Gross Football Lunch – NFL Week 13, 2023

Recipe of the Week: Bye Week Salad Kit

Ingredients:

• One of those salad kits that comes in a bag

Method & Analysis:

The sport of pro football and the culture around it are infused with a spirit of giddy excess, but at my age and in the context of the other facets of my lifestyle, indulging in such excess on a weekly basis in unsustainable. I can’t sit on the couch getting hammered, eating garbage, and watching the worst officiating I’ve ever seen (the mall cop vibes emanating from the refs intensify year after year) for 12 hours every Sunday, and quite frankly, I don’t want to. Sometimes the week’s slate of games sucks out loud, and even when it doesn’t, sitting down for every single game every single week can feel like homework this late in the season. Maybe I’d rather take a nap or play some Baldur’s Gate or simply follow my whims wherever they may lead me, you know? And while pigging out is fun, so is taking a dump without wondering if you need to see a doctor.

Fortunately, each and every football fan (except Rob Lowe) has a designated week of rest in the form of their favorite team’s bye week. Your team has the week off, which means that, as their ardent and loyal follower, you can take the week of from football yourself. Your engagement with the sport is free from obligation and emotional baggage. You can watch – or not watch – however many games you wish. It’s the perfect opportunity for the enlightened sports fan to disengage for a week.

This week’s recipe hardly counts as an actual recipe; rather, consider it a guide to an enlightened bye week experience. This is your week off, too. Let’s eat healthy, watch games if and only if we legitimately want to, and take the opportunity to contemplate our thoughts on feelings on the season so far, and our hopes and anxieties for the remainder of the season to come. First, let’s prep our salad kit. I guarantee your local supermarket’s produce section has a whole fridge case or two dedicated to salad kits that come in bag; pick whichever one you like, although keep in mind that some of them have a somewhat alarming amount of added sugars). Open your bag, dump the greens into a bowl, then open the little packets. Open the topping packets first and add them to your bowl, then add the dressing and stir everything together with a fork.

The resulting salad won’t be any sort of spectacular culinary revelations, but it will prove tasty enough while also being reasonably healthy; it will also prove to be a refreshing change of pace, and therefore serves as the perfect lunch for a day of rest and contemplation. To help you along on your path to tranquility and wisdom, I have prepared a small sampling of open-ended questions, designed to invite reflection and honest emotional contemplation of the current state of your football fandom. This is not an essay test; use these questions however you wish, or, if you feel confident in your ability to ask yourself meaningful questions without external prompting, go a head and do that, too.

• First and foremost, are you having fun watching your favorite team play football this season? How do you feel about your team’s performance this year? Are they playing well or playing poorly? Are they better or worse than their win-loss record, and if so, what reasons can you think of that may explain that discrepancy? How is the team performing relative to your personal preseason expectations, and to what extent do you think your emotional state regarding the team remains tied to those expectations?
• If your team is out of the playoff chase, what now? Are you going to watch your team’s games anyway? If not, are you giving any thought to hopping on a contender’s bandwagon for the rest of the year*? Are you mostly stepping away from the sport? Do you have any opinions on what the team needs to do to improve next year?
  • *Here, in brief, are my guidelines for joining a bandwagon:
    • Pick a team you think is fun to watch!
    • Also, pick a team you think has a reasonable chance of making a deep playoff run. Since the point of joining a bandwagon is to have some emotional investment in the rest of the season without the full commitment you give to your own team, I don’t recommend going into Super Bowl-or-bust mode with your bandwagon, but you do you.
    • As long as you think they’re fun to watch, don’t worry about being a front-runner. You’re doing this for you!
    • Ideally, your bandwagon team will be in the other conference, but it doesn’t have to be.
    • If you’re unable to choose a single team, that’s fine! Come up with a short list of possible bandwagon teams, and check in with each until you can whittle that list down.
• If your team is a non-contender with a shot at the playoffs, what do you want out of the remaining season? If your team misses the playoffs, will you be disappointed (and if so, how much), or is it not that big a deal? Does analyzing playoff scenarios make you feel better or worse? If they do make the playoffs, how deep of a run do you expect them to make? How disappointed will you be if the team makes the playoffs but is eliminated in the Wild Card round? Do you think they have a realistic shot at making a Cinderella run this postseason? Do you think the team is close to true contention?
• If your team is a true playoff contender, how are you holding up? What proportion of your emotional composition is genuinely enthusiastic excitement, and what proportion is nervous excitement? Realistically, how far in the playoffs will they go? Will you be OK if they are eliminated early? Are there any specific teams you’re worried about meeting in the playoffs, and if so, what makes that team a bad matchup in your eyes? How much winning do you expect in the seasons to come? Are you worried this is the last year of a Super Bowl window?

The bye week is your time. What matters most is that you are making some space in your emotional life to reflect on how your feelings about football affect the whole of your emotional well-being. We all have to take care of ourselves, and part of taking care of yourself is being ready, willing, and able to think about your feelings in concrete emotional terms. If you set aside your sports emotions from your other ones, you are doing yourself a disservice. Whatever you do with your bye week, don’t leave your inner batteries running! Make sure you give them a recharge.

Week 13 NFL Confidence Pool

Well, this is embarrassing.

Putting this column together requires doing basic arithmetic. I’m not going to bullshit you and claim this arithmetic is at all strenuous or complicated; all I have to do is add up my point totals (although actually, because I am nothing if not smugly clever, I calculate each week’s point total by subtracting my losses from the weekly total) and divide to get the percentages. It’s easy, and Windows calculator does it for me. However, for reasons I cannot possibly remember, I somehow have listed the total points available for a 14-game slate as 106 when it is, in fact, 105 on four separate occasions this season – in my columns for weeks 8, 10, 11, and 12 – and have also incorporated this botch in to the season point total. D’oh!

This has been corrected in this week’s column; the season point total below is true and accurate, I think. Frankly, this whole incident has left me unsure if I can count to 14. Ideally, I’ll be able to, at some point, go back into those previous columns and correct those totals, but this requires issuing an individual correction in each column, and my time is such that I’m not sure I’ll ever get around to that. I’ll do my best, but if it doesn’t happen I hope this mea culpa is sufficient.

With that out of the way, let me check in on my Week 12 picks. Not great, but also not terrible; once again, I have successfully kept almost all of my whiffs quarantined in the lower point assignments. It’s not ideal to have this many whiffs in the first place, of course, but frankly given the amount of thought I put into the week it’s better than I deserve so I’m not going to complain too much. To the picks!

Week 12 Correct Picks: 10/16 (0.625)

Season Total Correct Picks: 127/180 (0.706)

Week 12 Points: 103/136 (0.757)

Season Total Points: 1,108/1,450 (0.764)

Bye: Bears, Bills, Giants, Raiders, Ravens, Vikings

13 Points: Dolphins over Commanders

12 Points: Chiefs over Packers

This week, while the laws of mathematics dictate that I must assign double-digit points to four games, the fact of the matter is I only see two teams that can be trusted with them. The Dolphins are going to punch their way down all the way to the playoffs (I know it might not sound like a compliment, but since there’s no honor in football it absolutely is one), and Washington is taking one last nosedive before the real work post-Synder rebuilding can begin in earnest.

After Thanksgiving, I am ever so nervously keeping an eye on the Packers; I’m beginning to fear Jordan Love – and, by extension, the rest of the team – is becoming competent, and competent is all that will be required to grab the seventh seed in the NFC. That hardly matters this week though. Even on the road, the Chiefs’ defense will rip Jordan Love’s intestines out, and the Packers’ defense streak of perennial disappointment is well into its second decade.

11 Points: Cowboys over Seahawks

10 Points: Lions over Saints

9 Points: Jaguars over Bengals

8 Points: Steelers over Cardinals

7 Points: 49ers over Eagles

6 Points: Broncos over Texans

With only two teams worthy of double digits, this week’s Tier of Suspicion and Mistrust is alarmingly large for a 13-game slate. The Cowboys themselves may have put the Cardinals and 49ers embarrassments behind them, but I haven’t! They get this many points because let’s face it, they’re playing well for the most part, and the Seahawks are stuck in their own little funk. I have no idea to what extent I wish to overreact to last week’s Lions loss. On the one hand, losing by one score to a division rival – even one that isn’t nearly as good on paper – happens to most very team now and again. On the other, we all saw that game and I think we can agree it wasn’t half as close as the final score indicated. The good news is that the Saints cannot and will not be able to exploit Detroit’s many and various defensive deficiencies.

Really, I should probably flip the Jags and Lions assignments, but I’m holding off for a couple of reasons. The first is that I don’t think the Jags are an actual, overwhelming contender; the second is that I’m not confident in my assessment of the post-Burrow Bengals. I expect them to tumble out of the playoff chase, but maybe they’re still somewhat competent? I need more data before I can put big points against them. And I know this sounds like a truly weird thing to say about a 2-win team, but I’m also not sure what to make of the Cardinals now that Kyler is back, and more importantly, I still think the Steelers can lose to anybody, pending an audit of their post-Matt Canada offense.

As tends to happen with the big game each week, I don’t wanna go big on the 49ers because really, my pick here is rather vibes-based. I just think they’re a better team. It is incorrect to call the Eagles frauds – they absolutely can and may yet win the Super Bowl – but when forced to pick between a team that can win big and a team that seems to play everyone close, I’m taking the former every time. Loyal readers of this column may note that I’ve become fond of picking against the Texans in recent weeks, and I want to explain myself. I’m truly happy for the team and the fans; their long suffering has been well documented, and they appear to be set up well for years of success. But – and I must acknowledge that this is boomer-coded as hell – I also view them as a young team that’s destined to struggle from time to time, especially against a team like the Broncos. Their defensive turnaround is complete, and Sean Payton has fully returned to form as the meanest coach in the game. The ugliness of their winning streak is a feature, not a bug.

5 Points: Chargers over Patriots

4 Points: Titans over Colts

3 Points: Rams over Browns

2 Points: Buccaneers over Panthers

1 Point: Falcons over Jets

I only care to discuss these picks insofar as it gives me an excuse to talk about the Chargers and Browns, so that’s all I’m going to bother with. Their collapse is all but complete and Brandon Staley is a dead coach walking, but I’m having trouble regarding them as a truly bad team even though their record is dire. My point is that this assignment is inherently contradictory. I want to give any Patriots opponent with a modicum of talent more points than this, and yet, the more I consider the state of the Chargers, the more 5 points starts to feel like too many.

As far as the Browns go, both the pick and assignment here scan as incredibly disrespectful on first glance. This is because I have no respect for the Browns, who are about to go headfirst to the commode. You can’t win on the strength of a nuclear defense fueled by an All-Universe edge rusher when said edge rusher is playing with a messed-up shoulder.

Enjoy the games, everyone!