Gross Football Lunch – Week 6, 2026 NFL Season

Recipe of the Week: Dare I Call This Substance Chimichurri?

Method & Analysis:

It’s the Vikings bye week already, and in years past I have used the Vikings’ bye as an opportunity to conduct my patented (my legal counsel has made it perfectly clear that I must specify that there is no existing or pending patent pursuant to the following registered to Rob, Gross Football Lunch LLC (my legal counsel has further clarified that I must specify that Gross Football Lunch LLC is in no way registered as an LLC, not even in Delaware (or even in Rosemont)), or any associated entity or entities) Football Fan Emotional Health Self-Audit. A cursory scan of my social media feed on any game day is all the anecdotal evidence I need to conclude that modeling healthy sports emotions is my duty, and the world needs me to carry it out now more than ever. Every single member of every single fan base of every single NFL team is absolutely fucking miserable, regardless of their team’s record or playoff prospects, and y’all need to get your heads right.

Since parenting small children has become entirely too easy of late – the three year-old has only pissed on the floor in protest once in the past seven days – I relish the opportunity to model preschool level emotional regulation strategies to a nation of overgrown toddlers who have never watched football because they were too busy posting. But alas, I am unfit to perform this service at this time.

See, the Vikings’ offense looked competent on Sunday, if only just barely; if I’m reading the chart near the top of the page here correctly (my legal counsel has once again demanded that I specify that it cannot be verified at this time whether or not I am in fact reading this chart correctly), Kyler Murray had a positive EPA per play on Sunday! If these trends continue, the Vikings will become an unstoppable juggernaut! Perfect season incoming!! Somebody help!!! I’m stuck in an uncontrollable compulsory stimming loop of pairing Dallas Turner highlights with Manowar’s Greatest Hits!!!!

Ahem. As you can imagine, it’s difficult to pretend to be normal about sports when you’re busy nursing a baby goat worthy to be offered in blood sacrifice to accelerate the glorious conquest of the Purple Demon Horde. I will need to wait for the Vikings to suffer a loss or two before my own feelings can even out. For the time being, I will have to fall back on pretending I know how to cook.

*****

In my capacity as an irresponsible white person, I am constantly terrified of committing flagrant acts of cultural appropriation. As such, I am hesitant to label the below-described substance as a batch of ‘chimichurri’, on account of actual chimichurri coming from a place I’ve never visited and have no ancestral ties to, and also on account of not knowing whether the below-described substance even counts as actual chimichurri in the first place. Recipes and food are emotionally charged topics, and as such I’m worried that I’m about to step on a rake that’s also covered in cow shit.

But you can’t get canceled for being an irresponsible white person if no one reads your shit in the first place, and if I don’t have any grain to feed into the Content Mill, I’ll have to resort to sating this mechanical beast with bones, like the thoughtless colonial oppressor I know myself to be. I do not know if the below-described substance does or does not count as chimichurri in any technically accurate sense. I may or may not be missing a key ingredient or twelve. What I do no is that it looks like chimichurri, it smells like chimichurri, and it goes great on steak.

But alas, I must regretfully inform you that your first task is to wash a bunch of cilantro as thoroughly as possible. Washing cilantro is tedious but also necessary; you will wash and scrub (with like, your fingers or something, not a sponge you weirdo) and scrub and wash and it simply does not matter how much washing and scrubbing you do, there will still be bits of dirt and grit on the cilantro when you’re done, because every domestically available bunch of cilantro was grown in and harvested from the sand traps at Augusta National. Once the cilantro is washed, shake it dry and maybe pat it down with a clean towel, then start tearing the leaves from the stems. Don’t be too precious about getting every last little bit of leaf and discarding every last bit of stem; if little tiny bits of the thinner stem portions end up in the finished product, it’ll be okay. Just make sure to get rid of any and all of the relatively giant, woody stalks.

Once the leaves are all torn off, set them aside and peel six to eight medium sized cloves of garlic. Place the garlic and cilantro leaves in a food processor, then add a generous amount of kosher salt, a similarly generous amount of cracked black pepper, and a respectable but not necessarily excessive amount of crushed red chili pepper flakes. A good chimichurri has plenty of zing but isn’t necessarily hot and spicy in the way that, say, a good Thai green curry is hot and spicy. I’m not forbidding you from pursuing your vision for burning hot chimichurri – in fact, it’s not like the kids will touch the stuff when it’s not super spicy, so I may go to Spicytown next time I make a batch myself – I’m merely pointing out that the spice level is a component of the zing, not the whole of it.

Once all your stuff is in the blender, fire that son of a bitch up and keep it going until everything inside is shredded into such little tiny specks that it’s almost become some sort of paste. Turn the processor off and empty its contents into a bowl that’s large enough to accommodate the processor’s contents and a good amount of extra stuff.

It’s time to add the extra virgin olive oil and red wine vinegar, but first, a word of caution! If you have one of those nozzles on your food processor that will let you at a slow but steady drizzle of oil, like the one you would use to make your own Caesar salad dressing, you may be tempted to add the oil that way while the other stuff is getting chopped up, but don’t you dare do this! That nozzle exists to add oil in a slow drizzle specifically for the purposes of creating an emulsion. A good chimichurri is not a unified substance; it is herbs, garlic, and seasoning lying in a pool of oil and vinegar. I made this very mistake myself once, and while the taste was still acceptable the texture was gloopy and weird and decidedly not the texture of the nice chimichurri you get at the empanada place or whatever.

Instead, empty the contents of your food processor into a bowl, then dump a decent amount of extra virgin olive oil on top of it, followed by a few glugs of red wine vinegar. How much oil and vinegar should you add? Excellent question! If I ever learn the answer, I’ll let you know. I make this stuff with the power the arises when you combine the art of eyeballing it with the science of vibes. In the end, your ration of herb stuff to oil and vinegar should be, I dunno, 3:1? 4:1? It should be mostly herb stuff underneath a discernable but not overly large layer of oil. Give it a taste; if the amount of zing does not send you sprinting to the nearest wad of red meat so you can slather this stuff all over said wad, it’s not enough zing. Add little glugs of red wine vinegar until this level of zing is achieved.

Congratulations, you have made chimi…chim…chi…chiwhatever this stuff is, or can be called. It’s ready to use immediately, and will keep in the fridge for a few days. Put it on whatever you want; beef, chicken, pork, fish, pizza, fuck it, put it on your peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I don’t give a shit. This stuff is good and goes with everything, but I reserve the right to revisit this recipe another time, regardless of whether or not every gets mad at me.

In the meantime, would you look at that! My baby goat is ready! Um, does anyone have any experience tying up goat legs? No? Well then can anyone help me suspend a live baby goat over this nifty little sacrificial altar I’ve got around back by the shed? It’s tricky, I think this little fella is afraid for its life, which I suppose is fair, all things considered. Still no? Seriously? Pleeeease? Pretty please? I need a little help here! The sacrifice is demanded! THE SACRIFICE IS AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH SKOL VIKINGS MOTHERFUCKER AAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHSHASHAHHHSHDR&(UONJEmkl

Week 6 NFL Confidence Pool

Bye: Bengals, Dolphins, Lions, Vikings

Here at Gross Football Lunch LLC (my legal counsel has stormed into the office and threatened to slide a flathead screwdriver under my fingernails and pop them off one by one if I don’t knock it off with the LLC shit (my legal counsel has further clarified that I wasn’t supposed to tell everyone the part about the flathead screwdriver)), I concern myself with process over results. While I do strive to pick the games as accurately as I can, it is ultimately more important that the reasoning behind my picks and assignments is legible. Everyone thought the Cowboys would win last week, so I’m off the hook. Everyone also had the smarts to keep the Raiders on Fraud Watch, whereas I got lazy and spiteful, and paid the price accordingly.

Week 5 gave this pool terrible results while also providing tremendously entertaining football, and this week, I’m pleased to announce that the reverse is true. All of these games are dogshit, and I am making it my business to avoid watching a single second of any of them. They are also so lopsided that I didn’t have to think twice about giving any of them double digits, and in fact, there are so many games worthy of double digits this week that I had to narrow it down! What an embarrassment of riches!

And of course, the choice for max points was already made for me. I’ll speak my in-depth piece on this at some point, but if there’s one thing that’s apparent to me when I survey the landscape of football fandom these days, it’s that the analytics revolution has arrived for the general public, and that’s a problem. Rather than provide people with understanding, advanced statistics and their analysis have only given the people new tools to enable solipsistic wallowing. It is no longer enough for a football fan to see their favorite team win a football game. The offense must have a higher EPA per play, or more air yards, or more yards on scrambles, or a lower pressure-to-sack ratio, or a higher success rate on first and second down, or a higher success rate on second and medium when targeting the #3 receiver on an outside corner stop based off of outside zone play action against match Cover 6.

The defense needs 5-7 pressures a pop for both starting edge rushers, and a passer rating allowed below 80.0, a sub-20% rushing success allowed, and the off-ball linebackers need to demonstrate they possess the athleticism to roll up and play the run and sprint back into the intermediate to deep middle when running any middle-of-field open coverage. Because if they can’t do that, the entire defense would be better off getting rid of their off-ball linebackers entirely and replacing them with slot/safety hybrids and/or a few extra edge rushers, but only if they can rush on the interior from a two-point stance. And, of course, if your favorite team won by a margin of eight points or fewer, that means they actually lost and will be exposed as frauds in the playoffs, when they face a team that has a higher point differential, but is also fraudulent because their adjusted net air yards per tight end screen attempt is in the lower 60th percentile.

These are all symptoms of knowledge without understanding, which in an NFL context can only serve as fuel for the gnawing anxiety of impending, crushing defeat against an opponent to be determined later in a game that doesn’t yet exist. A good friend of mine is a Bills fan, and Tuesday morning he hit up the group chat to complain that too many of Josh Allen’s passing yards came after the catch, according to Next-Gen AI Hallucinations, Powered by Gutted State Capacity for Financial Regulation. If you watched Monday’s game and came away thinking Josh Allen didn’t play well, you have slipped the bonds of shared, observable reality and drifted into the Demiplane of Bottomless Unsubstantiated Nervousness.

For now, my point is simply this. In a wiser, more functional society, those of us who support winning teams would have set aside those anxieties this week in favor of getting another easy dunk on the Commanders. Like, holy fucking shit, this is a disaster beyond reason. The Jets are the very model of competence in comparison. If I may conduct a quick thought experiment, I would like you to ask yourself which of the following options is the worst one, and reflects the most poorly on Dan Quinn, Commanders OC David Blough, Jayden Daniels, and everyone else who let this happen:

1. They can’t count backwards from 2
2. They thought they got 3 timeouts in overtime instead of 2
3. They didn’t actually agree what the plan was and/or didn’t make sure Daniels was crystal clear on it, so he panicked and/or brainfarted

I’ve been turning this question over in my head since Sunday afternoon, and I still don’t know the answer. What I do know is that this coaching staff now has to travel cross country to face the best team in the league. Good luck with that. I don’t have much to say for the rest of this group, except that when I asked which picked team deserved the fewest points, the answer was intuitively and demonstrably the Rams. After Monday night’s festival of shanks, blocks, and out-kicked coverage, I am finally 8-10 business days away from internalizing the fact that the Rams’ special teams are ass enough to be disqualifying.

Long-time readers of Gross Football Lunch know that this middle grouping of assignments is a place of honor, as it is often where marquee games between good teams end up. If I’m not all that confident in picking a winner but trust whichever team I do pick more than, say, the Giants, where else can I put them? This week, the most honored assignment goes to the Seahawks, but said assignment is damning with faint praise. Seattle’s game against Denver is the only interesting game in Week 6, and it’s on Thursday night to boot. Even under ideal circumstances, a game between these Seahawks and these Broncos was going to be a rock fight, and playing on Thursday night precludes the possibility of ideal circumstances. I don’t know exactly what will happen in this game. I just know that it’s going to be disgusting, and leave all its spectators feeling icky both inside and outside, as if they had taken down a 4-pack of dry, disappointing store brand cupcakes. Can’t wait.

I know I said last week that I was done taking the Texans seriously, but then they went and used their obvious Get Right Game opportunity to actually get right. I hate to denigrate the work and abilities of professional football players, but Jesus Christ the Titans are a hopeless mess. I’m pretty sure the surviving members of the the 1998 Mankato East Cougars Varsity squad could beat the Titans right now, assuming they can find a way to pry off their ankle monitors. But, despite only succeeding against incompetent opposition, I am now convinced the Texans will fulfill their promise and enter the postseason riding a 13-game winning streak. Why it’s almost enough to get me to pick ’em, but since I lack the courage of my convictions I’ll have to settle for the pleasure of shooting myself in the foot with a low assignment on one of the best teams in football. Life is hard.

Okay, you got me, I did exaggerate a couple of paragraphs ago. The just about annual Packers/Cowboys game is one of my most beloved hate watches, and I look forward to whatever displays of quasi-competence await me almost as much as I look forward to overreacting to both teams’ most recent results. I forgot that, while the Tampa Bay Buccaneers came into Week 5 winless, the Dallas Lolboys have gone undefeated for the past 30 years. And, if I’m wrong, it means the Packers lost, and fuck the Packers forever. Is this enough interest to get me to actually watch what’s sure to be the football equivalent of Tuesday dinner at the Golden Corral instead of hitting the pen and firing up Final Fantasy VI? Who can say! The future is unwritten, and that’s beautiful.

Enjoy the games, everyone!