Gross Football Lunch – Week 4, 2026 NFL Season

Recipe of the Week: Un-BBQ BBQ Chicken

Don’t get me wrong, I get as much primal satisfaction from cooking giant wads of meat over an actual fire I made myself as the next guy. I just kind of suck at it, both in the technical sense and in the emotional sense. I have no idea how much charcoal to use for however many rounds of grilling I’m planning to do, I have no idea how to tell if the grill is hot enough (or entirely too hot) once the fire is going, I have no idea how much time I’m supposed to wait from dumping the coals out of my grill chimney for the grill to heat up, I have no idea how to arrange said coals at the bottom of my grill, and I have no idea whatsoever as to what I should be doing to sustain (or not sustain) the fire once it’s going.

These technical grilling shortfalls are a direct and proximate cause of my emotional grilling shortfalls. Grilling is for chilling, as my older brother who actual grills enough to have figured out what he’s doing would say, but the total uncertainty of seemingly every aspect of the grilling process leaves me unable to achieve any mental state within the same galaxy as chilling. I spend the whole time fussing, and while the results are generally edible, they rarely match my vision. So then I hem an haw and beat myself up about what I could’ve done differently and what I can do better next time, all without remembering to actually look any of this stuff up, and without slowing down to enjoy the still pretty acceptable fruits of my labors.

I think my grilling can and has and would continue to improve with practice, but practice is hard to come by. Even a lesser grill session can take a couple hours (which can be a couple hours too many when there’s small kids destroying the house and each other), and perhaps more importantly, it’s just too damn hot. I gre up and lived most of my life in the Upper Midwest, where summer and its attendant cookouts are a celebration of life. But here in North Carolina, summer is a time of great suffering, as any and all outside activities are necessarily conducted under the omnipresent gaze of a baleful, relentlessly hateful sun.

Maybe someday I’ll sort this stuff out, but until then, I can always fall back on my skill at cooking wads of meat in a skillet on a stove top. Not to brag, but I’ve got that pretty well figured out. This recipe is my latest and greatest indoor variation on BBQ chicken leg quarters, a cut that I’ve previously tried to cook on the grill with minimal success. Nobody got salmonella as a consequence of consuming these experiments, but the skin didn’t crisp up and the sauce got all weird and it just didn’t work out the way I wanted it to. This recipe solves those problems.

Ideally, you will be able to acquire chicken leg quarters (which are just the thigh and drumstick together in one piece), but I’ve learned the hard way that they don’t always have those at the store. If you can’t get leg quarters, use thighs and/or drumsticks; whatever pieces you use in whatever combination you use them, just make sure that they are bone-in, skin on pieces. Boneless and skinless, while less messy, is also less tasty. One or two hours before you begin cooking (so about two to three hours before you start eating), take the chicken pieces out of the fridge and season them liberally on all sides with salt and pepper, plus whatever else you want to season your chicken with. There are no limits and there are no rules. There are only purposeful creations and happy accidents. Once your seasoning is done, leave the chicken at room temperature with the skin side up until it’s time to cook.

Once cooking time comes, put the stovetop cooking implement of your choice over medium high heat with a small splash of vegetable oil. Once the oil is hot, it’s time to start cooking the skin, so that the fat renders and the skin itself gets all nice and browned and crispy. Place the chicken skin side down in the pan, then let it cook undisturbed for about 5-7 minutes. Please note that you will almost certainly need to brown and crisp the skins in batches, regardless of how much chicken you have to cook or how big your pan is. A crowded pan is the enemy of beautifully golden brown and deliciously crispy chicken skin, and it is of the utmost importance that you leave each piece of chicken a good amount of space. For reference, when I cook full leg quarters in my ginormous 12” cast iron skillet, I only brown two quarters at a time. If this isn’t a helpful way of visualizing, think of it this way; if you’re wondering whether or not you can cram another chicken piece in there, you can’t. Take the time to do it right. The good news is that, because the fat in the skin will render, you shouldn’t need to splash any more oil in after the first batch.

Once all of your chicken pieces have, brown, shrunken, crispy skin, it’s time to actually cook them so they can be eaten by humans. Reduce the heat to medium and put the chicken back in the pan; since the skins are already cooked, you are free to cram the chicken in there a bit. Don’t force it – if it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit – but do not worry if the pieces are touching. Since you’ve already cooked the skin, I recommend putting the pieces back in the pan skin side up, but you do you. The technical portion of this recipe is concluded.

Grab your barbecue sauce and a basting brush, and brush the chicken with a thin but substantial coat of sauce. Turn your pieces over after like, I dunno, 50 to 10 minutes or so and brush the other sides, and keep turning the chicken every so often until an instant read thermometer reads 155° F when inserted at the thigh bone in the thickest part. The only other thing to consider is that, should you choose a barbecue sauce with a high sugar content (the chicken pictured above was cooked with a sugar-free sauce that I don’t believe is available outside of the Carolinas, and who has not paid me to mention them by name), you may wish to turn the heat down a tiny bit further so that the sugars don’t burn too much. Some char is good, but acrid barbecue sauce is not.

That’s it. That’s all you have to do to make a halfway decent simulacrum of chicken that was grilled outdoors indoors. As long as you season each piece thoroughly, give each piece of chicken plenty of space when browning the skin, and cook each piece to 155° F, this method cannot fail. You will have tasty chicken and a method for preparing it that is infinitely variable and can be experimented with freely, according to your desires. Dig in!

Week 4 NFL Confidence Pool

Jesus Tapdancing CHRIST

What an abject disaster! What utter humiliation! What a, uh…third thing that also feels bad! Week 3 could scarcely have gone worse, and whenever I have a week this bad in the pool, I can do naught but gaze into my own asshole in a vain (though hardly glorious) search for hidden truth(s) or meaning(s) or signifier(s) that professional football absolutely cannot accommodate. Football is not a sport of known entailment. There are too many hidden variables and moving parts to keep track of and sort through before even considering the chaos inherent to the level of violence involved. In the NFL, this is all compounded further by the fact that any disparities in skill and talent are smaller than they appear. Even the poor saps stuck playing for the Tennessee Titans are collected from the best football players in the world, after all.

All of this is to say that I can beat myself up over my results from Week 3 all I want; even with infinite time and resources to research and investigate every aspect of every game before making my picks and assignments for every week, I would still be susceptible to a performance like this. Total knowledge of the verifiable facts of pro football does not and cannot serve as a divining rod that leads its wielder to infallible prognosis. And, if it did, the results it would provide would be so alien to human understanding that most people would reject them even if they were provided with and believed in the evidence. And, if you don’t agree with me in this regard, take this opportunity to ask yourself how you would’ve reacted if this time last week, an omniscient being of pure reason contacted you to tell you Marcus Mariota was about to lead the Commanders to victory over the Seahawks, and they brought every piece of evidence to prove the inevitability of this outcome should you wish to examine it.

I don’t say this to make excuses. Okay, do say this in part to make excuses, but only in part! I do this more to beat myself up in public for not putting much thought into my Week 3 picks, and to acknowledge that not only am I experiencing a crisis of confidence, I have also already reached the point in the season where my brain is a terminally soaked and moldy sponge of football information. Note that I didn’t say football knowledge, I said football information. I’ve absorbed so many takes that the updated takes are passing through me faster than Beast Light passes through a freshman. I can no longer process the actual games I actually watch. It’s gotten so bad that I’m giving max points to the Ravens, even though this is the exact sort of game they’ve been blowing with alarming consistency for the last five years or so.

This is a tough week to navigate while mired in self-doubt, so don’t think for a second I buy the Vikings’ 3-0 start. Kyler Murray stunk up the joint against Tampa last Sunday after stinking up the joint for 11 plays in Week 1, and I’m already done with that dude. But the Dolphins are awful and worthy double digit teams are in short supply this week. 12 on the Rams, who are 1-2 and kind of deserve it? 13 on the Lions!? Say whatever you want about their opposition, neither team deserves that level of trust.

But what are the alternatives? The Raiders take a game off of the Chiefs even when they suck, and so far this year they have shown the pluck and tenacity of a 7-9 win outfit. That might not sound like much, but as far as this century goes the Raiders must be partying like it’s 1983. I don’t want to make Drake Maye’s shitty start into a referendum on what his career has been and will be, but he sure has sucked lately. There’s just no defending 1 TD to 6 INTs. That said, this is a division rivalry game and the Pats are desperate, so I’m wary of giving the Bills too much.

Because they were on locally last weekend and because I was curious about the Bengals’ improved defense, I watched their game against the Steelers and…yikes. Rumors of Cincy’s defensive competence have been greatly exaggerated. I don’t want to overreact to what ended up a close loss to a division rival, but the jaguars are just a better team right now. Nor do I want to overreact to Denver’s thrilling comeback against the Rams; one of the core tenets of modern football analysis is that teams that win by one score or less in one season are unlikely to repeat the feat in the next. The Broncos, by virtue of their construction and coaching, appear better equipped to win narrowly than most other teams, but that doesn’t mean it’s a smart to pick them to keep it going, not against a 9ers team that may very well be the actual best in the NFC.

Fuck the Browns.

Case Keenum drinks for free in Minnesota for life, and I got a pleasant reminder of that fact on Monday night, when his old ass made the best out of his schemelord coach’s many opportunities. I’ve heard good things about the Jets’ performance so far, but they’re still 1-2 and I still haven’t debased myself enough to watch any Jets football, so I’m falling back on my priors while assigning points in recognition of the fact that that’s what I’m doing. All the rest of these games suck, and it’s late, and I have to make my kid’s school lunch before I pass out while playing CastleVania in bed. That’s the Gross Football Lunch commitment to professionalism in action, baby!

Enjoy the games, everyone!