Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Bears!

Sucks for Luck.

If you guys can keep me updated on the New York Giants this season, that'd be great!

go 49 ers :)

Pats got it this year.

Tough start for my Packers, but it was a good game to listen to on the radio and the 49ers do sound like a strong team again this year.

On to Chicago next week, for one of the best rivalries of the entire league. Now if only we could get a running back...

Go Thundercats, go!

Yeehaaaw! Yippie-kay-ayeayeye, muthafucka!

Must be a CFL team....

mah man!

nor-cal representah!

Go Purple

My father raised me right. That is to say he raised me to be a Redskins fan. My entire adult life the Redskins have been basically cellar dwellers (save for one season each during the Turner and second Gibbs tenures).

I was overjoyed at the performance of the Redskins in New Orleans this past Sunday. Sure, Robert Griffin III looked great for a rookie quarterback in his first NFL start, but moreover the entire team (with the exception of special teams - there is work to be done there - that blocked punt was shameful) looked really, REALLY sharp. I'm really impressed with the rookie running back Alfred Morris. He looked great! Things are really looking up in Redskins Nation.

HAIL TO THE REDSKINS!
HAIL VICTORY!
BRAVES ON THE WARPATH!
FIGHT FOR OLD D.C.!

Rule one of Shanahan-coached teams: Don't get attached to your running backs.

Anyway, Broncos are the home team here so I have to say it: Peyton fucking Manning. You can take him out of the game, but you can't take the game out of him. He looked sharp out there, far sharper than the highlights shown on sports shows indicate, and he has plenty of weapons this season to choose from (the Manning-Decker combination in particular will be dangerous later on in the season, especially given Decker's ability to draw pass interference calls). It's nice to finally have a reason to cheer for the home team, and the whole thing is made a little sweeter by Tebow being a non-factor during the Jets game.

So true!

Got to say though the Broncos are looking pretty sharp this year. I'd say their definitely set to win the AFC West.

And nothing was sweeter than seeing the Saints get beat up by the Redskins yesterday. RG III looks awesome.

Pittsburgh Steelers !!

Reviving this thread for those who missed Monday Night Football.

Or more specifically, the borderline-comical events that occurred after the last play because of the replacement refs. The whole game was incredible up to that point; Seattle and Green Bay are probably my two favorite teams in the entire league, so watching the game turn into a defensive struggle with brief moments of incredible offense was fun. It felt like anyone's game.

Toward the end Seattle was down with a little time left on the clock. All the Packers had to do is hold them on defense. What ended up happening was that Seattle took a shot down the field and they called defensive pass interference despite the fact that it was blatantly offensive pass interference. Bad call by the refs, but it's hardly the first of those. The game goes on and it gets to the point where there's time for one more play in the game. Seattle takes a shot into the endzone and a number of things happen:

- Golden Tate (Seattle) pushes another player down, but it doesn't get called despite the referees being right there.

- M.D. Jennings (Green Bay) intercepts the ball, clearly gaining possession. Thing is, Golden Tate gets an arm on the ball around Jennings' body. If the two had caught the ball simultaneously it would default to being a touchdown, but since Jennings had it first and Tate barely had one arm on it, even at the end, it was an interception. This is when all hell broke loose. One official signaled touchdown, a second signaled touchback (for the interception), and a pile of players formed as people tried to figure out what the hell had happened. Eventually they called it a touchdown despite everyone watching on the television knowing otherwise, having seen the slow-motion replay.

- Things get even weirder after this. There's a booth review, it being a scoring play, but apparently replay officials don't have the authority to deal with issues of possession for some inexplicable reason, and the call is upheld on the field to the disgust of the announcers. Green Bay, obviously furious since they felt they got the ball despite not yet having seen the replay (Jennings supposedly told them that he got it), starts to leave the field. Seattle follows suit. Cameramen come on the field, interviews start being conducted, and all of this starts happening despite the fact that Seattle would have to kick an extra point if they had scored. At this point, no one has any idea what's happening. Everyone was kind of waiting for something to happen to fix the botched call that literally handed the game to the wrong team. Waiting for some kind of magical game-fixing fairy or something.

Eventually someone convinced the two teams to come back out, Seattle kicked the extra point, and the whole thing cut to postgame analysis, which started with a bunch of people sitting around as though they had just seen someone walk up with a knife and stab the integrity of the league in the throat. Angry on-the-air rants start. Twitter explodes in rage. Pundits sit around with wide eyes in uncharacteristic silence, speechless, only opening their mouths to explode about how the integrity of the very game has been compromised by the replacement officials.

Absolute insanity.

It was... bizarre for a football game. Being a Packer fan it should surprise none that I heartily disagree with those last couple calls but the final play, in particular, was a complete head-scratcher when speaking of the officiating. I could accept the call ten years ago. But with official review on every signaled touchdown? It should be "interesting" to hear the explanations from the NFL today...

The game itself, it was like watching three different games in one night: first half was all Seahawks (their defense was tight!), second half up until around 3:00 was all Pack (finally, a hint of a running game after all these years), and the last three minutes was a clinic on the two-minute drill.

Some really bad calls? Oh yeah, including the last few. But it was also filled with sloppy play from both teams. It seemed like every third play was flagged.

At the end of it all, I can only come up with this: while one can gripe about the refereeing with a whole lot of evidence to back up the argument, in this case it would have been moot if either team had simply played better. If the score at the last play was, say, 27-7 before the ball was thrown, no biggie. And either team was certainly capable of coming up with 27 points last night.

Oh - good luck to young Russell Wilson. He lit things up as a Badger and is sorely missed at Camp Randall Stadium this year.