Gross Football Lunch – 2024-25 Conference Championship

Recipe of the Week: Vibes-Based Meatballs

But you know what’s really not all that hard? Making your own meatballs. It’s so easy; all you have to do is combine some ground meat with a handful of other ingredients – most of which you probably have lying around in your pantry already – then roll them into geometric forms that could broadly be said to resemble balls, then cook them just about any old way you choose. (Except boiling, I guess. Don’t boil your meatballs.) Ultimately, meatballs are just about impossible to screw up. If you have meat, and if you have the other stuff, and you cook them thoroughly, the worst possible result will still taste pretty darn good. And this will be true even if your methods are less than precise; over the course of this recipe, I will instruct you, again and again, to listen to the vibes. (Vibes!) Let the vibes (Vibes!) be your guide! Take a deep breath or 12, calm yourself down, put your apron on, and let’s get to it. Relax. You got this. The vibes (Vibes!) guarantee triumph.

First off, wash your hands. Over the course of meatball mixing and assembly, you will handle raw meat again and again and again. Wash your hands, and make sure to rinse and dry them as thoroughly as possible, lest you and your loved ones detect a hint of hand soap in their dinner. Make sure your hands are clean before you start! If you need to take a break and wash because all this raw meat on your hands is just so slimy and disgusting and you can’t even do any of this for one more single lousy second until all this crap is off your hands – not that I would know anything about this sort of aversion – feel free to do so, but remember to rinse and dry thoroughly.

Now let’s talk meat. In many cases, meatballs are made with ground beef and ground beef only, which is a bit boring for my tastes. If you insist on 100% beef meatballs, I will not stop you, but I will observe you silently but unflinchingly, my countenance broadcasting mild but firm disapproval. You will have much better meatballs if you add in an equal amount of either ground pork or ground veal. Ground pork is cheap will vary up the flavor, whereas ground veal will help your finished meatballs achieve a pleasingly uniform texture but may require you to take out multiple payday loans and/or cultivate a side-hustle as a purveyor of expired prescription opiates.

Whatever meat you are using, dump it into the very largest mixing bowl available. Next, mince a few cloves of garlic as finely as you can, and add them to the bowl. How much garlic should you use? Don’t ask me! Consult the vibes! (Vibes!) Next, add some breadcrumbs to your bowl. You can spring for the nice Panko breadcrumbs if you want, but this is also a fine time to use cheaper, finer breadcrumbs. How many should you add? Consult the vibes! (Vibes!) Use enough to disperse them more or less throughout; this will probably prove to be a decent amount, but not a ton. (Vibes!)

Add both some fennel seeds and crushed red pepper, as well as generous amounts of kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, finally topped with a certain amount of freshly shredded Parmesan cheese. How much of these ingredients and seasonings should you add? My friend, you know in your heart that I cannot answer that question. The answer lies in the wind, which is an old-school way of referring to the vibes. (Vibes!)

Next, add a few splashes of milk into your bowl. Use enough to get everything already in the bowl a little bit wet, but not enough to get any of it soaking wet. (Vibes!) Finally, crack an egg and dump it in. There are absolutely no vibes here, nor is there any adjacent hippie nonsense. Crack and add one and only one egg into your bowl! The egg is a binding agent and nothing more, and should be treated accordingly. Tuck in your shirt while you’re at it, slacker!

Once everything is in your bowl, start mixing it together with bare hands. You could use a sturdy wooden spoon or spatula, but where oh where is the fun in that? Hand mixing your meatballs will allow you to break up your ground animal wads while simultaneously dispersing all of the other tasty ingredients throughout. It will also give you direct sensory data as to the relative moisture level of your mix. If there are dry pockets that remain dry no matter how much mixing you do, add more milk by the splash until it all gets wet. If the mix is starting to get sopping wet, add a few more breadcrumbs, a bit at a time, until the mix achieves the target wetness. (Vibes!)

Eventually, your meatball mix will have well-dispersed ingredients at an acceptable moisture level. It is now time to roll out your meatballs. Grab a big hunk of mix and roll it between your hands until it takes on a round shape, then place it on a clean plate or baking sheet. Repeat until your mix is expended. I’m a big guy and I like big meatballs, so I always aim for an average raw meatball diameter of 2 inches, give or take. I would advise you to do the same, except I already know that it is better to refer you to some combination of your intuition, mood, and discernment. If only there were a single word to describe this ineffable sensation.

Anyway, grab your strongest frying pan, dump a bunch of olive oil in it, and set it over medium to medium-high heat. It is important not to crowd your meatballs, as crowding is the enemy of browning and crust formation. If you can get all of your meatballs in the pan with significant space in between each, great! If you need to cook them in batches to ensure every meatball has a measure of personal space in the pan, then work in batches. Either way, the process is the same. Let them sit and cook in the pan for 5-7 minutes, or until a nice brown crust forms where the meatballs touch the pan, then flip and continue cooking until the second side also has a nice crust, and an instant-read thermometer indicates each meatball is cooked to a temperature of 160° F. Remove them from the pan and let them drain on a wire rack or a baking sheet lined with paper towels.

While your meatballs are cooking, set aside a pot of salted water to boil, and make sure you have both your tomato sauce that you made yourself and a box of rigatoni at hand. You will want to heat the sauce up somehow; ideally, you still have a burner that can accommodate a saucepan, so dump a bunch of sauce in and set the saucepan over low heat, stirring occasionally. If not, you’re stuck heating it up in the microwave like the rest of us losers. It’s fine, you’ve done worse in your time and you know it. When the water is boiling, cook the rigatoni according to the package’s instructions. As with every pasta recipe you will ever cook for the rest of your natural life, be sure to both set a timer and collect a cup of the pasta cooking water out of the pot during the final minute of cooking. Once the timer goes off, drain the pasta and set it aside.

Now it’s time to bring everything together in glorious unity. Return your frying pan to medium low heat, and splash in a generous amount of tomato sauce. Take a wooden spoon or other rigid kitchen implement and scrape the bejeezus out of your pan, so as to loosen the crusty, meaty bits stuck to the bottom and release them into the sauce. Next, add some pasta, some olive oil, and some pasta water, stirring everything together until it takes on a glossy sheen in the pan. (Add more sauce if you need to!) Eventually, the sauce will disperse through the pasta and take on that telltale glossy sheen, indicating sauce/oil/pasta water unity. Scoop some pasta into a bowl, top it with a couple of meatballs, then top all of that with more tomato sauce, more freshly shredded Parmesan cheese, and a sprinkle of chopped fresh parsley.

Good, right? It was a bit of work, but all of it was easy and most of it was fun, wasn’t it? You did this, guided by nothing more than a vague set of instructions and your attunement to your inner self and the world around you. (Once more, with feeling: Vibes!) Dig in!

Divisional Round Results

Well, so much for knowing ball, huh?

You know when I realized this weekend was going to leave all of my predictive efforts in ruins? No, it was not after the Commanders’ upset the Lions, but good guess! I lost 8 points on that in the pool, but I picked Washington to cover and they uh…well, they certainly did that! Not only did that little boost (one that turned out to be my only spread pick that hit of the entire weekend) leave me a bit giddy, the game itself was sufficiently bonkers that processing it was all but impossible. Entirely too much happened in that game, leaving me stunned and incapable of processing any thoughts at all, let alone any reflective and/or self-examining thoughts. It didn’t help that it ended past my bedtime, either.

Rather, two closely related moments in the subsequent Rams/Eagles broadcast informed me, in no uncertain terms, that I had failed to do even the most basic of research in making last week’s picks. The first came early in the game, when Mike Tirico helpfully informed the viewing audience that Saquon Barkley rushed for over 250 yards in the Eagles’ week 12 win, a fact I had forgotten despite having watched the fucking game live AND linking the fucking Pro Football Reference box score in last week’s column! All my idiot brain could bother to remember was that the Eagles won the first game, and did so handily, discarding any and all possible explanations for the win as irrelevant.

So instead of doing research so light it hardly counts as such, I threw up my hands and said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “yes the Eagles whooped that ass in the regular season, but did you know that the Rams defense will attempt to sack Jalen Hurts?????” Naturally, I didn’t even have to wait until the end of the 1st quarter to see the Rams line and run a five-man stunt with man coverage behind it on 3rd and 4, which proved to be the perfect defensive play call to let Saquon sprint 62 yards for a touchdown. There could be no rejoinder to my intellectual laziness more pleasing to the eye than watching five guys slam directly into their oncoming blockers, with Saquon’s man getting taken for a ride a microsecond later, followed immediately with a scamper past the single deep safety, who tried his level best but whose very assignment left him doomed to failure before the ball was snapped. This was proper fucking gridiron at its most transcendent and its most beautiful, and it conclusively proved that I’m a fucking moron who doesn’t do his homework.

But all suffering is rewarded in time, and after being left with the chance to reflect on my failings for a few hours, I was offered redemption. For it was after this time of penance that I was blessed by providence to see the team I picked to win the Super Bowl eat shit and get knocked out in the second round. Oh well. Once more unto the breach, this time humbled (theoretically) and all the wiser (definitely not).

Conference Championship Picks

All lines pulled from ESPN at 12:33 PM Eastern Time on Thursday, January 23rd, 2025. My pick for each game, and the relevant spread, is always listed first. Home teams are displayed in bold.

• How many total yards and yard per carry did Saquon Barkley rush for in both of these teams’ regular season matchups?
• How many sacks did each defense record in each regular season matchup?
• What was the Eagles’ defensive pass rush win rate in the regular season?

I could go on, but the more I do so, the more tempted I become to do this shit right and actually look up the answers to these questions, and that would defeat the purpose.

Here is my comprehensive, holistic theory of how and why I ate shit last weekend. When I went back and re-examined my preseason predictions for this year’s Playoff MegaColumn, I found that many of my snarkiest, pithiest, and most dismissive predictions turned out to be entirely or largely correct. I took the wrong lesson from this. While I certainly could have put more work into researching each team in preparation for making my predictions, I did as much research as my crumbling, toddler-addled brain could possibly allow. In many (but by no means all) cases, this proved to be enough information for me to size up each team’s relative strengths and weaknesses, and draw some conclusions about how their season is likely to go. The resulting predictions didn’t always show this work, but I did the work nonetheless.

Last week, I didn’t do the work at all. Instead, I gathered up my hazy, half-remembered impressions of certain regular-season games along with my hazy, half-remembered impressions of each team’s injury status, whittled those impressions down to the basic gist of whatever relevant information those impressions contained, and then force-fed the resulting ball-adjacent thoughts through the wood chipper of my spread-betting guidelines: a twisted, rusted nightmare of amateurism from which no actionable data can possibly emerge. For an example of this difference, consider the following two statements:

• The Eagles beat the snot out of the Rams in the regular season.
• The Eagles’ ground game was no match for the Rams’ defense, and the Eagles won their regular season matchup easily.

Both of these statements are terse, but one of them manages to be both terse and useful. These kinds of basic insights remain beyond me even now, as my life has been even more shambolic than usual in the past few days. So, in the absence of pre-existing ball knowledge to draw upon, I must resort to inference from first principles, which is a two-dollar way of saying I’m going to compare each teams relative strengths and weaknesses, and hope for the best.

Yes, the Commanders’ firepower was on full display last week, but I needn’t remind you that the Lions’ came into the game with a depleted defense that only depleted further during the game. The Eagles’ defense, by contrast, can and has carried the team when it needed to in the first two rounds. Their front will be able to get pressure on Jayden Daniels with a four-man rush, they will be able to slow down Washington’s ground game with light boxes, and their secondary will be able to make plays. On the other side of the ball, anyone making a pro-Commanders argument that hinges on the Commanders’ defense has already lost. Philadelphia will gash them on the ground and slash them through the air; the only question is in what order they will do so. Once the game is over, the answer won’t even count as trivia. I was worried the Eagles would be favored by entirely too many points, so a paltry -6 line is both a steal and a relief.

But how the hell else am I supposed to describe what the Chiefs are good at? They kind of suck at running the ball, their receivers still can’t catch a cold, and their offensive tackle situation is dire enough that it would all but disqualify every other team in the league from even making the postseason. Their defense has been successful, but not as successful as last year’s unit, and the reasons for their success all trace directly back to the talents of Chris Jones and Steve Spagnuolo. I can accept that the Chiefs won the AFC West again, but I have no explanation for a 15-win season that earned them home-field advantage, and I’m not concerned a satisfying explanation can possibly exist.

To make matters worse, the Bills’ success feels comparably amorphous. Their offensive line is better, and their offense looks more functional than the Josh Allen hero ball of seasons past, but they’ve also been navigating their own talent deficiency at wide receiver, and the defense ain’t what it used to be (although Matt Milano’s return has given them a real boost). If, given the constraints on my time and my bandwidth, the only way I can make an informed prediction is by comparing each teams’ strengths and weaknesses, what do I do when I can’t get a grip on what these strengths and weaknesses even are?

The answer, of course, is vibes. (Vibes!) The Bills’ time is now, and now is the time they shall vanquish their ancient tormentors. If this isn’t enough analysis isn’t enough for you, tough shit. You shouldn’t be gambling, anyway.

Enjoy the games, everyone!