The Ups and Downs of Football Picks

As we enter week 10 of the NFL season, I suppose that it’s about time that I talked about my weekly NFL picks.
I play in two different pools: one of them is in a local restaurant, and the other one is at the newspaper where I work. We run an “Armchair Experts” section of the Sunday Saratogian, where five of us from the sports department go through the NFL schedule and choose our projected winners for the week.
In the restaurant pool we play with a point spread. At the newspaper we do not, we just pick the winner of the game.
Point spreads have never been one of my friends, and week in, week out for years I have lost many a bet, a football sheet, or a pool simply on a lousy half point.
To say that picking winners in the NFL is not an exact science is about as obvious as saying that wild animals live in Africa.
At the newspaper, where there are no points involved, I am doing quite well. I have been running consistently second or third out of five all season.
The restaurant pool, however, is a totally different story. All I can say about that is that I’m glad that my choices in the restaurant pool do not get posted in the paper, or no doubt some maniac would have hunted me down already and skinned me alive because he lost his house based on one of my losing selections.
Hey, this is a small town, and it isn’t easy to hide when you work for the only newspaper in the county.
It seems that last week, Week 10 in the NFL, I took a turn for the worse in the standings.
With a record of 84-47 entering last week, I was holding my own quite well, running second in the standings only to my editor, two games back.
To say that last week was tough on all of us is a huge understatement. The boss was a mediocre 7-7, as was Stan. I was a dreadful 5-9, Adam went an amazing 9-5 to take the top weekly honors, and even Ian, who has been picking up the rear all season long, out-picked me by one game.
That shook up the standings a bit. Instead of me still on Brian’s heels, I am now four games behind him.
I opened the week one game in front of Adam, two games ahead of Stan, and was leading Ian by seven, but now that’s all changed. Now, I am tied with Stan for third place, behind Adam, which does not make me very happy.
Upsets were abound, there’s no doubt about that, and once again the underachievers played the spoiler, the winless or near-winless finally played with some enthusiasm, and the favorites did not cover the spreads. Ha ha.
It was an atrocious week, one I would like to soon forget. The Chiefs were one of the teams to stick it to me. Kansas City has been playing better as of late, and they’re always tough at Arrowhead. The Denver Broncos have been something short of horrible, and they have been a nightmare on the road. Take the Chiefs, right? Wrong. Denver jumps out of the gate to take an early lead, and K.C. was never in a game that it lost, 27-11.
Next up, Carolina. The Panthers have been somewhat inconsistent, with all of their quarterback injuries and what not. But somehow, Carolina has been able to keep its head above water.
In come the Atlanta Falcons, who have had a miserable season, starting with the whole Michael Vick fiasco that lead to Atlanta losing its quarterback before the season even began.
This wasn’t a game that anyone expected to be a landslide, but even with Carolina’s troubles, it wasn’t a tough guess to think that the Panthers would muster up enough offense to come away with a win against the reeling Falcons.
Nuh-uh. Instead, Atlanta (like Denver) took an early lead and never looked back as they beat Carolina 20-13. Loss number two.
Next up, it was the New Orleans Saints’ turn to foil my predictions. They were hosting the winless St. Louis Rams. Another no-brainer, you say? NO SOUP FOR YOU!! The Saints, at home and winners of four straight games, could not even handle the hapless Rams. St. Louis goes on to win a shootout, 37-29, and once again, the bookies never lose.
Tennessee was next to sock it to me, as they were at home against the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Another matchup that didn’t take too long to consider. The Jaguars have been rocky, and the Titans have had one of the league’s stingiest defenses all year. The Titans at home would be the logical choice, but once again, no. Tennessee could not get points on the board for most of the game and the Jaguars went home 28-13 winners.
Baltimore-Cincinnati was a bit of a toss-up, but as good as the Ravens’ defense is and as unpredictable as the Bengals have been, I took Baltimore at home.
Another mistake. Again, Cincinnati took a quick lead and the Ravens could not catch up all game, and the Bengals walked away with the 21-7 win on the road.
The Detroit Lions continue to let me down this year. I just can not win with them. When I think that they are going to stumble, they win convincingly, and when I think that they have a win in the bag on Saturday, sure enough on Sunday they revert back to looking like last year’s squad.
This week was no different, as the Lions went out west to visit the underachieving Arizona Cardinals. Arizona went into the game at 3-5, and the Lions were at 6-2. With the Lions looking like a football team lately – no, honest, they really have – I didn’t think that Detroit would have much of a problem. Once again, I couldn’t have been more wrong if I said that gas was going to drop to $1.50 per gallon next summer. Cards 31, Lions 21.
Next up, Chicago at Oakland. The Raiders are one of my two favorite teams, but they have been so absolutely miserable in recent years that I have pretty much decided that I would not pick them until they showed me something.
They still can’t score any points, but the defense has not been playing that badly and the special teams have been playing well. Add that to the fact that Brian Griese continues to throw interceptions in key situations, and that the only offense that the Bears have had recently has been their kick returner, Devin Hester, and I thought that maybe the silver and black would find a way to win at home against a stumbling opponent.
Wrong again. The Raiders stayed with Chicago for most of the game, but the Bears pulled away in the fourth quarter for the 17-6 win.
My two disappointments of the day by far were the Giants and the Colts.
The Giants were winners of six straight going into their rematch with the Dallas Cowboys. Had New York avenged their earlier loss to Dallas, the two teams would have been tied for first place. The game was in The Meadowlands, and the Giants had all the momentum that they could ask for.
They squandered their opportunity, as they turned the ball over on their first possession and Eli Manning was sacked twice and threw a pair of picks in the first half.
That set the table for the Cowboys, and they did what good teams will do – they make you pay for your trespasses. Dallas took a quick lead, added to it, and by the time it was over the Giants were left hanging their heads and Dallas returned home with a two-game lead in the NFC East.
The Colts were visiting the San Diego Chargers in what should have been a fairly easy game for the Colts.
Indianapolis has been excellent all year (except, of course, when they played the Patriots, but everyone had looked bad against New England, so you almost have to give the Colts a pass on that one) even without their star wide receiver, Marvin Harrison.
That game featured something that has never happened before, and is likely to never happen again – Peyton Manning threw six interceptions.
No team, not even the Patriots, could think that they could get away with throwing six picks and still winning. Turnovers are the name of the game in football. If you win the turnover battle, more often than not you will win the game. The Chargers proved it, as they beat the Colts during a season that San Diego has played less than dominant, even at home.
So, it was a pretty gut-wrenching week for the old football picks. The only teams that did not disappoint me were the Packers, the Bills, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Seattle.
And I don’t even want to mention how I did against the spread at the restaurant. I had what had to be the worst week of my life, as I won just two games.
Maybe, at least, I will qualify to win low-man honors for the week. How pathetic.

The Green Dot

I have been a football fan for more than 35 years now. I have seen many changes in the National Football League. Different styles, new and improved design changes in equipment, and so on.
I also have always been the type of person that pays very close attention to detail. If you watch TV or a movie with me, you may find that several times during the production, I will point out technical errors.
For instance, perhaps someone in a movie is speaking and from one camera shot they have a corsage on their lapel, and then in the next shot the corsage is missing. Switch back to the first angle and the flower reappears. Those are the kinds of things that I notice.
I also have been good at, especially when I was growing up and we collected baseball cards and actually read magazines, noticing changes in uniforms in sports. Even to this day, I could tell the difference when the Miami Dolphins added that touch of blue in their logo, for example, or when any other changes, no matter how subtle or slight, were made to team uniforms.
Last year during training camp I noticed that the Minnesota Vikings changed their style of unis, and the year before that when there was a change made in the NFL officials’ uniforms.
Usually, when there is any kind of league-wide change to team uniforms, whether it be something that is added or deleted, we will learn about these changes when we watch the games on television. The announcers will normally make us aware of the changes and the reason or reasons for the changes.
Until this year. There has been a change that I have noticed, it has been a league-wide alteration, and for some reason, to this day (Week 9 in the NFL just passed), nothing has been mentioned about it.
The announcers haven’t talked about it. I haven’t seen any story about it on the internet. I watch 4-6 NFL games per week and I haven’t heard anything mentioned.
It is a small change, a change so subtle that as the first few weeks of the season went on, and I found myself watching a game with someone that I know for the first time of the season, I would ask if they noticed it, or if they had heard what it was for. One by one, they all informed me that they had neither seen it before or heard why the change was made.
You can see this difference literally 100 times per game. It’s a small thing, something little, but I have been looking at it constantly each and every Sunday and Monday for the last nine weeks and still no one has explained where it came from or why it is now there, and it’s really beginning to annoy me.
How could this difference in the NFL uniform be on television screens from coast to coast 50-100 times per game, but yet be ignored by the announcers of the game all season long, as if it’s a secret, league-initiated coup that everyone is to be tight-lipped about, something that they don’t want the fans to know about.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, or maybe you still haven’t even noticed it, it’s the little green dot that is currently on the back of every NFL quarterback’s helmet.
I don’t know where the green dot came from, and thus far, no one has been willing to talk about it.
They haven’t mentioned it on Sports Center, on any of the pre-game shows, any Website, in any magazine, or by any of the announcers during the games.
What is the reason for the green dot? What is its significance? What is it trying to tell us? I don’t know the answers to these questions and it’s bothering me tremendously.
Now that I have mentioned what it is, you can clearly see that I was not exaggerating when I said that you can see it at least 100 times per game.
You can see the dot before every play, when the quarterback is huddling up the team, is in the huddle, or perhaps when he’s calling out the signals at the line of scrimmage and he turns his head to shout to the other side.
I have come to believe that most TV announcers do a pretty good job of letting us know the new developments in the teams, and even the uniforms, at season’s beginning.
But somehow the NFL has snuck in this little green dot without heed or warning. They have not offered us any explanation as to why we are forced to stare at this hideous little lime green circle all day and night on Sundays and for three hours on Monday night. And I want answers. And the sooner, the better, folks, because I haven’t been alerted to reason of the little fluorescent sticker’s existence, and the more I see it, the more I wonder just what the NFL is up to now. And, more importantly, why aren’t they talking about it.