SirLes said:
Yeah, the Bucs suck, but they weren't the team on the field in London.
Only halfway through the season, but I think it’s pretty easy to name a lot of the playoff teams. Seattle, SF, GB and NO look quite certain at this point, with the second WC wide open. I’d guess Detroit or Chicago, but watch out for Arizona and Carolina. The NFC East could be won with a sub-.500 record. To paraphrase Churchill, I think Dallas is the worst team in that division, except for the other three. It tells you just how bad that division is that the Giants started 0-6, and now are considered contenders.
In the AFC, the West also will have two playoff teams, Denver and KC. NE as always wins the East, Cincy looks in control of the North and Indy of the South. Leaving the other WC up for grabs, maybe San Diego, but they have to play Denver (twice I think) and KC again. So a lot of teams still in the mix for that.
Seattle plays SF again, at SF, and both Seattle and SF play NO. IOW, each of those teams plays each of the others, and I think it works out that each plays one of those games at home, and on on the road. If one of those three teams wins both of those games, it will have the inside track on HFA, and will be a big favorite for the SB.
Seattle and NO are especially difficult to beat when they play at home, so more specifically, you could argue that the winner of NO at Seattle will go all the way. But Seattle waits for Harvin, and the 49ers for Crabtree. Kaepernick just isn’t the same QB when he doesn’t have both Vernon Davis and Crabtree as targets, and it’s really shown this season.
I think the eventual AFC champion is very difficult to predict, and will be right up to the beginning of the playoffs. Denver and Manning could set a lot of scoring and yardage records this season, but they’re also giving up huge numbers of points and yards on defense. Going into the game against Washington (which eventually will have a non-racist mascot, according to word on the street), only the Eagles had given up more yards per game than Denver. Having Von Miller back should help. But Denver will probably have to beat KC twice to win the division.
Indy has been very impressive in beating three of the preseason top 5 teams, Seattle, SF and Denver, none of which have lost to anyone except Indy and among themselves (Seattle beat SF). I wouldn’t say that they are as good as any of those teams—that they could consistently beat them—but it does indicate that on any given day, they can rise to the occasion and beat anyone, which makes them a scary playoff team. But the loss of Reggie Wayne is huge. Next to Luck, probably the most important player on the team, and maybe the most important if you include the locker room as well as on the field.
Brady is showing signs of age. The Pats gained only 59 yards in the first half against Miami??? And Brady again failed to throw a TD pass, only passed for a 100+ yards. And still they found a way to win. Don’t see them in the SB, but they could spoil someone else’s chances.
Edit: Can someone explain to me what happened to the rule about how yards lost in sacks are to be considered? They used to be considered negative passing yards, in that the total passing yards by the team were calculated by subtracting the yards lost in sacks from the total passing yards by the QB.
But now they seem to have disappeared from the ledger. Consider the Seahawks-Rams game. Russell Wilson passed for 139 yards, and the sum total of the rushes (including Wilson's) was 44 yards, for a total team offense of 183 yards. But Wilson was sacked 7 times for 48 yards. Those yards ought to be subtracted from the total of 183, but aren’t. I did read in a report of the game that the Rams held Seattle to 91 yards passing, which seems correct and accounts for the 48 yards lost in sacks, but nowhere in the stats of the game are these yards accounted for.
I know they haven’t been subtracted from Wilson’s passing total, because if you add the total number of reception yards by all of Seattle’s receivers, you come up with 139. The team stat box makes things even more confusing. While it lists net passing yards as 139, it also lists the 48 yards of sacks, and it lists average yards per attempt as 5.6. Where does this come from? Russell’s stats list 7.7 YPA, which is 139 divided by 18 attempts. The 5.6 YPA could take into account the yards lost by sacks, but doesn’t. If you subtract those yards from 139, you get 91. That divided by 18 is not 5.6. And worse, if you want to count sacks as attempts, you would have 25 attempts, not 18.
I have noticed the same thing with other NFL games, and also with college games. What gives? How can sack yardage be ignored? It means offensive yardage is being inflated, and defensive yards given up made to appear worse than they actually are.
I have no idea why I wrote Bucs instead of Jags - other than they both suck. Never post late at night I guess.
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