Well that was fun! This past weekend, the football gods once again overloaded our schedules with six entire Wild Card games but, in their infinite wisdom, they also blessed us with no less than three and a half excellent football games. If the league must continue to disrespect our time, at the very least they can do so in a fun way. But what does it even mean for a football game to be excellent, or even good? After a great game, fans and pundits alike offer up heaps of praise without interrogating the aesthetics of the sport. There is agreement, but without understanding.
These games, which ran the gamut from outstanding to barely watchable to barely watchable but in a perversely enjoyable way, gave me pause to reflect on my own football aesthetics, and in the midst of this process I stumbled upon a framework with which to gum up all this philosophical gobbledegoop with arbitrary quantification. Those of you reading this who follow professional wrestling in any capacity are no doubt familiar with the Star Rating system of match evaluation. If you are not familiar, the star rating system grades pro wrestling matches on a scale of 0-5 stars, with 0 stars indicating a match so bad it disgraces the business itself, and 5 stars being an instant all-time classic.
The beauty of this system is that it embraces its arbitrary nature, and in so doing embraces the arbitrary nature of all ratings. You can divide stars into whatever micro-gradient you wish, for whatever reason you wish. Want to assign a match rating of *1/4, ****1/2, or ***13/16? Go nuts. Do you feel a mere 0-5 scale is insufficient to capture your pleasure and/or disgust at the match you just watched? You are free to exceed 5 stars if your sense of possibility has been rewired, or go below 0 into negative stars if you feel that a match hocked a real loogie into the eyes of paying customers.
In the star rating system, vibes are transmuted into numbers, solely for the purpose of having a number attached to a radically subjective criticism that will inevitably anger vast swaths of wrestling nerds who will just peep the rating without actually reading whatever criticism it comes with. These ratings are the perfect bait, and the perfect superstructure to impose on free-flowing and largely unprincipled critiques. Does this make any sense? No? Good! Mild confusion is the perfect starting point for this week’s lecture, so that means it’s time to dive in.
Los Angeles Rams vs. Carolina Panthers
As anyone who remembers the dreary Super Bowl blowouts of the 80s and 90s can attest, the NFL’s guarantee of legitimate competition precludes any guarantee of entertainment. Blowouts happen in football, as do pointless rock fights, as do games where the action on the field is rendered subservient to punitive officiating. Any game is liable to suck, but that only makes it all the more special when a game turns into a real-life sports movie. This game had everything. The Rams’ early lead was quickly erased, giving way to a back-and-forth exchange of leads and control peppered with big plays and dramatic near-misses.
The story itself came pre-manufactured, as the upstart but shitty Panthers with their upstart but shitty quarterback faced the Rams’ perennial playoff outfit, having already stolen an upset from them in the regular season. That the Panthers came close to winning but couldn’t get it done in the end lends a final dose of pathos. Can Bryce Young pull off some big plays in big moments? Yes. Can he put together a game-winning drive with 40ish seconds left? Perhaps not, but good on him and the rest of the Panthers for hanging tough until then. Yes, I’m still giving this the full 5 stars, because sometimes the bad guys win, even in wrestling.
Rating: *****
Green Bay Packers vs. Chicago Bears
The conventional wisdom on football aesthetics, while tacit and rarely if ever discussed openly, appears to state that a game of football is good if it is closely contested at the end, regardless of how the game went prior to that point. I reject this notion, as sometimes a close game is the result of two separate blowouts, with one team dominating the first half and the other team dominating the second. This means that the line between a dramatic come from behind and an self-defeat switcheroo is perilously thin.
The Bears’ comeback was outrageous, delirious fun, but did it render the first half worth watching? Not really, no. This happens in wrestling sometimes, too. A match can have a great finish even if the early portions are slow and don’t go anywhere. Neither did this game fit the Two Blowouts template, either. The Bears defense got its shit together early in the second half, but the offense took its sweet time catching up, which heightened the drama and the stakes of each play down the stretch. That’s good! Also, that fourth down throw to Rome Odunze, my goodness. Sometimes, a face-meltingly awesome play or two is all you need.
Rating: ****1/4
Buffalo Bills vs. Jacksonville Jaguars
Just as there is a question of what role the final score plays in determining a game’s quality, there is also a question of competence in this determination. No one likes a game where neither team seems capable of basic execution. No one likes busted plays, no one likes penalties, and no one likes games where both teams seem like they were trying to lose. On this, we all agree.
However, I submit that coaching fuckups often serve to make a game more compelling. The Jags were destroying the Bills on the ground, and yet, Liam Coen and the rest of the offense abandoned the run, which in turn allowed Buffalo to hang in the game for the duration, which in turn allowed Josh Allen to retake the lead late with his heroics, which in turn forced Jacksonville to throw, which in turn led to a game-sealing interception. If I didn’t know any better, I would suspect Liam Coen to be a reincarnated Sophocles character with a downfall that legible. Note that, while this had a lower score total than Bears/Packers, the tension was higher throughout, therefore, it was the better game. I also marked out hard for the finish.
Rating: ****3/4
San Francisco 49ers vs. Philadelphia Eagles
The problem with arts and entertainment critics is that they are all writers, and because writers only understand writing, all pieces of criticism invariably reduce to literary criticism. There’s only one reason to invoke Sophocles to describe professional football, and it’s because I understand so little about the craft of professional football that I can only describe the aesthetic impressions my experience of this craft gives rise through clumsy comparison. Since football viewing is capable of accommodating narrative fabrication, this means that the easiest reference points for these comparisons are other narratives. I can watch a game as it exists, but any description of it I attempt can only be a copy of a copy, at absolute best.
In this context, the 49ers/Eagles game was an unsympathetic protagonist comedy. This year’s Philadelphia Eagles were stupid assholes who everyone hated, and whose fans hated them most of all. In the early stages of the game, it seemed like the Eagles had finally found some measure of self respect and were ready to turn their lives around, but they soon relapsed into gross and alienating dysfunction, as all unsympathetic comedy protagonists must. It was deeply difficult to watch, and ended exactly as poorly as you’d expect given the behavior involved. Was it funny? Oh yes, yes it was. Hilarious, even. But that doesn’t mean it was always easy or pleasant to watch, nor was it a true masterpiece of this comedic form. (For the apex of unsympathetic comedy protagonist football, you need look no further than Super Bowl XLII.) Bonus stars awarded due to Vikings Legend Eric Kendricks making the game-ending play.
Rating: ***1/48
Los Angeles Chargers vs. New England Patriots
By this point in the weekend, I was elated with the quality of the weekend’s football but also pretty dang sick of football. The bad news is that I stuck with this game far too long into the second half, well after the point that it became clear the Chargers could not and would not prove capable of overcoming a 6-point deficit, and well after the point where I could get much done in Mass Effect 2 before bedtime.
I try and present myself as someone who has conquered FOMO, but in this case, I kept hanging on just in case the Chargers stopped being themselves. I’m not sure what they were thinking by starting a war of attrition when they were already down both starting tackles, but I suppose there’s no such thing as a good gameplan under those conditions. The good news is that I used this time to sit on the couch with the game on while also listening to ZZ Top’s landmark 1983 album Eliminator, which absolutely deserves to be mentioned among its much-beloved and Diamond-certified 80s peers.
Rating: 7/18*
Houston Texans vs. Pittsburgh Steelers
I’m not going to go so far as to say any game that features present-day Aaron Rodgers attempt to throw the football is or can possibly be good, but I will say I found this game to be a lot more entertaining than you’d think. The Texans’ defense is a slasher villain, an inevitable force of unyielding violence and the actual main attraction whenever they’re on the screen. Every pass breakup the Houston secondary makes is the sports equivalent of that one time Jason froze his victim’s face in liquid nitrogen, then smashed it into chunks on a countertop.
Also, much of the second half was legitimately tense. Which offense would break first in a one-score game? Blessedly, it was the Steelers who couldn’t keep up with the onslaught, which gave us all the pleasure of seeing Rodgers crumble to the ground for a strip-six, then demonstrate his resilience with a game-sealing pick-six a few minutes later. With any luck, that will send Rodgers off to retirement, where he can spend his days with his totally real wife who lives in Toledo and goes to a different school. Not that expected otherwise, but shame on Joe Buck and Troy Aikman for glazing Rodgers’ career in the final minutes nonetheless.
Rating: **2/5
Divisional Round Picks
First, let’s conclude last week’s business with a look at the Playoff Confidence Pool and my game picks. To the big board!
Pool Points Won: 54
Pool Points Lost: 36
Differential: +18
Game-Picking Record: 3-3
Did the Eagles’ loss absolutely blow my pool to smithereens? Yes. Was the Eagles’ loss, as I suggested above, really frickin’ funny? Also yes. There is no reason to participate in any confidence pool if you are not going to get a kick out of it, win or lose, and I’ve found one of the best ways to have fun no matter what is to go big on teams you don’t like very much. If a team you hate wins the Super Bowl well then, hey, at least you’re getting points out of it. If one of your top picks eats absolute shit in the early rounds, then you’re not going to mind as much. I learned this lesson four years ago, when I picked the Packers to win it all only to see them get eliminated immediately, in one of the very most goddamn hilarious losses the NFL has ever produced. If you can’t have points, you can at least have some hearty chuckles.
Thus concludes the old business. On to new business! My picks for each game are given in bold.
Buffalo Bills vs. Denver Broncos
Normally, when a 6-seed travels to the 1-seed’s stadium for the Divisional Round, it is the responsible prognosticator’s job to consider how the 6-seed could pull off an upset. For this game, however, that formula is inverted. As dull and dreary as it is to say this is because Bo Nix can’t be trusted, the fact of the matter remains that Bo Nix can’t be trusted. However, the Broncos’ path to victory is very real, despite this. We all saw what the Jaguars did to the Bills’ putrid run defense last week, and the Broncos can do all that and more. If they can move the ball on the ground and score on the ground too, the Broncos can absolutely pull this off.
That said, their path to victory is quite narrow, indeed. This is not a team that is built to score lots of points; rather, it is a team that is built to pull ahead by 10-14 points and then let their superior defense preserve the lead. This strategy can and has worked well at forcing an upset against a superior offense, but this strategy is double-edged. As scoring decreases, so too does the margin of error. With that in mind, it is now expedient to point out that when the Broncos have won this year, they have rarely done so by more than one score.
With that in mind, assume that the Broncos have a 3-point lead in the waning minutes but are either punting or kicking to the Bills. How little time does there need to be on the clock for it to be too little time for Josh Allen? 30 seconds? 15? 10? A team that excels at ball control and defense can accomplish a great many things, but a team with an elite quarterback always has an edge against them. It is one thing to run the ball effectively, and another thing altogether to run so well that you score touchdowns instead of field goals, and successfully squat on the clock when the opposition knows that’s what you’re trying to do. Even in their worst case scenario, all the Bills have to do is hang tough enough to give Allen one more shot. I’m not sure all the ball control and defense in the league is enough to keep a lead safe in those circumstances.
San Francisco 49ers vs. Seattle Seahawks
Listen, I saw what the Seahawks did to the 49ers in Santa Clara in Week 18. Granted, Seattle only got 13 points, so any increase in offensive production on the 9ers’ part may make this rubber match more interesting. But that game was not half as close as the final score indicated. Seattle’s defense annihilated the 9ers, and with all due respect to Jake Tonges, I don’t see how losing George Kittle to an Achilles tear will make the offense’s job easier this time around. The only path to victory I see for the 49ers involves a complete and total Sam Darnold Meltdown, and while that’s a distinct possibility, it still might not be enough. For one thing, forcing a Sam Darnold Meltdown requires getting pressure, which the 9ers can’t actually do. For another, it’s not like Darnold has been playing all that well lately in the first place, and it mostly hasn’t mattered.
Houston Texans vs. New England Patriots
I sense that my stable of preferred pundits is largely down on C.J. Stroud after his rough performance on Monday night, and that’s certianly understandable. Five fumbles and an interception is a bad day at the office in any era of the sport. However, I am hesitant to draw too many conclusions from this. The Steelers’ defense was old and streaky this season, but when they were playing well they remained a scary outfit. The Patriots’ defense looked mighty scary on Sunday, too, but a lot of that is owing to the fact that the Chargers’ offensive line was a theoretical construct. The Texans’ line is only slightly (if at all) better, to be sure, and has sunk the offense more than once this season, but that’s still not enough for me to pencil Stroud in for another obvious outlier game.
And then, of course, there is the matter of the Patriots’ offensive line, which is also not great. Hell, the Chargers front, led by old man Khalil Mack and an assortment of guys, sent them into fits upon fits. If the Chargers’ good but not spectacular defense could do that to the Patriots, then I shudder to think what the Texans’ nuclear assault is capable of. Drake Maye can create under pressure, but that capability is prone to becoming quite restrained when the pressure is frequent enough. Also, how often do you think Kayshon Boutte can get open against Kamari Lassiter, let alone Derek Stingley? How many times can the Patriots run the ball before Azeez Al-Shaair sends a back to the blue tent? If they block the pass rush, how do they manage it? Who gets open? How do the Patriots score? Hell, how do they move the ball? I don’t see any satisfying answers.
Los Angeles Rams vs. Chicago Bears
Listen, I have no illusions about these teams’ comparative, on-paper quality. The Rams are the better team in just about every respect, including every respect that matters. Stafford remains a better quarterback than Williams. The Rams’ defense is actually good, instead of the Bears’ turnover-dependent unit. Ben Johnson has done a great job in his first year, but any argument positing that he is a better coach than Actual Sean McVay is unserious.
It is therefore reasonable if not logical to conclude that any argument positing that the Bears will win on Sunday is similarly unserious. But it is going to be very, very fucking cold in Chicago by kickoff time on Sunday, and while it is unserious indeed to write off a warm weather team just because of they have to play in the cold (as anyone old enough to remember the absolutely dreadful discourse prior to the 2002 NFC Championship Game can attest), it is also foolish to discount it entirely. Cold footballs are harder to grip, harder to throw, and a very real impediment to executing a high-powered offense.
This does not mean the Rams are doomed, or anything close to it. I am merely pointing out that there is reason enough to question how much the Rams’ on-paper superiority is worth in this game, and admonishing you, my loyal readers, to expect chaos. The Bears aren’t really all that likely to win, but they are just likely enough to win for my contrarian instincts to kick in. Plus, if this pick works, I could be the best in the world!
Enjoy the games, everyone!
Rob Writes About Whatever 