Week Six

Raiders at Broncos?

Bears at Cardinals?

It’s weekends like this when I wonder if the network suits are asleep at the wheels of the football automobiles known as Sunday and Monday Night Football. Are they trying to make me switch to the baseball playoffs by providing us with two horrible matchups? Does NBC actually want me to see if that special on Comedy Central will be a more entertaining Sunday night affair? Is ESPN really pumping out that non-stop ‘Is it Monday yet?’ ad campaign only to give me a one-sided blowout?

OK, so maybe week six doesn’t provide the headline grabbing matchups that last Sunday did. But still, you can do better than this. Giants at Falcons features two number one overall draft picks from the past six years. Seattle at St. Louis is pretty much the game of the year in the NFC West. Hell, even Houston at Dallas is an in-state rivalry game.

But instead were stuck with a Sunday night game featuring Oakland, fully equipped with the worst coach in the league and an offensive coordinator that ran a bed and breakfast 365 days ago, against Denver, a legitimate Super Bowl contender. The over/under on when John Madden starts rambling on about the glory days of this rivalry is the start of the second quarter, and honestly, I’d take the under.

A night later the Worldwide Leader serves up the mighty monsters of the midway, the Chicago Bears of course, taking on Arizona and their rookie QB, Matt Leinart. This one at least will be worth watching, even that’s only to see how many sacks the Bears can get on the pathetic Cardinals o-line. But I’m pretty sure the outcome won’t be in doubt for too long.

So why are the networks giving us these crap games as national showcases? Maybe they are afraid of competing with the baseball post-season, or they just want to give some exposure to these lousy teams. Or maybe in April when they scheduled these games, they actually thought that both squads would be good. Whatever the case is, lets hope there isn’t another pair of primetime games like this the rest of the year, for our sake.

As for my picks, there are only 13 games this weekend to makes selections for because six teams have the week off. Last week I went 10-4, improving my season record to 49-25.

My picks in bold

Cincinnati at Tampa Bay

New York Giants at Atlanta

Tennessee at Washington

Houston at Dallas

Carolina at Baltimore


Buffalo at Detroit

Seattle at St. Louis

Philadelphia at New Orleans

Miami at New York Jets

Kansas City at Pittsburgh

San Diego at San Francisco

Oakland at Denver

Chicago at Arizona

My survival pick from last week, the Indianapolis Colts, needed all 60 minutes to keep my streak intact, scoring all 14 of their points in the second half in a comeback win versus the Titans. I have now used the Cardinals, Ravens, Dolphins, Eagles and Colts in the survival pool, so for this week I will take the game I just finished complaining about, the Denver Broncos to beat Oakland.


Random Thoughts

Since I didn’t really make any points in my last column, I decided to offer some thoughts in this one. Here’s what’s on my mind:

1-These MLB Championship Series’ are really causing me some distress. Who do I cheer for? In the AL, you have two teams that are really tough to root against. Oakland is this low budget brainchild of Billy Beane, a group of guys who play the right way. Good pitching, clutch hitting, exciting baseball. Then you have Detroit, the loser’s turned winners led by the fiery, chain-smoking, old school manager. My support is with the A’s, only because I picked them before the whole thing, and plus the Tigers have Neifi Perez on the squad.

As for the NL, instead of having a tough time because I enjoy watching both squads, I have a tough time because I highly dislike the Mets and the Cardinals. So I guess in that match up, the best-case scenario would be seven competitive baseball games in which Tim McCarver never opens his mouth.

2-Yesterday the White Sox announced that they are establishing a partnership with the convenience store 7-11 in which all of the Monday through Friday night games played at the Cell will be starting at…you guessed it, 7:11pm. Now I believe this is the most idiotic thing I have ever heard, but that’s not what I’m going to rant about. What I’m wondering is why can’t the Sox just sell out everything? Instead of a Crede to Konerko ground ball, shouldn’t that be a 5th 3rd Bank putout. (If you don’t know how to keep score, that obviously didn’t make sense to you.) How about when Tad Iguchi drives in an eighth inning run to make it 6-4, every announcer is forced to call that the Allstate insurance run. And when Bobby Jenks gives up a walk off homer, the scoreboard will read ‘That was Bobbie’s seventh Panasonic ceiling fan blown save of the year’. Or better yet, have the Miller Lite Hawk Harrelson drunk pick’s to click. You can put that on the board….YES!

3- I promised myself I wouldn’t go on and on about my beloved Gators, even though they put on an impressive show last Saturday versus LSU to jump to number two in the national polls . Instead I’d like to talk about another undefeated squad, the surprise of the Big 12, the Missouri Tigers. Coming from someone who watched every Mizzou game a year ago, I have to say the feelings of both surprise and fulfillment are creeping into my mind. In 2005, I felt the Tigers were a talented team that was held back by two things: Horrible coaching and “star” players who were not interested in being leaders. I put star in quotes because the “stars” I’m talking about were quarterback Brad Smith, wide receiver Sean Coffey and safety Jason Simpson. No, this wasn’t the second coming of Ken Dorsey, Andre Johnson and Ed Reed, but Smith, Coffey and Simpson were solid players. The problem was that they weren’t really team players. It seemed that Smith would have rather run for six yards then throw a pass that would have gone 20. Coffey wouldn’t run across the middle of the field even if there were a new Bentley waiting for him if he did it. And Simpson tried (and I should mention, failed) to make ESPN’s ‘Jacked Up’ segment every time he could have made a simple body tackle. So this team had bad leadership to start off with. Add on to that head coach Gary Pinkel, also known as the second coming of Dick Jauron. A guy who would run the draw on third and eight, the coach who sets his players up to fail. It was no surprise the team was a disappointment in ‘05.

So with the departure of the three ‘stars’ this season, I felt Mizzou would be a solid team. But with Pinkel still in charge, I was hesitant to claim them my sleeper team, since I knew at any time they could fall harder then Baxter from ‘Anchorman’. Turns out, I was wrong. Pinkel has relaxed now that his go-to-guy, Smith, is gone, and is letting hit team play. Six wins later, the Tigers are ranked number 19 and are the last unbeaten in the Big 12.

4-R.I.P. Cory Lidle