the Giants and completely ruin what was at that point on its way to looking like a great year for New York. Coming in to that game, the Giants were 9-4, looking in good shape to win the East with the game being at their home stadium in New Jersey York, and easily in position to nab the first wildcard spot as they were the only team not from Atlanta with fewer than five losses on the season at the time. But after DeSean Jackson ran back that touchdown to complete the miraculous, inexplicable comeback in Week 13, the next week saw the Giants face off against the Packers -- the team that would go on to steal the Giants' playoff spot, which they knew coming in to that game -- and the Giants just laid down like girls, giving up 45 points and getting absolutely crushed by the superior Green Bay squad on the road. From there the season was suddenly over, and even a final-week victory over the hapless Redskins could not get the Giants back into the playoffs. So, while it's sad that the Eagles have to look to regular season games which enabled them to keep their rivals out of the post-season for their own highlights on the year, that Giants win proved to be far and away the most memorable single moment of the year for Philadelphia, and is probably not something that will be forgotten for a long time to come by the fans in the city of brotherly shove.

Unfortunately, that's all the good there is to say about this team's 2010 season, and the rest of the recap of the year is pretty much all negative. It has to be mentioned that Andy Reid took another higher-seeded team and lost to a 6-seed in the playoffs this year, playing another key post-season game at home against a team he was favored to beat, and lost. It's become an annual ritual in Philadelphia since the time Reid has been here, with Reid's career post-season record now sitting at an uninspiring 10-9, especially when you consider that the team has entered the playoffs as a division winner -- and not a wildcard -- in six of Reid's nine years in the post-season. In 2002 the team lost to the Buccaneers at home as the higher seeded team in the NFC Championship, a feat Reid equalled in 2003 at home against the Carolina Panthers. In 2008 the Eagles once again lost to a team they were favored to beat, falling to the Arizona Cardinals in the NFC Championship game on the Cards' way to a tough Superbowl loss to the Steelers, and now here again in 2010, the loss to the packers as a 3-point favorite marks the fourth time in six playoff runs that Reid's Eagles teams have ended the season by losing to a team deemed inferior by the guys who are paid to really know such things. There was a lot of talk this year about how great this Packers team is, but come on now. The Pack had to scramble their way to a 10-6 record on the year, they had absolutely zero running game to speak of until they ran into the Eagles' porous defense in the playoffs (more on that in a minute), and this is a team that lost at Detroit 7-3 in an absolutely crucial game that team knew they needed to win in Week 14. But the Eagles sure made the team look good on Sunday night, didn't they? It's a story that Eagles fans just know all too well with Andy Reid's team at this point, and as long as Reid keeps performing in the regular season, it seems there is just never going to be an end to it in Philly.

And about that playoff game the other day for a minute, it's actually pretty amazing if you watched the game that the Eagles were in position to win it in the end. I mean, I watched every snap and it felt to me like the Eagles pretty much got beat down on, but look at what really happened. Philly lost by five points, 21-16, and were driving and within the Packers' 40-yard line in the final minute to try to pick up a late touchdown for the victory. And think about what happened in the game to get the teams to that point. For starters, idiot Eagles kicker David Akers, after a pretty fabulous regular season inj 2010, missed a barely-forgivable 41-yard field goal into the wind in the first quarter, but then compounded his epic failure by missing a 34-yarder in the fourth quarter with the wind at his back that I could have probably put through the uprights without too much trouble. Let's just chuck that first miss, which was a tougher kick than many people realize with the wind swirling as it was in that direction early in the game, but if Akers had just not choked and made the 34-yarder, then the Eagles would have been down 21-19, and with almost a full minute left and already inside the Packers' 40 at the end of the game, the Eagles would have had an easy field goal kick for Akers to win the matchup and advance. So even despite how poorly the Eagles played overall in the game, I would be remiss if I did not mention that those two missed field goals -- neither of them longer than 41 yards -- would have given the Eagles the outright victory in points scored at 22-21, and getting back even just the shorter, easier of the two kicks would have put the Eagles in position where they would have won the game 22-21 anyways in the final minutes, as Mike Vick would never have even considered throwing his ill-advised pass that got intercepted in the final seconds since he would have had no need whatsoever to even look at the end zone, instead of knowing that he needed a touchdown to win. Taking it a step further than that even, if Eagles' tight end Brent Celek does not idiotically step out of bounds before Mike Vick threw him the ball in the Eagles' two-point conversion after scoring their fourth-quarter touchdown, meaning that his nice catch on the conversion and his skill in landing both of his feet in bounds would have counted, then even then the score would have been 21-18 on that final drive, and once again Vick would not possibly have even looked to the end zone once already in field goal range to tie that game and send it in to overtime. So, while the Eagles -- typically for the Andy Reid era -- did not play a good game at all on Sunday against the Pack in their biggest game of the season, they were nothing more than just a few freak occurrences away from tying or putting that game into overtime. And this isn't me doing the stupid woulda-coulda-shoulda thing like saying "If only Jason Avant had caught that ball" or "if only Vick had seen DeSean Jackson wide open downfield on that one play", etc. This is about a guy whose heel inadvertently stepped out of bounds before the ball was thrown and before he caught the ball and landed both of his feet in bounds, and about a kicker who missed just two field goals all season long out of 31 attempts of 41 yards or less, missing two out of three such attempts in the game in easily the worst game he has had in a few seasons in Philadelphia. If he makes either one of those kicks as he did all season long, or if Celek doesn't touch the base line of the end zone with his heel before catching that 2-point conversion in bounds, the Eagles are advancing and I'm not writing this post for another week until we let the Falcons or Bears pass and run all over us to move to the NFC Championship game.

Which leads me to my final few points about this 2010 Eagles team: even if we had beaten the Packers if these freak occurrences had not in fact occurred, this team was simply not Superbowl bound this year, as many had hypothesized about halfway through the season when Vick mania was just heating up. By the second half of the season, the Vikings (1 time) and the Giants (1.875 times) showed that they had figured out pretty clearly how to beat Mike Vick. Pressure, pressure and more pressure, take him out of his comfort zone, and make him roll to the right, and he is just not that great of a quarterback. After the Vikings blitzed Vick about 850 times in Week 15 and the Eagles made absolutely zero attempt to stop it or to provide additional protection in the backfield for Vick, and then the Packers brought a corner blitz and dropped Vick on the very first play of the Packers game, Eagles fans all threw up in their mouths a little bit. It's just so Andy Reid to be that kind of unprepared to fall victim to the exact same play that the Vikings and Giants used to neutralize Vick over 2.875 different games in the final weeks of the season, and it is really symptomatic of everything the Philly fans have come to dread about Andy Reid's teams once playoff time comes around. Once the Giants pretty much shut down Vick down for 112 minutes and 40 seconds of football, and the Vikings echoed the Giants' strategy in spades to a similar effect, a good deal of the steam was let out of this team's sails, and no good coach worth his salt was going to let a great team get beaten at home by the Eagles even if we did advance to play the truly good teams in the NFC in later rounds of the playoffs.

And one more point about the Eagles' inability to defend against the blitz. How many times have you ever seen Mike Vick read the defense at the line of scrimmage and make adjustments to get himself the protection he needs as a result? Zippo, that's exactly right. You watch Tom Brady or Peyton Manning quarterback their teams, and pretty much every single time they get to the line, they first stand up straight and look out at the defense. They look at the formation, and they look at who is leaning where, which linebackers are advancing towards the line of scrimmage, etc., and then they make adjustments. They call an audible. They tap their center and point to the guy they want him to pick up on a likely blitz. They move their runningback to the other side of their own offensive formation to be there to pick up the corner blitz. The truly smart quarterbacks assess the defense on every single play, then they adjust, and only then do they run their play, when they have changed things up adequately such that they have the confidence that they will be able to get their chosen play off in time to accomplish what their play is looking to accomplish. No, they don't get that first down or score a touchdown on every single play. But they're always going through the process of assessing and adjusting before every single play, and all the great, smart quarterbacks today do this the same way. But not Vick. I honestly do not ever recall seeing Vick point to a potential blitzer and ask his linemen to pick it up, not one single time all through the 2010 season. In fact, I'm not sure I can ever recall Vick really looking at the defense and trying to make any kind of a read at all prior to just hiking the ball and attempting to run the play that has been called. Vick just doesn't seem to have that kind of smarts, and frankly you could really see over the second half of the season this year how much that hurt him. The better the opponents you face, the more crucial it becomes to read a defense and adjust your play or at least your protection to counter what is coming at you. Vick simply does not do this, and with both him and Andy Reid being utterly powerless to adjust to the defenses on individual plays, this team was simply not going to go far in the playoffs even if they had beaten the Packers if the freak occurrences I mentioned above had not gone down.

Lastly, no recap of the Eagles' season would be complete without mentioned the team's defense. The Eagles' defense is utterly deplorable. There are just no other words to describe the shit that they string together and call a team defense. Even before our former defensive coordinator Jimmy Johnson died of cancer a couple of years ago, the pass defense had become pretty well porous, but since he passed away and was replaced with Sean McDermott, the Philly defense has pretty much been a goddam sieve. And that's probably being kind. The Eagles cannot stop anyone on defense, in particular when it counts, and you could see it against the Giants in those crucial games this year, against the Vikings early in the team's Week 16 loss this year, and most definitely against the Packers in the wildcard game this past weekend that ended the team's 2010 campaign. They put up pretty much the sickest stat imaginable during the Packers game for all the viewers to see -- during 2010, despite scoring the most points in the NFC, the Eagles gave up more points than any team that had ever reached the Superbowl in NFL history. What's worse, on the year the Eagles were also dead last in the NFL in red zone defense, allowing opposing teams to score touchdowns in 47 out of 57 appearances in the red zone, including the playoff game. How sick is that? All you have to do is make it to the 20-yard line against the Eagles, and you're basically going score, almost every single time. And Aaron Rodgers showed the world just how it works, as on each of the two occasions when they managed to get inside the Eagles' red zone, he took exactly one play to punch it in, in both cases actually to absolutely wide fucking open receivers who made it look like they were completely forgotten by the Eagles players trying to make a stop. And let's not even mention the fact that the Eagles haven't had a real pass rusher on this team since the days of Reggie White and Jerome Brown, which amazingly was an entire generation ago at this point. Mike Mammula? O M G.

If there is one lesson the Eagles need to learn from the 2010 season, other than of course than Andy Reid simply cannot help but get out-coached in the post-season, even by another moron coach like Mike McCarthy -- it's that we need to fire our defensive coordinator, and just get a whole new defensive scheme in place in Philadelphia. With Mike Vick at the helm, and with the incredible young talent the team has all over the offense between Jeremy Maclin, LeSean McCoy and DeSean Jackson, this offense is primed to be the best in the NFC for years to come. But while offense may get you to the post-season, just like everyone else we will need to have a strong defense if we expect to go far in the playoffs. It's nice to have beaten the Giants six times in a row now -- and don't get me wrong, it really is -- but it's time that this team and Andy Reid start to focus on building a team that can run deep in the playoffs, and not just win the NFC East every other year as it has during Reid's 12 years as head coach. Reid's incredible six divisional titles in this division in just twelve years at the helm is nothing at all to sneeze at, but when you're ending every one of those years by losing a game instead of winning -- most of the time to an inferior team on your home field -- then it's time to start figuring out what needs to be done to change things up and reverse that trend. Right now, that means getting an entirely new defensive scheme in place before the 2011 regular season, and working diligently with Mike Vick between now and then to teach him how to read defenses, and more importantly, how to react to them.

NFL -- Wildcard Weekend Picks

In a very strange twist of events, for the first time in as long as I can remember, it looks like all four of the lower-seeded teams in this weekend's Wilcard Round games in the NFL have a good argument that they are actually the better team in their respective matchups. I mean, obviously the defending Superbowl champion Saints are far better than the embarrassing 7-9 Seahawks, who will host the Saints on Saturday due to the NFL's playoff seeding system that puts all division winners ahead of all wildcard teams right off the bat. That same system also has the 11-5 Jets travelling to the 10-6 Colts on Saturday afternoon, although that is at least a much closer matchup where you could easily see either team finding a way to win. And in the Sunday games, it's the 12-4 Ravens visiting the 10-6 Chiefs in the early game in another matchup of a far better record travelling to a far worse record team due to the NFL's divisional structure. And then Sunday's late game is what most are viewing as the best game of the weekend, a matchup of the 10-6 Packers visiting the 10-6 Eagles, but when the two teams played heads-up in Week 1, the Packers bested the Eagles in Philadelphia, albeit with Kevin Kolb at quarterback in what seems like it was about 10,000 years ago. I'm not sure I can ever recall a situation where all four of the road teams have a good argument to actually be the superior teams, and in particular where three of the four matchups feature a team with a better record on the season going on the road to play at a team with a worse seasonal record, doubly in particular in this case with two of the matchups being a road team visiting a home team with at least two fewer wins on the year.

All that said, the Vegas lines on these games are adjusted accordingly to take into account all of the above, and the end result is four games which are all pretty much hard to pick. With that in mind, I'm going to deviate from what I did during the regular season and just force myself to make picks for all four games, and see what happens. Whether I will really bet these lines in real life remains to be seen, but unlike my regular season predictions where I pretty much only posted picks on the games I had good confidence in, I'm planning to go ahead and just make my guess for each playoff game from here on out and see how I do.

For starters, I like the Saints over the Seahawks, even giving the 11 points Vegas has come up with for the line between one of the league's hottest teams and defending league champion and a truly bad sub-.500 divisional winner. In looking at Seattle's schedule, if you throw out Carolina and Arizona -- perhaps the league's two worst overall teams -- Seattle's total scores over its last 8 games have been, in order of most recent to least recent: 16, 15, 18, 21, 24, 19, 7, 3. The 21 and 24 both came in blowout losses as it is, and included a fair amount of trash time late in the game where those last points were not defended by the opponents with nearly the ferocity that the Seahawks are sure to run into this weekend in the Saints who are defending their Superbowl title. And, the 'Hawks are either looking at Charlie Whitehurst again at qb this weekend, or a beat-up Matt Hasselbeck at something like 70%. Basically, I'm thinking the Seahawks are going to score mid-teens in this one (unless the Saints run up 40), and the Saints should be able to pile on some serious points with their offense. New Orleans already scored 34 points at home against the Seahawks when they played in mid-season, and the Saints have put at least 30 on the board in 6 of their last 8 games to boot. This one looks to me to be a low-30s to mid-teens affair, which means the 11 points is not likely to be enough to cover the massive chasm in skill between these two squads. Especially with Seattle's average margin of defeat this season sitting at over 21 points, I'll take the champs and lay the points here, albeit a huge line for a road favorite in the playoffs.

In the second game on Saturday, it's the Colts favored by 3 points at home against the Jets, which is also a rematch of last year's AFC Championship. Only, this year, both teams seem a little worse than they were last year, and it seems to me that whoever wins this game is going down hardcore next week, regardless of which team wins and which team they play in the conference semis. That said, something tells me that Rex Ryan and the Jets will find a way to defend well enough against the Colts' incredibly one-dimensional offense, as Indy is the #1 passing team in the league but the #29 rushing squad. They're going to be an easy game plan in relative terms for what is still a strong defense in New York, and even the return of Joseph Addai a few weeks ago is likely to do a whole lot to remedy this big imbalance. In addition, the Jets' Mark Sanchez has had an inconsistent year, having particular trouble against aggressive, talented defenses, but the Colts just don't have one. They are 13th against the pass on the season, and 25th against the run. This means the pressure will likely be off of Sanchise to make things happen with his arm, and when he needs to make a play, the Colts have just not had a great time this year coming up with the big stops on any kind of a consistent basis. In all, I think this is a close game, but with the Jets getting 3 points on top of a favorable matchup, I think New York is where the value lies for this one.

Moving to the early game on Sunday, the AFC West champion Chiefs are getting three points at home against the Ravens, and even though I have been behind the Ravens as a dark horse Superbowl candidate all season long, I think this one could be a tougher matchup for Baltimore than most people seem to think. Yes the Chiefs haven't been good for several years before this one, but this is a deceptively good team, with the NFL's #1 rushing attack, a wideout with 1170 yards and 15 touchdowns, and a quarterback who threw 27 touchdowns to just 7 interceptions on the season. Although the Chiefs' defense is pretty much average at best, the Ravens don't exactly feature the type of offensive onslaught that is likely to give KC trouble, and the Chiefs have perhaps the single best home-field advantage in the NFL, losing in KC only in the last game of the season this year after the Chiefs had already clinched their first divisional crown since early in the last decade. Although I have a definite worry that the Chiefs faced only two playoff teams in 16 games all season long (one of them being 7-9 Seattle!), the Ravens no longer have the incredible team defense that they did a decade ago. I could see the Ravens squeaking one out in KC for sure, but on balance with the Chiefs having a lot going for them in this game and that incredible home field advantage, I think taking KC plus 3 points is the value pick here.

And then we come to the toughest game of the weekend to pick, both from a spread standpoint and for me from a personal standpoint as well, being a lifelong Philly fan. The Eagles are favored by 3 points at home against Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers, who sneaked into the playoffs with a Week 17 win over the Bears to knock the Giants and Bucanneers out of postseason contention. In the Packers' favor, Aaron Rodgers is pretty much the class of the NFC as far as quarterbacks go, and the team has a solid defense as well to boot. Andy Reid's amazing postseason ineptitude is another big plus that simply cannot be overlooked from Green Bay's perspective, as his in-game management is basically as bad as any coach in the league today. On the Eagles' side of the ledger, though: the game is in Philly, and the Packers were just 3-5 on the road this season, with one of those road wins over the Kevin Kolb-led Eagles way back in Week 1 -- a totally different team -- and another against the hapless Vikings back in Week 11. This is simply not a good road team, who managed to lose during the season at the likes of Washington and Detroit in the second half. The Packers are also another of these totally one-dimensional teams like the Colts, with the Pack ranking as the league's 5th-most prolific passing team but just the 24th-best running squad. And let's not forget that Packers' head coach Mike McCarthy is almost equally poor at game management as Andy Reid, so it's not like there should be a big advantage either way there. This one is so hard to pick, because the Pack's total give-up on the running game is going to make things much easier to game-plan for Andy Reid, and Reid does know how to win a game in the early rounds of the playoffs, and in this case he's facing a team that has not played well at all on the road overall on the year. But the Packers should benefit from the general beat-up nature of Mike Vick at this point in the season, and the game plan that the Giants twice put together as well as the Vikings most recently in showing how to take Vick out of his comfort zone pretty easily. I could go back and forth on this one all day, so in the end I think you have to take the points and go with the Packers, who could easily win the game outright, but could even lose a close one and still get you the winning pick for the game.

So in all, I'm laying the big points on the road in the one totally lopsided matchup on Saturday, but otherwise I am taking the points and the road team in the close matchups at Indy and at Philly, and am again taking the dog and the points at home with the Chiefs. Other than the Saints - Seahawks, this may be the best set of Wildcard Round matchups in recent memory in the NFL.

Giant Excuses

#1 is the best obv.

Winning One-Against-Three

With all the (massive) problems the NFL has with its referees insisting on taking over the games of the biggest, best sport on the earth today, there is just something so satisfying about the Eagles going on national television on Sunday night and beating not just the Giants, but also beating the referees as well as NBC's color guy Chris Collinsworth.

Sure, the Eagles went out and did what they had to do on Sunday to beat their hated division rivals, taking the game 27-17 to nab a 7-3 record and sole possession of first place in the NFC East, which had been held almost the entire season previously by the Eli Manning and the Giants. One week after erupting for four passing touchdowns at another key divisional rival in the Redskins, Mike Vick did not throw a td pass on the day this weekend, but he ran for a crucial one and helped pace the team with 258 yards passing and, as usual, zero interceptions. Meanwhile, the Eagles defense was utterly stifling, as Eli Manning chipped in with a key fumble as well as three more interceptions, bringing his league-leading total to 17 picks on the year, if you throw out Brett Favre and his 886 interceptions so far in 2010, leaving the Giants for the most part completely unable to move the ball or do anything of any value offensively. At least until the refs stepped in, anyways.

With the Eagles leading the game 16-3 late in the third quarter and heading into the 4th, the game was such that it was clear that the Giants wouldn't find their way into the end zone no matter how much time they had to play on the day. The Eagles just shut the Giants' down, plain and simple, and every single time the Eagles needed a big play or a big stop on defense, they got it. The Eagles did what they've done a lot recently to the Giants -- won a huge game fairly late in the season, behind the power of multiple takeaways as they forced the Giants to make poor decision after poor decision in their undying quest to get at least somewhere near the end zone. And so the referees decided, in typical NFL fashion, to become the story of the game once again instead of just calling the game. They quickly awarded the Giants the ball back after overturning a pretty obvious fumble that would have effectively ended the game -- with Collinsworth all the while commenting on how genius it was of Tom Coughlin to challenge that play that every little league coach in the country would have challenged given the situation -- and then they reversed a call to give the Giants the ball after an Eagles player committed a dubious-at-best fumble, using their amazing powers of replay to get most calls wrong even on the slow-mo. What a joke. The Giants punched it in from the 10 two plays later, and then not four minutes later in gametime, there were the refs again, calling a pass interference call at the 1-yard line to bail out Eli Manning who had made a laughable heave down the field to avoid getting his head knocked off on a crucial third down play that -- once again -- would have and should have effectively ended the game. But those pesky refs were having none of it, and they did whatever they had to do over a 5-minute span or so to not just keep the New York team in it, but to quickly give them the fucking lead in a game that was a blowout to a degree that only someone who watched the entire game could understand.

But I think the most satisfying part of all for Eagles fans with the game on Sunday night had to be once again beating down Chris Collinsworth, unquestionably one of the biggest assheads in all of sports announcing. I've written about him before, because it is very difficult to measure whether his bias is greater than his stupidity, or vice versa, and Sunday night's performance out of Chrissy C. has got to rank right up there with his all-time bests. I mean, repeatedly pointing out that so many of Eli's interceptions this season have been on tips? Come on, Chris! You may want to suck Eli's wang, but the guy leads all under-40 quarterbacks in the NFL in interceptions this year! That doesn't happen because of tipped passes, even if you hate Philadelphia and would say anything good about their opponent in any game, even if it makes you look like a complete chucklehead. A real announcer of course would note that Eli is simply having an uncharacteristically sloppy year at the helm of his offense, as any monkey with half a brain who's actually watched the Giants' games this year would know, despite a few tips earlier in the season that probably could have been caught. But when Eli throws a ball two feet behind his receiver on a crossing route, and the guy spins around, leans back and gets a finger on the ball before it gets intercepted, that's not a great play by the quarterback that his receiver screwed him on. It's the opposite, Chrissy, which any non-ape in the booth with any modicum of impartiality already knows. Oh, and by the way, Chrissy, what about your unthinkable assertion during the timeout while Eagles' special teams man Ellis Hobbs was being tended to after a vicious helmet-to-helmet direct hit from Giants' dirty fuck Dave Tollefson, that the play was fully legal. Fully legal? You assyshit!! Hobbs is lucky as hell that he had movement in his extremities shortly after the injury caused by Tollefson -- the same dirty fuck who already knocked out at least one other quarterback already earlier in the season -- and Tollefson might as well crack out the checkbook now, cuz he'll be writing a nice $50k (at least) check within the next few days most likely. But it was a fully legal hit, right Chrissy? You heartless, thoughtless piece of shit.

Collinsworth, I know your head is already about 5 times taller than it is wide, and you're already one of the ugliest, stupidest bitches on television today in any capacity. But when I watch you, I and thousands of other intelligent viewers across the country literally mute the tv every time you open your big, fat, worthless yapper. If I could, I'd love to put your head in a vice like I assume your parents did when you were little to make you look like that and just squeeze it tighter and tighter and tighter until the air whooses right out of your ears. Lucky for you NBC is so clueless about football that they allow your stupid ass to be a part of the broadcast, along with other stellar commentators in the studio like Tony Dungy, Dan Patrick and Rodney Harrison. And even among those three fucking loser rejects, you're still far and away the bottom of the heap. Congratulations. Oh, and sorry about your team's loss of first place last night, too.

Too Stupid to be Believed

As a lifelong Philadelphia Eagles fan, Monday was a super fun day.

For starters, Mike Vick is hands down the best quarterback in the NFL. Nobody can even argue it, and even though the guy had six touchdowns yesterday and a passer rating of roughly infinity, he was already the league's best before yesterday's game. Vick came into the Eagles' Monday night romp over the Deadskins with a 125.4 passer rating, the highest in the league, and he's the closest thing to literally unstoppable of any player in the league today. And then he threw four touchdown passes in DC on Monday night. In like five minutes. And he ran for two more, in addition to countless first downs. Basically every time Vick touches the ball, he does whatever the hell he wants. And as I've written here before many times, Vick is for my money the single best feel-good story of the year in the NFL in 2010. Yes what he did to those dogs is truly sick and nothing will ever change that, but Mike Vick is the ultimate example of a guy who in my view more than paid his debt to society, he missed more games than anyone else has ever missed for committing lesser crimes than his, and ultimately the guy who never hurt another human being paid an incredible price compared to what other rich and famous dudes who actually hurt other actual people have paid. And now he's back, and the amazing thing is he is much better right now than he ever was even before being incarcerated for two years. Just incredible.

Secondly, I heard the Eagles just scored another touchdown this morning. I mean, 59 points? Really, Redskins? Really, Mike Shanahan? Any time we can beat the Mehskins, it's a good day, and when you do it in their house it is all the better. And when you run up a 28-0 lead in the first quarter, that's the best of all. For those not well-versed with the intricacies of the NFC East, over my lifetime, it's been the Redskins more than anyone else who have given the Eagles the most trouble. Even when the Eagles were so great under Buddy Ryan in the 1980s, and all through the '90s and the 2000s, we've had comparatively little trouble with the Giants, even as that franchise has had three superbowl winning teams in the past 20 years or so. Despite all that, we've fared well over time against the Giants, but the Redskins have always given us fits. I have more horrible memories of Skins games than any other team for sure, and to come out and roll this team that badly, there are no words to describe how good that feels as a longtime fan of the real Gang Green.

But lastly, by far the most highlarious and enjoyable for me part of Monday wasn't watching Mike Vick's coronation, and it wasn't seeing the Eagles destroy our hated franchise competitor. It was the news that came out just before the game that the Foreskins had signed former Eagles qb Donovan McNabb to a 5-year, $88 million extension, on the heels of far and away his worst season since his rookie year in 1999. I mean, Daniel Snyder, are you trying to embarrass yourself? Are you deliberately attempting to further your image of the spoiled rich kid who throws money at any old fool who somebody once thought might be good at this game? When I first saw this headline, I thought no big deal, this is the NFL, they can put whatever number they want on the contract like $88 million and in the end, as soon as McNabb continues sucking, they'll just cut him. I mean, it's not like they're guaranteeing him a lot of this money, obviously -- not literally less than one game after Mike Shanahan benched his ass heading into the 2-minute drill in a crucial game with his team down by 5 points and needing a touchdown to win, right? Right?

Wrong! $40 million is guaranteed to McNabb under this new contract. So let's see. Last year the team paid $100 million to sign Albert Haynesworth, who has started exactly zero games this season and who isn't even any longer in the team's starting defensive package since he "is just not good enough to play the 4-3 defense". Now this year, their division rivals obviously duped them in landing two draft picks in exchange for trading them an aged Donovan McNabb, while all along they had not one but two qb's on the staff who were already far and away better players at this point in their careers, including one who is hands down the best quarterback in the league, and McNabb is following through with the worst full season of his career, so bad that he needed to get benched for the crucial final drive of the game in the Skins' last outing. And then they guarantee McNabb $40 million over the next five years? This can't be serious, can it? I keep waiting for Daniel Snyder or Mike Shanahan to come out and yell "April Fools!" or something, and yet with every passing minute it just seems more and more likely that the Dreadskins are actually going to be paying this guy $40 million guaranteed, plus as much as another $43 million on top over the next five years, to keep throwing the ball into the ground, throwing more interceptions than touchdowns like this season, and giving his team no chance like he did on Monday after three more turnovers including two pick-6s to help the Eagles on their march towards 60 points on the night.

Could Monday have gone any better for Eagles fans, I ask you?

NFL -- Week 10 Picks

As I mentioned earlier in the week, through Week 9 of the 2010 NFL season, my weekly game picks against the spread sit at an uninspiring 12-13-2. While this certainly could be worse in the wild and wacky NFL, I'm definitely looking to improve these figures over the second half of the season, although in all honesty the second half of 2009 is where my picks really seemed to drop off, so I'm going to need to do much better in this year's second half or else the season is going to be a complete and total disaster in terms of my picks. Still, I'm going to stick with the recent policy of not forcing myself to pick any certain number of games in any given week as I do think that will help me over time to focus my predictions on the games I generally feel the most confident about. Just like last week's Giants-at-Seattle game. Heh heh.

OK so here are my picks for Week 10 of the NFL season:

1. Miami Dolphins +2 vs. Tennessee Titans. In a week chock full of tough games, I really like this pick as I think the better team is getting points, and playing at home to boot. It looks like the Fins will be starting Chad "All He Does Is Win" Pennington at qb this weekend for the first time all season, and the Dolphins are simply not going to 0-8 at home on the year. I know the Titans just added Randy Moss over the past week after the Vikings cut him after Week 8, but I just can't pass up the extra two points for the home team who I would have picked to win this game in any event.

2. Houston Texans +1 at Jacksonville Jaguars. This is a matchup of 4-4 teams, but I've made no bones here about the fact that I think the Texans are a good team, and the Jags are not, overall this season. This is a game where the Texans will find a way to win if they are actually going to try to make a playoff push in 2010. When I look at this objectively, I think the Texans throw the ball better than the Jaguars behind Matt Schaub, and Arian Foster and his nine touchdowns runs the ball better than Maurice Jones-Drew and his one touchdown scamper this season as well. Once again this is a game where I would probably take the Texans as a pickem, but with the added bonus of a push if the Jags win by one point, the value seems definitely tilted a bit on the Texans' side here in my book.

3. St. Louis Rams +6 at San Francisco 49ers. I don't even understand this line, which can often be a harbinger of one of those too-good-to-be-true lines that I love to get burned on, but with the 4-4 and first-place Rams heading to San Fran to play Mike Singletary and his no-math skills, I am surprised this is more than a pickem as it is. The chances of the 49ers scoring many points against the quietly very solid Rams' defense in this game are I think low to begin with, and the NFC West's best offense in the Rams should be able to move the ball against the hapless 49ers defense. Mike Singletary has lost all control of this team, he is a lame duck fool on the sidelines, and his team has got nothing to play for throughout the balance of this season. I'll take the Rams plus a touchdown and do so quickly.

While I do think the Giants' 14-point line at home against the Cowboys in Jason Garrett's first game as head coach is too high, I think even I might have to stay away from that game despite knowing that the Giants have consistently disappointed in games like this during the Tom Coughlin era. I can't believe the Eagles are favored by 3 at the Redskins in Monday night's game, but I do suspect the Eagles will win so I want to stay away from that one as well. And while I do think the Bills will nab their first win of the season at home this weekend against the Lions and their backup quarterback, having to lay three points to pick the only 0-8 team in the NFL is just a personal insult, and I won't do it. So there's your three official picks this week (bank it!), and best of luck to anyone playing this weekend's NFL games.

Bring on the Rants

So the World Series is over. I will admit to feeling a slight twinge as I watched the San Francisco Giants climb all over each other, a feeling that someone else was celebrating something that wasn't theirs, that belonged to my team. But in the end, that's a good thing. I'm from Philadelphia, and to be honest, as sports fans we are incredibly demanding on the micro level, often known for booing our hometown heroes when they fail to come through in a big spot in a given game, but on a macro level, we Philadelphians just have low expectations when it comes to championships. It's not like it's in the water or anything, but it's just a reflection of the historical reality: we haven't won much. When you go 25 years and 100 seasons between the four major U.S. sports between 1983 and 2008 without a single championship for the city to celebrate, when your baseball franchise remains the first and only franchise in all of professional sports to lose 10,000 games, when your basketball team has basically been hanging out in the pooper since the mid 1980s save for a few good years a decade ago under Allen Iverson, you just start to accept it. So yeah, I know the Phillies had the talent to win another World Series this year, and believe me as a long-suffering Philly sports guy I very tangibly feel our failure to nab that elusive World Series title this year while we had the chance and when we had come so close, but I mean, come on. I'm not a New York sports fan. These aren't the Yankees here. My Phillies have just won their fourth consecutive NL East for the first time in franchise history, we went to back-to-back World Series before bowing out to the eventual WS champion in the NLCS this season, and we've got an incredible pitching staff and most of our powerful lineup locked up for at least another year heading into 2012, plus one of the best, most devoted young GMs in the game today.

Try as I might, I just can't get crazy about the Phillies not winning the World Series again in 2010. I felt a twinge all right watching the celebration last night, but that's all it was. This Giants team clearly deserved to win the championship this year. As I wrote all about before the NLCS began, this Giants' staff posted the best team ERA in more than 60 years over the final 8 weeks of the 2010 season, and in the end it was their pitching that dominated, all through the playoffs really. Sure, it's easy for us Philly fans to get mad at Ryan Howard and his 12 strikeouts in the NLCS, or Chase Utley's and Shane Victorino's inability to get a big hit after coming through in the clutch so many times in postseasons past, but the rest of the sports-watching country sees the real reality: these Giants pitchers are fucking good. They made the Philly hitters look bad -- it's what they do. Matt Cain didn't give up a run in the entire postseason for the Giants. 21-year-old Madison Bumgarner pitched 7 shutout innings in a huge spot in the World Series. The Texas Rangers, who led all of MLB with a .276 batting average during the regular season, hit just .190 in the Series overall, with Giants ace Tim Lincecum beating superstar Cliff Lee not one but twice in the span of a week to clinch the championship in 5 games. This Giants team was the best team in the league when it came right down to it this year, and Bruce Bochy and those players deserve a hell of a lot of credit for coming together and peaking at the absolute best possible time, and playing their game despite consistently being picked to lose in the postseason along the way. Congratulations to the fans of the San Francisco Giants, who are celebrating like crazy today after the franchise's first championship in 57 years, and first ever while in the Bay Area.

But there is a lot of other crazy sports news going on out there today, isn't there?

For starters, this Randy Moss stuff is just craziness. Four games after the Minnesota Vikings actually trade away a third-round pick to the Cheatriots to acquire troubled wide receiver Randy Moss, Brad Childress up and cuts the guy after a bad loss to the Cheatriots in which Moss had just one catch for seven yards. Four games? For a third-round draft pick? I'm sorry, but is Brad Childress literally trying to force his owner to fire him? I mean, Chilly was already probably gone after this season -- after all, he is a stone cold jackass and has no control over this team -- but this move simply boggles the mind. Was Moss that much of a cancer in the locker room? Probably. Where hasn't he been? But how you simply cut a guy to waivers after four games when you gave up a 3rd round pick to get him, and when you will likely be on the hook for most of his $6 million salary now as well? That is some fucked up stuff right there. And meanwhile, Moss is quoted as saying he would like to go back to play for the Cheatriots again. Yeah right. For starters, the Cheatriots currently sit with 1 loss and the best record in all of the NFL, which means they are 32nd out of 32 teams on the waiver wire, and IMO Moss is not likely to slip through every other team in the league without being claimed by somebody desperate for some help on offensive in the ultimate win-now league. But even assuming Moss did manage to slip by without any other team in the league claiming him, I say no way he ends up back in a Cheats uniform. You're telling me that Bill Bellichik is going to take back the guy who nearly came to blows with the Cheatriots' offensive coordinator less than a month and a half ago about lack of focus on him on the offense? With his team sitting with the best record in all the league, he's going to welcome back a locker room cancer who's already caused trouble on this very team in this very season and who basically forced a trade after malcontenting his way through the preseason and five regular season games already in 2010? Fat chance, my man Randy. I don't think we'll be seeing you in a New England uni anytime soon, bro. Some bridges you just can't un-burn.

Another great NFL story from this past weekend, in particular for me personally -- is this whole saga with Donovan McNabb and Mike Shanahan in Washington. When the Skins took the ball with under two minutes to go in their game at Detroit on Sunday afternoon, Shanahan shocked the team by benching McNabb in favor of backup Rex Grossman to run the two-minute drill. Immediately following the game, Shanahan candidly told sideline reporters that he benched McNabb due to concerns over McNabb's "competence" with the two-minute offense, but then a day later after persistent questioning, Shanahan has now changed his story to the benching instead being about McNabb's conditioning more than his mental capacity to run the two-minute drill. For my money, it really doesn't matter a whole lot which one of Shanahan's totally different explanations is right, because either way we already know the true reason -- Shanahan doesn't think McNabb is good enough to be in there in that spot. That's it. With the game clearly on the line and his team down by less than 7 with 1:50 to go and needing a touchdown, the Redskins' head coach decided to bench McNabb in favor of a longtime shitty backup who hadn't really taken crucial game snaps in some two years. Whether McNabb's perceived failings were mental or physical doesn't really matter in the end. As I've been pointing out repeatedly during this season after the Eagles traded him away to the Skins -- within the division no less -- the Eagles obviously saw something (or many things) they didn't like in McNabb as the season wore down to a close, and it looks like they were right. And if Shanahan isn't careful (he usually isn't), he will soon get to experience firsthand what a pussywhining McNabb is like as well, another annual occurrence that the fans and the team management just got used to over time in Philadelphia, but which will likely be very poorly received in a new city, especially given McNabb's pace for his worst full season ever as a pro in 2010, including throwing more picks than interceptions and really failing to fully take the reins of the offense yet even through seven games of the regular season. I was always a big McNabb fan in Philly as I've written about here many times, but I won't lie -- I smiled a lil bit when I saw this story, and with every passing day as McNabb comes closer and closer to publicly griping about it, I am enjoying watching the Skins squirm more than little bit.

Oh, and here's another thing in the world of sports that I find utterly ridiculous right now: the BCS. I'm not going on a general rant here about how stupid the whole system is, the impossible to follow formulas, the computer ranking, or the lack of a playoff system or a true national champion which clearly keeps the sport from growing by probably several multiples with every passing year. No, I'm just talking right now about the unbelievable bias in this thing towards the big-conference teams. I mean, this shit is as close to a set-up for the big conference schools as it could ever be. This whole BCS thing, with each of the big conferences exerting some elements of shared control and manipulation, is one of the biggest scams I have ever seen accepted by the American sports-watching public. How many fucking teams have to lose before Boise State is given a chance to play for a national title? Just one chance is all I'm asking for here guys. If they play for a title, and some big-conference team with one loss during the regular season blows them out by 40 points, then I'll shut up. I'll stop complaining about it right away because then I'll know, then we'll all know. But instead, this team has been top-5 all season long. They were top 5 last year, and when given a chance during the regular season last year, they took down a top 10 team. They took down top-5 TCU in their bowl game last year. They started this year in the top 5 again, and they haven't even let anyone get close to them so far this season, including a solid beating of then-top 10 Virginia Tech this year as well. Boise State has played three top 10 teams in the last two seasons and beaten them all, so in the few chances they've been given at a fair shot at the top teams, they've risen to the challenge every single time. It's not their fault if none of the other big conference schools won't schedule a fair home-and-home series to play Boise State during the regular season -- these schools are scared to death of Boise State! They would rather play almost anyone than Boise, so Boise just takes their two shots a year at the big boys and dominates them all, and otherwise totally flattens everyone else in their path. Now this season was supposed to be all about Notre Dame, but they quickly proved that they suck by losing early. Perennial powerhouse Florida dropped a game in the earlygoing as well to lose their shot at a title. USC quickly lost as well to take their NCAA-embargoed self out of the realm of the unbeatens. Overlooking Boise State completely after three early favorites lost games, the BCS controlled solely by the big conferences lifted Ohio State to then the overwhelming favorite early on, until they too lost a shocker a few weeks back. Then it was Alabama leap-frogging Boise State, with all the talking heads on ESPN proclaiming that Nick Saban's team would never lose a game this year and roll on to another national title. Until they lost a couple of weeks ago to South Carolina. After Michigan State and Missouri both lost their undefeated records this past weekend, I figured the case for Boise State could no longer be ignored by the BCS, but then boom! Now it's Auburn -- another big conference school who had hardly been talked about at all until just a couple of weeks ago -- who is the new greatest team in the league this year. And when they lose the SEC championship game to Alabama in a few weeks, then you know what's gonna happen with the BCS, right? Then Alabama with one loss will be back to being ahead of Boise State again. With Ohio State right behind, how much you wanna bet.

Boise State is The Best Team in NCAA Football in 2010. Period. The big schools refuse to ever play them during the regular season except in unfair, highly favorable circumstances to the big school teams. The big conference-controlled BCS then promotes every single undefeated team over Boise State week after week, even switching it up over and over with every passing week as every single team without exception that the big schools have tried to inflate this year have done. This past weekend has now brought it all to a head as the BCS is now forced to start talking about promoting one-loss teams over Boise, who has beaten three top-10 squads in the last two seasons while dominating everyone. It's simple. Boise State is the best team in the league. Yes, they would beat Alabama if they played them right now on a neutral site, and yes they would beat Ohio State as well. Open your eyes and stop believing what the totally and laughably biased BCS is telling you and trying to change on you week after week after week after week. Congratulations to your Boise State Broncos, the real national champions of the 2010 NCAA football season.