Well our Week 2 NFL picks didn’t really work out as Mr. Fantasy was the only one who was over .500 at 9-7. Schaumburg Stu rolled in right at .500 at 8-8 while Dan the Man was 7-9. As for me; well I was at the bottom of the barrel at 6-10. Through two weeks Schaumburg Stu is 19-13. Mr. Fantasy is 18-14, I am at 17-15 and Dan the Man is at 13-19. Hopefully Week 3 goes better for us.
Now when it comes to the NFL I have to tell you I am very disinterested in the game through two weeks. To me the NFL is heading down the same road that the NBA has and that is defense is a thing of the past. Now in the NFL they’re trying to reduce injuries, but they have to figure this out so players are still allowed to make contact with each other. I’m actually going to take this week off from watching football and see how much or if I miss it at all. I think I’ll treat it like I do an NBA game; which is I’ll turn it on to check the score, but I won’t watch more than a minute of it at a time. Right now I have no interest what so ever in watching football and that’s sad because it use to be one of my favorite things to do on Sunday’s.
A couple things that drove me up the wall this Sunday was the roughing the quarterback calls and the fact that no seems to be able to make a field goal. The add in the fact that there was an obvious replay call that somehow wasn’t overturned.
It’s quite clear that however the referee was for the Green Bay/Minnesota game on Sunday he had no idea what the term roughing the passer meant and if you’re a Packers fan he actually cost your team the football game in regulation. Somehow this referee thought that Clay Matthews slammed Kirk Cousins to the ground when he sacked him late in the game and he threw his flag and made the terrible roughing the passer call. It’s easily one of the worst calls ever made in a regular season game and I actually have to wonder if the guy had money on the game; so he threw the flag to line is pockets.
What makes things even worse is when these guys blow calls like this nothing happens to them. They’re not fined or reprimanded in any way and that just doesn’t seem right.
Then there’s the replay official who somehow couldn’t see that the referee missed a call and didn’t overturn it. I believe it was a Tampa Bay wide receiver who made a catch and got his left foot down in the end zone and then the rest of his body landed in the end zone. No maybe the on field referee didn’t have a good look at it or something to that affect, but he called it an incomplete pass. Now on the replay it was clear that this was a touchdown, but somehow the replay official upheld the call on the field and it was an incomplete pass.
Here’s another case of a official completely missing a call and an obvious call at that, but will he be penalized for it; no. He’ll probably be in the replay booth again this weekend and hopefully get those calls correct.
Going back to the quarterbacks. Plain and simple if you don’t want them to get hit and just allow them to stand in the pocket and pick defenses apart just make that a rule and give them a time limit to throw the football or else the closest defensive player to him gets credit for a sack. Or maybe you can just put some flags on the quarterback and instead of tackling him and trying to get some moron referee to try and interpret a rule a defensive player just has to pull a flag off him for him to be down.
I understand that the NFL has to find ways to make the game safer in hopes that the media will stop trying to persecute them for every injury that a player gets, but while they’re trying to do this they have to make sure that they don’t ruin the game that people grew up watching. Sadly for the NFL they haven’t been able to find that line and they’re ruining the game that I grew up loving and playing and they’ve gotten me to the point where I don’t even want to watch it anymore.
I’d be very interested to know your thought on the NFL two weeks into this new season. Is it something you still enjoy watching? and if so why? Please feel free to leave your comments here for me.
Blake Snell of the Tampa Bay Rays just won his 20th game of the season last night and has to be the front runner for the American League Cy young award, but it will be an interesting vote. Sabermetricly wins don’t mean anything; so that could really hurt Snell in the voting depending on how many Sabermetric people have ballots this season.
I don’t understand why wins no longer mean anything or maybe Sabermetrics look at it as just luck like I’ve heard them say about RBI’s. The more I hear people talk about Sabermetrics the less I understand about it and I have to start questioning the value it actually has when it comes to measuring a player. One of the first things Sabermetrics did was discount batting average and introduce WAR which is a stat that you can actually adjust to get it to say what you want it to. So now two of the three stats that compromise the Triple Crown don’t mean anything in the Sabermetric world. I guess that explains why they where pushing Mike Trout over J.D. Martinez for American League MVP even though Martinez has a chance to win a Triple Crown.
I’m done trying to figure it out.
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