Gross Football Lunch – Week 18, 2025 NFL Season

Happy New Year, sports fans!

As you, my loyal readers, are well aware, Gross Football Lunch tradition dictates the provision of the NFL Playoffs MegaColumn. As you can imagine, taming that unruly beast requires far more work than the standard weekly column, which itself takes more time than I have in a given week. From this, it follows that I am already unthinkably behind on this year’s MegaColumn, and the fear and trembling that results from this knowledge, combined with the constant psychic distress that results from breaking up the constant screaming matches and toddler fights endemic to the post-holiday lull, have once again left me without a topic this week. I will try harder during the playoffs, I promise. Or at least, I promise to try to try harder during the playoffs.

At any rate, it’s time to cut the chatter and get into this Senior Skip Day of a confidence pool column, so without further ado…

NFL Confidence Pool – Week 18

As is always the case, the last week of the season is hard to take seriously in the confidence pool. Most of these games are absolute rubbish, some of the games that appear to be meaningful will be rendered pointless as soon as the second strings start taking the field, and at least one game can be rendered pointless by the Atlanta Falcons. Furthermore, my performance in this week’s pool is all but irrelevant to my season totals. I am not going to clear a 0.700 average in points or in picks this year, but I will certainly clear 0.600. Make no mistake, I am beyond grateful to have done this well in a season this chaotic, but that doesn’t mean I have any real incentive to put my best foot forward this week. Life is tough and my brain is is sieve nowadays. I simply cannot be bothered to keep track of which teams may or may not be resting starters, and I simply cannot be trusted to keep such information straight even if I did track on it.

So instead, I’m going to use this week’s pool for cheap thrills and free association. You were correct to leave the Vikings for dead back in October, but they’ve now won four games in a row and, if they beat the Packers on Sunday, they’ll finish the season with a winning record, having also knocked the Lions out of the playoffs in hilarious and heartwarming fashion. They also responded to playoff elimination by punching the Cowboys in the throat, effectively ending their season, too. To top it all off, JJ McCarthy…ok, McCarthy still sucks, but he sucks a bit less than he used to, maybe. The vibes are as high as they can be for a team that won’t be playing any bonus football, and I can’t wait to watch the Vikings shove the injury-plagued Packers into a locker and steal their lunch money in front of tens of thousands of their adoring fans. And if the Vikings blow it in classic and/or improbable fashion, well, at least I’m only hurting myself, you know?

The rest of these assignments should all be self-explanatory, as all of these remaining picks are given to playoff teams that have something to play for, in theory. True, the 2-seed ain’t what it used to be, but getting to stay home for the Divisional Round seems worth playing for from where I’m sitting; more importantly, I see no reason to think Washington could beat Philly’s second team, and there;s no recovering from a performance as the Lions’ on Christmas. The Jaguars and Texans are still playing for the AFC South title, the Patriots are still playing for the 1-seed, and the Cardinals blow. I think that just about covers it.

I’m taking the Seahawks – if the path to turning Darnold into the worst version of himself is interior pressure, a team that can’t get any pressure at all is at a disadvantage – but I’m doing so with caution. These games tend to defy reason, even by division rivalry standards. With their division already ceded back to the hated Patriots, the Bills would be well advised to rest starters, which should still leave them with more than enough to beat the Jets. I have been wrong on the Ravens for several weeks in a row now, but I refuse to accept a world in which this sorry-ass Steelers team is allowed into the postseason. Also, if the Steelers were going to win this division, they would have done so weeks ago and we all know it.

Normally, a shake-up at the top of an entire conference is exciting, and normally, the instant erasure of a decade as horrendous as the previous would be cause for celebration all its own. But when the new teams at the top of the conference are the Broncos and Patriots – the very same teams that the old new teams at the top of the AFC replaced – we instead get to feel stuck in a version of 2015 with more measles outbreaks than we remember from the last time we passed through. All of this is to say I don’t think I picked the Chargers for a real reason, except out of stubborn rejection of the Broncos as true contenders. Sometimes, part of picking for one’s own amusement means picking out of childish, pig-headed obstinance.

Another part of picking for one’s own amusement is not giving much thought to games you don’t care about. Yes, the NFC South championship and the conference’s final playoff spot are on the line this weekend, but that entire division will disappear as though they never participated in this season in the first place the very second their inevitable home loss in the Wild Card round comes to an end. So while we are stuck with the bad news of the NFC South’s existence, we are also comforted in the knowledge that Saturday’s Bucs/Panthers game doesn’t even matter, because of the aforementioned (or at least, previously cited) Atlanta Falcons exception. There’s a lot of mandatory football watching ahead of all of us, so let’s all remember to be grateful when there’s a game like this, which has stakes but carries no consequences.

Enjoy the games, everyone!