Welcome to the third season of Gross Football Lunch!
While I am proud of the work I’ve done in the first two seasons of this column, I’ve decided that I need to tweak the format of Gross Football Lunch for the sake of my own sanity. I love writing about food and I love writing about football, but churning out a 1500 word recipe and 1500 words of football takes every week for 22 weeks is simply not sustainable given the assorted scraps of spare time I have to give to this endeavor. Furthermore, I am constantly plagued by imposter syndrome at every step of putting together every single GFL column. I make no secret of my lack of credentialed qualifications for talking about football, because there can be no secret that I don’t have time to watch enough football in close enough detail to have something smart to say about any game in a given week, let alone every game. And when I do have a take I want to release into the world, am I sure it’s even mine, or am I unknowingly repurposing and paraphrasing someone else’s take without credit?
But last season, the imposter syndrome spread to writing recipes. After a few weeks, I retreated all the way into the deepest recesses of my Spooky Mind Palace, and found that I couldn’t tell if I was writing recipes effectively. Were these sets of instructions that normal people were capable of following, or were these the incomprehensible ravings of a lunatic who is too much of a petty kitchen tyrant to ask his wife to slice the garlic? Is any of this food tasty, or does it solely reflect the gustatory values of an irredeemable cheese and grease pervert? Do I even know how to cook more than three things? Sure seems like all I know how to cook are wads of meat, big pots o’beans, and assorted p’skettis. Are any of these recipes even mine, or I am unknowingly repurposing someone else’s recipe without credit?
Down the stretch of last season, the strain of fighting this constant two-front war left me with no juice whatsoever. And that sucked, because there were some projects for this blog that I really wanted to complete and send off into the world, but couldn’t because I had the creative capacity of a half-empty jar of spackle. So, rather than run myself so ragged that I am psychologically unable to chronicle any of my other interests in the off-season, I have instead chosen to tweak the Gross Football Lunch format and make it a more sustainable enterprise.
The Confidence Pool is staying the same. It is the foundation of the column, the perfect framing device for the half-baked sports takes I peddle in, and most importantly, it is an all-or-nothing proposition. If I were to skip even one week of the confidence pool, I may as well not have bothered in the first place. Therefore, I’m changing the Recipe of the Week to an occasional feature, not a weekly one. Beginning next week, the non-Confidence Pool portion of Gross Football Lunch will instead be a rotating feature on whatever I feel like talking about. There will be write-ups of video games, music reviews, maybe some book recommendations, etc. This will also be the dumping ground for Vikings-specific reflections and other NFL takes that I can’t sensibly cram into the Confidence Pool section. And there will still be recipes from time to time (I owe a certain cadre Bengals fans a Cincinnati chili recipe, for starters).
Thank you for your continued readership and understanding. Unless, of course, this news is a dealbreaker and I can no longer count on your clicks and support, in which case fuck you and the horse you rode in on. I never needed your bullshit in the first place.
NFL Confidence Pool – Week 1
With that bit of housekeeping out of the way, it’s time to return to the NFL Confidence Pool! The confidence pool is a method for picking games that’s more interesting than picking games straight up, but less terrifying than picking against the spread. You pick the team you believe will win each game on the entire week’s slate, then assign a point value to that pick based on your level of confidence in it. The point values range from 1 to however-many-games-are-happening-this-week, with 1 representing your least confident pick, and the top value representing the most confident pick. When you pick a game correctly, you win the point value you assigned to that pick. When you pick incorrectly or the game ends in a tie, you get nothing. Whoever wins the most points wins the pool for the week, and there may be prizes for most points won over the course of the regular season, too.
(This brings me to a vital point: Always consult with your confidence pool’s organizer to make sure you fully understand your pool’s exact rules and procedures! I am not a confidence pool attorney, and this is not confidence pool legal advice. Your pool’s rules and procedures may differ from the ones I am adopting for the purposes of this column, and are in no way binding upon the rules or procedures set by any individual confidence pool organizer.)
I will be sharing my own confidence pool picks and point assignments in every weekly installment of Gross Football Lunch. I will also provide brief but concise justifications for most of these picks and assignments. I reserve the right to ignore a game entirely; not every game is interesting. Furthermore, I cannot even pretend have the time and resources necessary to understand every single team’s deal in-depth, meaning I will not always be able to weigh in intelligently on each and every game each and every week. If I can’t form an opinion worth sharing regarding a particular contest, I won’t.
Before I get into the Week 1 picks, here are some general guidelines for assigning points that I have found useful in my Confidence Pool career. None of these are hard and fast rules, and in fact, I guarantee you that strict adherence to these guidelines will screw you over multiple times over throughout the course of the season. Please exercise caution! With that in mind, here are my confidence pool tips and tricks:
- The best games to place max points on are mismatches. These are games in which an excellent team is playing a terrible one. The Chiefs playing the Titans is a mismatch. The Bills playing the Saints is a mismatch. You get the idea. Put big points on these games and don’t think twice about it, even if the superior team is playing on the road.
- Better teams are always worth more points, while worse teams are always worth fewer points. Every week, you will be tempted to place big points on a mediocre team playing a terrible one when you could put those points on a great team facing quality opposition. For example, say you pick the mediocre Chargers over the woeful Raiders. You then also pick the outstanding Lions over the potentially dangerous Rams. Which team gets more points? The answer is the Lions. No matter how bad a bad team is, a mediocre team cannot create a true mismatch, and cannot be trusted with your top points. It is always best to place your top points on a demonstrably awesome team, even if that team has a tough matchup. Games between two bad teams should be assigned as few points as possible.
- Beware Divisional Matchups! There are no true mismatches when it comes to division rivalry games! Division rivals are both familiar with each other and highly motivated to kick each other’s asses. Exercise caution! If you’re tempted to place big points on a divisional game, and you will be from time to time, make sure there isn’t a non-divisional matchup that’s more worthy of those points.
Home teams are listed in bold. For international games, the designated home team is further noted with an asterisk*. To the picks!
16 Points: Broncos over Titans
15 Points: Eagles over Cowboys
14 Points: Bengals over Browns
13 Points: Commanders over Giants
Week 1 is the second-scariest week of the season for anyone participating in the Confidence Pool. Not one of us knows a damn thing about any of these teams, and not one of us will know anything until we’ve seen the very games we are meant to be picking. Isolating actual mismatches ahead of time is effectively impossible for all but the most wizened sharps, especially since fully half of the schedule is division rivalry games. Everyone else is stuck making picks with their own special, quick-curdling blend of combination of vibes, cognitive biases, and information retained from soon to be useless preseason previews.
With all of the league’s elite either playing each other or caught in a divisional scrap, this means that the only true mismatch I can spot is the (probably) hapless Titans and the (probably) pretty good Broncos. Never you mind that Cam Ward might give Tennessee a boost right out of the gate and that Denver is built neither to score more than 20 points nor come back from being down 10; this is as clear-cut as the week gets.
The rest of these picks are all divisional games, but I’ve justified the high assignments as bets against my chosen losers. This is least true in the case of tonight’s season kickoff; if you ignore the ongoing trainwreck in Dallas (not that you should), you’ll notice they still have a functional if not totally respectable offense. The same cannot be said of either the Browns or Giants, both of whom have the same narrow path to victory. Both teams must muck things up with superior defense while hoping they can find a way to squeak out the ugliest wins possible. This is a tough way to win against even middling pro offenses, it’s all but impossible against these dreadnoughts. I know I said as much last week, but miss me with the Jaxson Dart hype. If preseason meant anything once the real games started, Kenny Pickett would still be a Steeler.
12 Points: 49ers over Seahawks
11 Points: Vikings over Bears
10 Points: Packers over Lions
9 Points: Texans over Rams
8 Points: Bills over Ravens
7 Points: Chiefs over Chargers*
As if to imply that the National Football League no longer views its fans as mindless cattle who will snarf down any old garbage with the shield logo stamped on it, the week 1 schedule offers football fans a tremendous reprieve. Every year, the league puts one of the two Bears/Vikings games in one of the coveted non-Thursday primetime slots despite the fact that it’s the second-least watchable rivalry in all of professional sports (behind Giants/Cowboys), and every year, both teams disgrace themselves, their fans, their municipalities, and the very notion of football as entertainment. One team always wins, but everyone else who was enough of a sucker to give their time and attention to this 1970’s dead ball slog as depicted by ChatGPT loses.
So, if we must be stuck with this game, why not squirrel it away on Monday of Week 1, when anyone still possessing wisdom and decency will have decided they’ve had enough of this football shit until next Sunday? Everyone else will deserve what they get, and the rematch will be safely quarantined within regional broadcasts, and further secured under the constant vigilance of Kenny Albert and Jonathan Vilma. Normally this is the game where I have to remind everyone that the Vikings almost always lose at Soldier Field, but fuck that. It’s Week 1 and the Bears deserve no benefit of the doubt, whatsoever. At this point in the season, I’d rather be mad twice for losing the game and the points than conflicted about putting these dorks in their place, but for nothing.
You’ll notice that this grouping of games is where all of this week’s intrigue lies. Part of me suspects that taking the Packers is foolish if not disrespectful, but I wasn’t kidding when I said I was nervous about the Lions’ offensive line, and Micah Parsons’ arrival so late in the offseason is a real sucker punch. The Packers have line issues of their own, but they’re at home and the Parsons trade has brought them close enough to the Lions’ on-paper talent level that I think they’ll win a close one.
I would love to give the Chiefs more points here, but I have no idea what to expect from their offense, and I have yet to gain a proper understanding of the specifics of Brazilian gridiron chaos to make an informed assignment. I had picked the Rams at first because I figured their pass rush is a nightmare, but then I remembered the Texans’ pass rush is even more terrifying, the remaining defense behind it is much more complete, and C.J. Stroud has the added advantage of a functional spinal column. Anyone who claims to pick the winner of the Bills/Ravens prize fight is a liar, a sucker, or both. You have my blessing to pick whoever you wish, just don’t go big on it, ok? I’m picking the Bills solely because I asked myself which team was more likely to suffer from the worst drop and/or penalty you’ve ever seen, at which point the choice became clear.
6 Points: Buccaneers over Falcons
5 Points: Steelers over Jets
4 Points: Cardinals over Saints
3 Points: Jaguars over Panthers
2 Points: Colts over Dolphins
1 Points: Patriots over Raiders
Before you take any of the above text as evidence that the NFL loves and wants us to be happy, go find the Week 1 schedule and take a look at the 1 PM Eastern kickoff. Time was, the 1 PM kickoff in Week 1 was cause for excitement, and built for the express purpose of gassing up the product. Now that we’ve all died and live in hell, the schedule has bloated and distended to accommodate not one, but two primetime games before this blessed occasion (one of which is sequestered behind a subscription service paywall), and the league has decided to treat all of us as the captive audience we all hate ourselves for being.
All six of these games kickoff at 1 Eastern, and all six of them confuse and infuriate me in one way or another. I would love to give the Bucs, Steelers, and Cardinals more points than this, but the Falcons swept the Bucs last year, the Cardinals have betrayed me time and time again, and the Steelers have a reputation for playing down to lesser teams that dates back to the days when they were still a highly regarded franchise. Like most people, I have an unshakable but otherwise inexplicable sense that the Steelers are on the verge of total collapse, but that’s not nearly enough to warrant picking the Jets outright. But it’s the Cardinals that have me the most disappointed of this trio; I wanted to start raking as many points as possible picking against the Saints, and I’m none too please that I have to put those plans on hold.
As for these final three games, they are so vile that my mind rejects them to behold. That said, I’ve decided that Jaguars/Panthers is my game of choice in this time slot. Part of that is an ongoing desire to participate in local culture, and part of it is a sneaking suspicion that one (or both!) of these teams will be scrappy if not actually good. This suspicion is no doubt delusional, and I should probably keep it to myself until my next med check, but I guess it’s too late now. Picking the Colts against anyone feels wrong, and in the halcyon days of 2023 these Dolphins were built to feast on such chum. But life comes at you fast and the Dolphins are coming apart at the seams. It’s hard to sustain success in the NFL, especially when you’re a full-time adderall dealer with a head coaching problem.
Enjoy the games, everyone!
Rob Writes About Whatever 