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Football season kicked off last night. I missed the game, at work all night, but I'm excited for my Philadelphia Eagles to kick off in Brazil tonight.
How're my fellow sports fans on the motte feeling about their teams this season? Any degens placing longshot parlays this week?
I'm thinking that by week 8, most predictions in this Eagles team are going to look pretty stupid. Last season they were the best team in the sport for half a season and the worst team in the sport for half a season. The spine of the team is pretty much the same. They swapped out OC and DC but kept the same head coach. They've added several young defensive backs and a few veteran linebackers, lost their most dangerous edge rusher and a team legend; they swapped out a Hall of Fame center but they had an in house heir so they just needed a new right guard, and signed a star running back they're hoping isn't old. At the end of the day the most important question is at quarterback, has the league figured out Jalen Hurts? If he collapses under blitzing every time, the rest is academic. Their outcomes seem likely to again be binary, but a lot of power rankings hedge by placing them in the middle. I wouldn't bet the o/u of 10.5 wins either way comfortably, but one could probably make money betting tail odds of over 12.5 wins and under 6.5 wins. This is either a team with a ridiculous unguardable number of offensive weapons or a team with no answer to extra pressure.
Professional football prognosticators seem to be more fickle than normal lately. The Eagles had a bad end to the season but I'm not going to throw them under the bus and say that a season and a half (plus the improved season before that) was all a lucky fluke just because of a half-dozen games. The Gnats are terrible. The Commanders get hyped every year but never seem to go anywhere. That leaves the Eagles and the Cowboys, and the Cowboys will probably choke. At the very least, they don't deserve to win anything. For some reason their fans hate Dak. Everyone keeps saying Zeke is washed, but he's still better than the guy backing him up. They have a good defense, but Micah Parsons is unhappy. I don't know what to make of this. The Eagles have as good a chance as they do.
I'm going to ping @Walterodim so I can consolidate my responses here. I have Josh Allen as my dynasty league QB so I'm totally biased, and I've always liked the Bills. I have a theory about QBs like Allen and Mahomes; when you combine guys this good with really good coaching, it doesn't matter who the receivers are. In a sense this is the ideal play because they can't just shadow your top guy all day. Tom Brady won all of his Super Bowls in such a system — everyone forgets this, but the only wideout to ever make the Pro Bowl on a Patriots Super Bowl team was Troy Brown in 2001 (and that was his only Pro Bowl). Randy Moss and Wes Welker had better careers, but neither won a Super Bowl. The Bills' defensive injuries are more of a concern but it seems like they always have a ton of defensive injuries. Speaking of the Patriots, they're in a rebuild and are expecting to be so bad that they're easing Drake Maye into the QB role even though he's obviously better than Brissett. The Dolphins are the kind of team with an "explosive" offense that wins games by hanging a ton of points on shitty teams. But they can't beat anyone good. Their defense relies on the offense keeping them off the field. As for the Jets, it's all hype. The offense assumes a 76-year-old Aaron Rogers will be back in hall-of-fame condition after being injured for a year. I predict he gets injured again and we get to see Tyrod Taylor. Their defense boils down to "we have Sauce Gardner", and they can't stop the run. Breece Hall is good, but so was Travis Henry. Bills win this division easily.
Pinging @Hoffmeister25. The only thing the Chargers have going for them is that they're clearly better than the Raiders and Broncos, so they should coast to an easy second place finish. If two things are certain it's that Jim Harbaugh will run the ball, and J.K. Dobbins will get injured, so be ready to see a lot of the Gus Bus. The Jags briefly looked like they had their act together, but that remains to be seen. The Texans should easily win this division, but their only two years removed from being the second worst team in the league, and as a Jags fan you should know what that means. Hell, as a Chargers fan you should know what early hype combined with limited success can lead to. Granted, the Texans looked more put-together last year than the Jags or the Chargers ever did, but I'm not about to crown them kings of the division, either. The Colts could also pose a problem, but I'm not a fan of overhyped QBs like Anthony Richardson and Michael Pittman, Jr. always underperforms expectations in fantasy, so I'm rooting to see Joe Fluke-O lose another wild card game. The Titans are an interesting story. They deserve to lose for tearing down a stadium that isn't that old to build a taxpayer-funded dome in a city with mild weather. They also have a history of disrespecting the Terrible Towel, and their best season in the past 20 years was with Kerry Collins at quarterback. Honestly, this division could go in any direction.
And now for my Steelers. Over the offseason, they took the bold step of replacing the frustration of a mediocre quarterback with the frustration of two mediocre quarterbacks. As they can't help but repeat in every broadcast, Mike Tomlin has never had a losing season. Every year some edgy sportswriter picks them to go 5–12 or some bullshit without realizing that that isn't possible. No matter how dire things seem, if there's one thing the Steelers are capable of it's battling back from a terrible season to have a chance to make the playoffs with a Steelers win AND a Jaguars loss, AND a Chargers loss, AND a Browns–Bengals tie, only for every leg of this impossible parlay to happen except the part where the Steelers beat the 2–14 Texans. Or, alternatively, they make the playoffs but are so outclassed they lose 45–15. After experiencing two Super Bowl wins I have resigned myself to this fate. But the sportswriters are still idiots; this team is better in every dimension than they were last year, but they're predicted to do worse. Some of this has to do with the brutal schedule, but they have one of the best defenses in the league and everyone forgets that last year they were 7–4 after Thanksgiving despite not scoring any points and would have easily cruised into the playoffs if it weren't for three fabulous weeks of Mitch Trubisky. The idea that Russell Wilson and Justin Fields can be written off entirely after a combined three minutes of preseason play is absurd. Seriously, there's absolutely no correlation between the preseason and regular season so commentators just need to stop acting like there is.
The division is interesting. The Ravens are clearly the best team, but the Steelers should have no problem beating them twice so long as Lamar stays healthy. I used to like Joe Burrow but I lost all respect for him when he showed up to the Super Bowl in that horrible suit (and had to wear it to the press conference since he forgot to bring anything else). Supposedly he's oblivious to fashion so he lets Ja'Marr Chase pick his clothes for him. Most people know that there are certain clothes that white guys can't pull off. Unfortunately, "most people" does not include stylish black guys, who tend to uncritically assume that their approach works for everybody. When Ryan Fitzpatrick showed up at a press conference wearing DeSean Jackson's clothes everybody in the press laughed because they knew it was obviously a joke. No one laughs about Burrow's sartorial choices because they know he's oblivious and it would just hurt his feelings. Anyway, they have a questionable running game and their defense might be worse than the Chargers. These are the kinds of teams the Steelers beat easily since they can't stay competitive unless they score 500 points. The Browns are always the Browns. I'll admit that they have a good defense. But DeSean Watson is terrible enough that they signed ALL the quarterbacks. Nick Chubb won't be his old self coming off of injury and will be worse than Jerome Ford was in his last game before Chubb came back, but not so much worse that they can make Ford the starter. These defensive battles are tossups so the Steelers should split this with them. You can throw darts at a board for the rest of the games because some bullshit always happens.
Prediction: They enter divisional play in last place with a 3–6 record against a shit schedule and everyone starts talking about how the schedule is so tough (all divisional plus Eagles and Chiefs) that there's no way they can possibly come back and Tomlin needs to go, etc. This whole affair involves repeated benchings of both Wilson and Fields and at least one disastrous Kyle Allen start. And then they sign Ryan Tannehill because he knows the "Arthur Smith offense" and they win 7 of their last 8 thorough some combination of the following: Injuries to opposing QBs who aren't Lamar Jackson, fluke plays, missed field goals, questionable penalties, TJ Watt fumble recoveries for TD, Minkah pick-6s, the Eagles starting Kenny Pickett, and at least one Calvin Austin jet sweep. They will then lose to the Browns in the first round of the playoffs in a game so badly played it's nearly unwatchable.
Replacing three mediocre quarterbacks.
Trubisky was well below mediocre.
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