NFL writing and predictions for people who hate the NFL
Author: Benjamin Netzorg
Benji Netzorg, AKA Dangersquirrel.
Writer, leftist, and general pain the ass, making content about movies and anarchism and whatnot in the Pacific Northwest.
He/him or they/them.
Ah, here we are. Three more hours of football and then we are released into our listless, wistful freedom from the NFL for an offseason. What are you gonna do with your time? I’m gonna play more Minecraft, plan a wedding, and block the words “John Elway” and “Tom Brady” on twitter.
As for who will win, I didn’t watch Super Bowls 48 and 50 just to turn around and not pick the team with a top defense over the team with an explosive offense. I think the 49ers win 38-31 and Jimmy Garoppolo is MVP.
This doesn’t happen a lot, but I really see no reason to move any of the teams. My top 2 convincingly won their conference championships and all of the speculated roster changes to the non-playoff teams is too vague to warrant moving a team.
Got the result I predicted, definitely not the one I wanted. It’s not for nothing that we’ll see Robert Saleh and Eric Bieniemy at the Super Bowl. While they were passed over for head coaching consideration, they’ll have a chance to go the extra mile to prove themselves. Maybe teams thought it wasn’t worth waiting until they were bounced from the playoffs to make a hire, but then again, Saleh will be coaching under a guy who was hired immediately following an embarrassing Super Bowl performance of his own.
Chiefs over Titans It had to come to and end at some point. The Chiefs came out slow again and trailed by 10-0 and then 17-7, but then they remembered how to catch 10 yard passes and how to crowd the point of attack on run D and from there it was domination. There were some decisions by the Titans coaches that certainly didn’t work out, but I don’t think I would say they should have been able to do it better, they just were not as good as the Chiefs. It was over when Mahomes’ incredible 27-yard scramble at the end of the second half put them in the lead going into the locker room. Now Andy Reid gets a second shot at the Lombardi while Mike Vrabel has to sew his penis back on and hope the contracts for Ryan Tannehill and Derrick Henry work themselves out.
49ers over Packers The Niners won via slow and painful suffocation, breaking the Packers defense methodically with runs of mostly 5-20 yards at a time. Mike Pettine was totally unprepared, and Raheem Mostert took advantage to the tune of 200+ yards and 4 TDs, AKA a Full Henry, while Jimmy Garoppolo was 6/8 passing with less than 100 yards, AKA a Full Tannhill. Aaron Rodgers did a lot to try and get back into the game, but his cautions gunslinger tendencies did not bode well for the game, and he threw 2 picks to go with 2 fumbles, though one fo those was an exchange with the center that was not all his fault. Either way, though, the Packers offense when they can’t run the ball is still just Rodgers making shit up with very little help from anyone not named Devante Adams. The blocking and catching were both not on the level. If they’re going to make it back to this point next year, the Packers need to approach the offseason as if they went 9-7 and have lots of work to do but with lots of potential if they get it done. Meanwhile, Kyle Shannahan becomes the John Quincy Adams of football, joining with his dad to become the first father/son duo to coach Super Bowls. Heartwarming.
Postseason: 4-6 / 5-4-1 / +$16 Title Belt: KC won from TEN (1 week reign)
This week I am proud of OBJ and Luke Kuechley. OBJ is in trouble for two things: redistributing wealth to the NCAA’s exploited players, and slapping a cop’s ass in the LSU locker room. What a fucking Icon! You’re doing great, Odell. Kuechley is retiring about a decade before he would otherwise be expected to thanks to chronic concussions. You gotta protect yourself! When your body is done, it’s done, and the NFL isn’t worth ruining the entire rest of your life for. Good for her.
Anyway, since there are only two games this week I’m writing full score predictions here instead of on twitter. Here goes:
TEN 23 – 35 KC Picking against the Titans has been good for them so far. So between that and a disbelief that the Titans can have the same luck that they leveraged into a win last week and last time they played KC, I certainly can’t pick Tennessee.
GB 23 – 31 SF I would love to see some Aaron Rodgers shit go down and the Packers make it to the Super Bowl, but I’m not naive enough to believe that will happen. The 49ers are perfectly built to jump out to a lead and then limit Rodgers’ possessions too much for him to make an actual game of it. Maybe not the shellacking that SF gave the Pack last time they visited Santa Clara, but it’s a stretch to think Green Bay can cover the 7 points, much less win the game.
What is John Elway’s deal? He finishes the season telling us Scangiarello is safe at OC and then in the middle of a divisional round game he sends Scangs out on an ice floe and hires Pat Shurmur like 20 minutes later??? I just… There were some issues with the Scangiarello offense but some of the smarter football people I know of have laid out all the ways that the offense was a failure of personnel not of scheme. Seems like not much of an upgrade at the cost of continuity for your young QB.
Niners over Vikings The Vikings were paper tigers. Their weaknesses played so well into the 49ers’ hands. The second half was not even close. Nick Bosa is an asshole. Remember when the Broncos almost hired Kyle Shanahan?
Ravens defeat Mike Vrabel’s penis by losing In the playoffs there are fewer games per week and every team is proven enough that when they lose it’s abnormal. So we search for deeper meaning in playoff results much more so than in the regular season. A whole lot of tropes come up here: January is the time for Running The Ball. The team that romped through the regular season was “not ready for postseason ball.” Sitting for two weeks made the Ravens rusty. It was a trap game. I think the most true is actually the one that’s usually overblown, and that’s that the extra week of rest really took the Ravens out of the game. They weren’t dialed in, Vrabel’s squad was chomping at the bit and brimming with confidence, and when the Ravens came out slow it was not within their wheelhouse to come from behind. Not when Derrick Henry coming through like a freight train on every play so the Titans win comfortably with Ryan Tannehill only passing for less than 90 yards. Not when Lamar Jackson got stuffed on two QB sneaks and had 4 turnovers, 3 of which were on bad decisions he never made in the regular season. Now the Titans move improbably on and the Ravens go home with 0 postseason wins to show for their 14-2 season. Don’t you dare bad-mouth Lamar Jackson though.
Texans over Chi — No, wait, I guess it’s not over yet… Yeah okay Chiefs over Texans. For the first quarter there seemed to be a curse placed over the Chiefs. The Texans rocketed to a 21-0 lead. The Chiefs were dropping things all over and couldn’t cover Kenny Stills or really anyone else. Then to open the second quarter Bill O’Brien decided that 4th and inches in the red zone called for a field goal and 4th and 2 from his own 35 warranted a fake punt, and boom, the Chiefs score TDs on 7 straight possessions and the Texans are down 24-41. Look, I get that O’Brien has been in the playoffs more often than not, but don’t you think it’s clear by now how little of that is because of him? The thing that’s fucked up here is that O’Brien is his own GM. I would get rid o him, honestly. It was not fun seeing his let the Chiefs take over so thoroughly. When O’Brien wins a game it’s because he’s either blowing out a bad team or making a Deshaun Watson-fueled comeback against a team that took its foot off the gas too soon.
Packers over Seahawks if you believe the refs Yeah, the comeback was unlikely anyway, but calling Jimmy Graham’s first down when he was taken down visibly multiple feet shy of the line to gain was the nail in the coffin. An entertaining game that came down to a reffing blunder. Maybe it wouldn’t have if the Seahawks could run the ball in the first half. The Packers now go play in Santa Clara, where they were blown to smithereens already this year.
Postseason: 2-6 / 3-4-1 / -$4 Title Belt: TEN won from BAL (1 week reign)
I went 1-7 straight up and against the spread combined, so really what the fuck do I know?
Texans over Bills eventually An in-game collapse for the ages by the Bills, highlighted by contrasting QB plays. Near the end of regulation, Josh Allen scrambled for a first down near range for the all-important field goal. On his way to the ground, he for some reason blindly chucked the ball backwards toward an unsuspecting lineman, who batted the ball out of bounds. It was a needless play that had like a 95% chance of going horribly wrong. Meanwhile, with 3 minutes left in overtime, on 3rd down right outside of field goal range, Deshaun Watson took a snap, saw rushers collapsing in, somehow stayed on his feet through two hits that spun his body around twice, and rolled out to hit his receiver down the field to essentially win the game. Remember, though, that Watson was a total disaster against the Colts in his first playoff game. So, maybe next year, Josh Allen.
God Bless the Tennessee Titans So I do think that the Patriots will be back together next year. And I do believe they’ll make the playoffs again. They might even make another super bowl, but I don’t think so. I think We will look back on this game as the end of the age of the Patriots. I really think this is it. I think it was a game where the Pats couldn’t navigate the red zone, where Ryan Tannehill beat them with <100 passing yards, where Tom Brady ended the season throwing a pick-6 to a former Patriot to finalize a loss to a coach who spent his playing career on a roster with Brady. The Titans have very few claims to fame, and I would love for them to have this.
Vikings beat the Saints fair and square Okay, so the curse is fucking real. The Saints are now the first team to lose 3 consecutive seasons on playoff games ending in walkoff touchdowns, and they’ve lost their last 5 playoff games by no more than one score. Shit’s pretty ridiculous. Here’s the thing that Saints fans don’t want to hear: There’s no way they could have called OPI on review on Kyle Rudolph’s game-winning catch. No way, no how. It was probably enough that they could have called it on the field, but it was a shove-off only to the degree that just about every goalline fade is a shove-off. And even then, can you really claim to have been robbed when a team that shouldn’t have been able to hang with you was so dominant that you were lucky to get the game to overtime? And then here’s the part that NFL referees don’t want to hear: That was some bullshit calling the Saints on a false start with like 13 seconds left. It’s debatable whether they were really not set, and even so it was on a play to spike the ball, so it didn’t fucking matter in the slightest, and it’s a stupid and obscure rule anyway. The Saints deserved their chance to score a TD there, and I honestly believe they would have. And while that push-off couldn’t be overturned, it was a bad, bad move to decline to even take it to review, when the entire Saints fanbase feels like they’re the victim of a seasons-long conspiracy by the officiating office. What a shitshow. What an absolute shitshow.
Some Seahawks Bullshit Okay, so the shamrock is still up Seattle’s ass. One quarter into Carson Wentz’s debut he’s concussed by Jadeveon Clowney (not a dirty hit, don’t let anyone tell you it was a dirty hit). Josh McCown coming into the game gave me mixed feelings. On the one hand, it made it easier for the Seahawks to win. On the other hand, is beating Josh McCown really something to hang your hat on? Then again, McCown is by all accounts a great person who deserved to play a playoff game to end his pretty incredible career (with games for more teams than anyone but Vinny Testaverde and Ryan Fitzpatrick, I believe). But he was hardly set up for success, and Wentz also deserves playoff success. Still, I’ll take the win and the trip to Green Bay.
Postseason: 0-4 / 1-3 / -$10 Title Belt: BAL defended from PIT (9 week reign)
Round 1 the 4 seeds fall and the 3 seeds hold. In the AFC we get chalk in the championship but the Chiefs outsmart the Ravens again and get to the Super Bowl. In the NFC the Seahawks translate their chagrin at the way their regular season ended into a couple of close wins before a close loss in New Orleans. Drew Brees gets a ride-into-the-sunset finish and Michael Thomas becomes the first non-Steeler to win super bowl MVP as a wide receiver.
AWARDS MVP: Lamar Jackson – QB, BAL
Offensive Player of the Year: Michael Thomas – WR, NO
Defensive Player of the Year: Chandler Jones – OLB, ARI
Offensive Rookie of the Year: Kyler Murray – QB, ARI
Defensive Rookie of the Year: Nick Bosa – DE, SF
Coach of the Year: John Harbaugh – BAL
Comeback Player of the Year: Earl Thomas – FS, BAL
Dangersquirrel vs the NFL 