Gross Football Lunch – 2023-24 NFL Divisional Round

Recipe of the Week: Chicken!

Ingredients:

• Whole chicken
• Kosher salt
• Pepper
• Olive oil
• Lemon
• Fresh thyme

Method & Analysis:

It’s finally time for the Gross Football Lunch chicken roasting party! Let us celebrate the bounteous glory of the Divisional Round – which is once again comprised of 100% pure, uncut on-paper bangers – with one of the very greatest comfort foods known to humanity.

However, it is also finally time to inform you that I can take absolutely no credit for the chicken-roasting method contained herein. What follows is instead an explication of the ‘Simplest Roast Chicken’ recipe found in Mark Bittman’s absolutely goddamn indispensable cookbook How to Cook Everything. If you have any interest in cooking whatsoever, I highly encourage you to obtain a copy from your local bookstore, an institution that deserves your support a hell of a lot more than Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or that one Borders out in the Alaskan wilderness that only remains open because they physically can’t receive communications from anyone or anything outside a 50-mile radius (that I just made up).

How to Cook Everything lives up to its title not by providing recipes for each and every single recipe you can possibly think of, but by providing both a shockingly large amount of specific recipes and an easy-to-follow framework for how to cook basically every ingredient you can think of. In other words, even in the rare cases when a specific recipe is missing from this book, you can still use it to arm yourself with cooking knowledge that will point you directly towards being able to make that recipe, anyway. Again, I implore everyone who doesn’t have a copy to purchase one.

That said, as the book covers so much ground in such a relatively efficient package, it does not always have time to get into the weeds. Therefore, I am combining the twin powers of Citing and Crediting My Sources as Aggressively as Possible and Providing Extra Details + Troubleshooting Tips to convince myself (and quite possibly no one else) that this recipe isn’t a wanton act of premeditated plagiarism. Go buy the damn book!

Got it? Good, now let’s talk about chicken roasting. I know I said I want to make my recipes accessible to all, regardless of available kitchen implements, and I know I haven’t always done a great job of adhering to that, but for this recipe I strongly encourage you to have both an instant-read cooking thermometer and a cast-iron skillet at your disposal. If you don’t have a cast-iron skillet, any oven-safe cooking dish will do; if you don’t have a thermometer, you will be stuck checking your chicken visually. Visual chicken checking sucks mondo ass, but I’ll talk you through it anyway, because I’m nice.

Absolutely no later than six hours prior to your intended serving time, check your acquired chicken to make sure it is fully thawed. Grab it out of the fridge and run your hands all the way around it through the packaging; if parts of it feel frozen, it’s because they’re frozen.

If you don’t feel any frozen parts, feel free to skip to the next two paragraphs. If your chicken is frozen, here’s what to do. Open the packaging and place the unwrapped chicken in a container that will contain all of the vile, fetid raw chicken juices, then inspect the cavity. Most whole chickens are packaged with the chicken giblets, which are usually contained in a thin plastic bag stuffed inside the bird’s cavity. Since this bag is in the middle of the bird, it’s the last part to thaw, and 9 times out of 10 if you have a chicken that has been in the fridge for days (or perhaps wasn’t ever in your freezer in the first place) but still hasn’t thawed out, this bag will be the culprit. Pull the bag out and either discard the giblets or save them to make your own chicken stock (a noble pursuit that I would like to discuss someday but will not be covering in this week’s recipe).

If there isn’t anything to yank out of the cavity, good news! Your next step is the same anyway. Leave the chicken outside the fridge for approximately 3 hours, or until fully thawed! Cover the chicken if you must to protect it from pets and local critters, but do not put it back in the fridge until you are absolutely goddamn certain the bird is fully thawed!

Whether you had to deal with a frozen chicken situation or not, it’s now time to fast forward to absolutely no later than two hours prior to your intended serving time. Haul your chicken out of the fridge and, using either paper towels or washable cloths, pat every single square millimeter of the beast dry, both on the outside and inside of the cavity. A dry chicken is a crispy chicken, and a crispy chicken is a tasty chicken.

Next, place a hefty amount of kosher salt and black pepper in a dish. This will keep the salt and pepper separate from their relatives in their respective containers, and therefore obviate the need to get fussy about which hands may or may not have touched raw chicken. Skip this step, and you’re gonna need to wash your hands every single goddamn time you need more of either seasoning, because the alternative is cross-contaminating your most important flavorings with raw chicken nast, and that cannot be tolerated.

Once your seasoning apparatus has been filled, cover the entire chicken with salt and pepper and rub it into the skin, leaving absolutely no square centimeter unspared from your salty wrath. This will require pulling the wings and thighs away from the main body so you can get into those crevasses. Once your chicken is fully seasoned, leave it out of the fridge for one hour so that it may come to room temperature, covering if necessary to keep the ants/crickets/mosquitoes/dogs from getting any fanciful ideas of ruining your dinner.

It’s time to roast the chicken! Make sure your oven racks are placed far enough apart to accommodate your bird, then preheat your oven to 450º F. If you have a cast-iron skillet, place it in the oven now, so that it heats up while the oven does; this will crisp up the bottom of the chicken nicely. Unfortunately, I don’t have intelligence on whether or not this step is worth keeping if you’re not using cast-iron. My gut and my experience tell me if it has a continuous, flat surface (such as a Dutch oven) it probably is, but if doesn’t (such as a roasting pan with a rack), it probably isn’t. Surface area is the name of the game here. Without a flat, continuous surface, preheating will not produce a thoroughly crispy bottom skin layer, which is the whole point.

Either way, it’s time to finalize roasting prep while the oven preheats. Cut one lemon in half and stuff it in the cavity, along with a few sprigs of fresh thyme. Then, cover the entire outside (top and bottom) of the chicken with olive oil and rub it in a bit. Once your oven is preheated, place your chicken in your roasting gadget breast side up. (If you don’t know what breast side up is, refer to the above picture; that’s breast side up; you’ll now it’s breast side up when it looks exactly like just about every picture of a roast chicken you’ve ever seen.) If your gadget is screaming hot because it’s been in a 450º F oven for 10ish minutes, remember to be careful when handling! Use oven mitts, and don’t try to do too much at once. Remove your skillet, set it down fully, then place the chicken on it.

Once the chicken is oven, good news! Almost all of the work is done. Set a timer for 45 minutes; after 45 minutes, it’s going to be time to check the temperature. Here I must make time for a brief discourse on chicken sizes. For the present purpose, there are essentially two different sizes of chicken. There are your smaller, nicer, but also more expensive chickens (these are usually 4ish pounds), and there are your colossal, bloated, but cheaper and more commonly found supermarket chickens (these can be as large as 6 or even 7 pounds). If you have managed to acquire a smaller, better chicken, it’s quite possible your chicken will be fully cooked after 45 minutes, especially if you let it come to room temperature. If you have larger chicken, it may take a whole hour or more to fully cook. Check after 45 minutes in either case.

Once the timer goes off, it’s time to check your chicken! Pull it out of the oven, and insert your thermometer into the thickest part of the thigh, and let the business end of your thermometer rest approximately halfway between the top of the chicken and the bottom. If you don’t know what the thickest part of the thigh is, refer to the circles in the below picture:

Your chicken is cooked when a thermometer placed halfway through the thickest part of the thigh registers 155º F-165º F. White meat cooks faster than dark meat, so if your thigh reading is within this range you don’t need to check the breast. If the thigh meat is cooked, so is the breast meat.

If you are bereft of a thermometer, you will have to check the chicken visually. Pry one of the thighs away from the body, so that the meat is exposed. Check to make sure that all of the meat is brown, with absolutely no pink, except for right where the thigh bone socket connects to the body; this are will remain reddish even if you cooked your chicken with a functional replica of the Tsar Bomba. Since you don’t have an exact reading in this scenario, I also recommend checking the breast. Grab a knife and cut straight down as close to and as parallel to the breastbone as you possibly can, and cut all the way down, too. Make sure that the entirety of the breast is white, with absolutely no pink.

If your chicken isn’t done, sock it back in the oven and check the temperature again (either visually or with a thermometer) once every five minutes. Once your chicken is very definitely done, bring it out of the oven and let it rest for 15 minutes. After the 15 minutes are up, it’s time to eat!

If you’re willing and able, I highly recommend you carve the chicken first; that said, I am not good enough at chicken carving to have any of my own wisdom to impart. Instead, enjoy this instructional video. That said, this is a judgment free zone, so if you want to go to straight to town and can’t be bothered with any more work, go for it! You’ve earned it, and you have my blessing. Dig in!

Wild Card Weekend Results

Pool Points Won: 43

Pool Points Lost: 35

Differential: +8

Record Against the Spread: 4-2

As I sat and watched the Cowboys get absolutely rinsed on Sunday, I was overcome with three distinct forms of despair. I am not any sort of fan of the Dallas Cowboys, and had they eaten this much shit against any other team in the NFC, I would’ve been able to enjoy their humiliation as much as anyone else. But instead, they lost and lost horrifically to the Green Bay fucking Packers, who are now undeniably ‘back’ despite having never gone away in any meaningful sense. Every fan of every other NFC North team has given themselves comfort in the knowledge that someday, the Packers fan will come to know true despair. I am now compelled to admit, both to myself and to anyone else who will listen, that not only is that day over a decade away in the best case scenario, I have come to doubt its very existence. They’ll win the division 75-85% of the time until the sport is outlawed or the missiles start flying, and we all just have to learn to live with that.

The second form of despair was good, old-fashioned impostor syndrome. After both the Cowboys’ humiliation and the Browns’ pantsing the day previous, my own ball knowledge became a matter of direct question. Those two teams were my 11 and 9-point assignments; basic counting tells you that, therefore, I needed the Browns to win once and the Cowboys to win twice. Losing the points is bad enough, but more importantly, how in the hell did I not see this coming!? I’ve made no secret of the fact that, while I enjoy studying game film and learning about the sport and its workings in granular detail, I only have the time I have, and ultimately, writing is my hobby, not my job. I can only succeed as a football prognosticator when I take a look at the big picture, and isolate glaringly obvious reasons a team will win or lose.

This means I have absolutely no business putting Mike McCarthy down for two playoff wins. His very presence on the sideline in a big game is as obvious as warnings get. If I make even one more pick this idiotic, I may need to stop trying to make pool picks for real and start making absurdist anti-picks for the real heads to gawk at. But in order to make good absurdist picks, I have to know what constitutes an absurd pick, and how can I know what constitutes an absurd pick when I sincerely put Mike McCarthy down for two playoff wins!?!? The cause is hopeless.

Finally, the Packers’ win was the first time in playoff history that the 7-seed emerged victorious, meaning this boil upon the ass of the playoffs itself has had its existence validated and we’re stuck with it forever (until the league inevitably expands to a 16-team format). We were always stuck with it forever, of course, but one of the many lies I enjoy telling myself is that we could’ve gone back to the honest, god-fearing 12-team format with a few more years of unwatchable 7-seed futility. That’s obviously a silly notion indeed; I have about as much control over the league’s decision-making as I do the games themselves. Therefore, I’m going to have to yell at Roger Goodell at the top of my lungs every time I see him on the TV until I see results, dammit!

While I am still shaking off the feelings of despair and inadequacy, last weekend wasn’t all bad news. The Bills beat the spread and the Rams covered. 4-2 was the best record I could’ve realistically hoped for, given my ghastly lifetime spread betting record and how little effort I put into making my picks in the first place (go after me for dogging it if you must, but deep down we both know that picking the ponies is the only real game of skill). Also, 43 pool points is more than I thought I was going to get when I was at the nadir of my sorrow, so that’s nice if you ignore the paltry differential. And why shouldn’t I? It’s time to think positive an manifest success before I suffer through another weekend of getting my teeth kicked in.

Divisional Round Picks

All lines pulled from ESPN at 8:30 AM Eastern Time on Thursday, January 18th, 2024.

My pick for each game, and the relevant spread, is always listed first. Home teams are displayed in bold.

–Baltimore Ravens (-9) over Houston Texans

The Texans have been kicking my ass all season. First, I was too late to abandon my preseason hypothesis that they would be frisky and demonstrate an upward trajectory while also being terrible. Then, once the wins and the C.J. Stroud highlights became too much to ignore, I spent most weeks picking against them in the confidence pool anyway, on the grounds that this was going to be the week where a tough, veteran team makes life hell for the young lions. Once the Texans started winning those games, too, I finally started regarding them as legit, and began picking them from time to time. Naturally, I did so in the weeks where they finally did decide to lose.

This brought me almost, but not quite full circle. I went into last week saying that the tough, veteran Browns were going to make life hell for the young Texans, and I paid the price. Now, I am forced to pick against them again, even though they’re getting a lot more points. On top of that, I still can’t fully shake the Ravens’ 2019 Divisional exit. We all thought that team was unstoppable, too.

But, once again, I need to hand out some calm reminders to myself and everyone else as to why this Ravens team is different. First, I must reiterate that they have actual wide receivers and an actual offensive coordinator. Greg Roman and his clown car playbook of designed quarterback runs and read options were never going to be able to overcome a multi-score deficit in January. A multi-score deficit is no trouble at all for Todd Monken, who can dial up actually viable passing concepts designed to target actually viable outside receivers.

Lest I make this all about coaching like an asshole, I must also reiterate that Lamar Jackson has achieved true quarterback enlightenment. He can hit anybody running any route, while throwing off of any platform, and when he needs to extend plays, he does it more intelligently than anyone, including Mahomes and Allen. Forget about the game slowing down – Lamar Jackson is playing turn-based football right now.

If that’s not enough to talk you into the Ravens, I must also remind you that while the Texans have a lot going for them, they do not have any single game-wrecking player on par with 2019 Derrick Henry. Nor is the Ravens defense the sort to surrender a multi-score deficit in the first place. They are not just succeeding, but thriving, using the only defensive scheme that matters. They run whatever they think is going to work best, and they’re usually right. And, as great as Stroud is already, asking a rookie to make consistent plays on the road against blitz after blitz after blitz is a tall ask.

In short, there are reasons upon reasons upon reasons why the Ravens have been crushing every opponent into a thin paste lately, even the good ones. 9 points is nothing.

-Packers (+9) over 49ers

Yeah, I know the 49ers aren’t any slouches either, but in this case 9 points ins entirely too many for me. Name an advantage the 49ers seem to have over the Packers, and I’ll tell you why I’m concerned it doesn’t matter. Ok, I will grant you that the 9ers are far, far less likely to look past the Packers and/or fold quickly under duress (or whatever brusque, couch dad-coded explanation you want to offer up to the explain the Cowboys disaster). But when it comes to on the field considerations, I don’t think this game is nearly the blowout this line suggests.

Are the 49ers the more complete team, on both sides of the ball? Yes, absolutely. But at a bare minimum, the Packers proved they must be taken seriously, and taking the Packers seriously requires unpacking what goes into San Francisco’s holistic superiority, and determining where the constituent elements of this superiority may backfire or fail outright. I’m going to start by examining Jordan Love’s prospects against the 49ers defense. Love obviously played out of his fucking mind on Sunday, and yes, part of that was exploiting multiple coverage busts, but that wasn’t the whole.
Love also made some great throws, extended plays, and handled the rare pressure admirably.

In short, Jordan Love checked all of the Playoff QB boxes. And yes, San Francisco had a better defense than Dallas, but not by much; the 9ers finished 4th in defensive DVOA with -9.6%, and the Cowboys finished 5th with -8.7%. Explain the Cowboys’ collapse with whatever phrasing of ‘lack of preparation’ you choose, but if the Packers could do that against Dallas, it’s possible they could do it against San Francisco, too.

All of that being said, there’s also the matter of the 49ers’ offense vs. the Packers’ defense, and I must concede that the 49ers win this match-up, full stop. It is all but impossible to envision Green Bay’s once again highly suspect defense being able to stop McCaffrey, Samuel, Kittle, and Aiyuk all at once, and it’s quite possible that offense will hum just by running all of their usual stuff. While I’ve managed to make it this far into the season without doing a discourse on Brock Purdy, I think that’s a mistake to sell his accomplishments short as either the product of superior weaponry or superior schemelording. He played better this year than Handsome Jimmy G ever did, and success creates success.

To sum up, yes, the 49ers are better in every way on paper, but this game isn’t played on paper. No matter how you view his performance against Dallas, Love has the tools and weapons he needs to avoid getting blown out entirely, and he could easily turn this game into a shootout. Therefore, 9 points is way, way too much for me, even if I grant the 9ers got this.

Buccaneers (+6.5) over Lions

Again, this line is just too damn high. I know we’ve all had a good time disrespecting Tampa and the NFC South this year, and rightly so. The fact that they feasted on Philly’s putrescent pre-carcass does not change that. But the Bucs are a bad matchup for Detroit, in the purest (or near to purest) sense of the term. Detroit’s pass defense is absolutely dire; Matt Stafford and Puka Nacua’s vainglorious fireworks last week were absolutely no accident. Yes, Baker Mayfield isn’t particularly scary by himself, but a quarterback doesn’t need to be scary to find Mike Evans and Chris Godwin open downfield against this secondary.

In order to win, the Lions will have to execute their ball-control offense to the hilt, and punch the ball into the endzone, too. Anything less than clock strangulating drives that also end in touchdowns will leave the defense vulnerable to comebacks it cannot realistically stand to weather, even with Aidan Hutchinson adding his usual 2-3 sizzle-reel worthy plays.

And this, of course, assumes that the Lions will be able to get out in front in the first place. Tampa’s defense remains nasty and Todd Bowles remains a stone cold psychopath as a defensive playcaller (and make no mistake, I say that entirely as a compliment). If Jared Goff is forced to drop back repeatedly, either because the run game isn’t working or because the leaky defense put them in a hole, the game could get out of control in a hurry.

But it’s not all doom and gloom for the Lions, even if that does happen. Their offensive line is outstanding and may be able to withstand repeated blitzing and games up front. Amon Ra St. Brown made First Team All-Pro for a reason. Stopping the Lions on the ground is easier said than done, even for a run defense as good as Tampa’s. Dan Campbell might make multiple calls that are just crazy enough to work if their backs are against the wall. And of course, the Lions beat the snot out of the Buccaneers in the regular season, so it’s possible I’m talking them up entirely too much, and finding ways to corroborate my vibes-based distrust (these are the Lions we’re talking about). I’m still taking the points, though.

Chiefs (+3) over Bills

Finally, we come to the weekend’s main event, quite possibly the closest the NFL has ever come to a rivalry on par with that of Mitsuharu Misawa and Kenta Kobashi. Obviously, unlike their classic from two years ago, both of these teams come into this game with very obvious flaws, but I would like to take this opportunity to submit that this means the probability of a tight, wire-to-wire battle is greater, not lesser. I hate to go so far as to expect a thriller; in real sports, classics are a rare thing indeed. Someone almost always puts out of reach with plenty of time left.

I could spend another few thousand words dissecting specific matchups in this game, whether between specific position groups or even specific individuals. But I’m tempted to say that’s missing the point. I’m taking the Chiefs though. I don’t know that they’re going to win, and I’m not even all that sure they’ll cover. But what I do know is that, as an uniformed and inexperienced spread bettor, my final fallback is cowardice. Suppose I were to peer into the void and determine that, across all possible versions of this game, the Bills win and cover in 98% of all such games, and the Chiefs only do so in 2%.

Mathematically, taking Bills would be the obvious choice. You know what numbers are. But, if that 2% were to hit, I would spend the rest of eternity berating myself. Let me get this straight, one more time: I picked against Patrick Mahomes!? And Andy Reid!? In the playoffs!? What was I thinking!?!?!?

Enjoy the games, everyone!