robsam
2841
I just wish Dallas had somehow pulled off a crazy deal to draft Cam Newton. Look at what he’s doing with Carolina and imagine him on almost any team with a better roster.
Shmtur
2842
Not to nitpick, but Cris Carter has actually already done this. They currently share that record.
[B][CENTER]
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEYYYESSSSSSSS!!!
OH HO HO IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII LIKE IT.[/CENTER][/B]
(Dream team my ass)
Sarkus
2844
You may be ignoring them, but the Titans are pretty well balanced team, both in terms of offense/defense and in terms of run/pass offensive potential. CJ2K’s slow start has been offset by Hasselbeck having a great start to the year.
They’ve also had a relatively easy schedule. We’ll know a lot more about them next week when they visit Pittsburgh. But right now they certainly look playoff capable, and at home (which is where they played the Ravens) they have a good chance against most teams.
Aw dammit I loved that movie so much. “I’m a goddamn good looking man.”
Actually, the Steelers game won’t tell us much. They don’t look very good at all this year. Beating the Colts is nothing, and they’ve lost pretty badly to good teams. I don’t think we’ll really know much about the Titans until they play Houston. Of course, if they LOSE to the Steelers, that might tell us something. The Titans got their shit together faster than expected, and that’s largely thanks to Hasselbeck. They played the Ravens very well though. In fact, they’ve played well in every game except week one, when they played one of the most undisciplined games I’ve ever seen.
Then the announcers were wrong. Not that that should surprise anyone.
You’re sure Carter’s where the first four games of a season? That was the distinction they were claiming.
The Steelers look pretty bad, period.
Offensively, this is a team built for running and the deep pass. The OL is worse than expected and can’t do either. Ben now has happy feet and isn’t throwing the ball accurately. The young WRs (Sanders and Brown) aren’t making the correct adjustments at the line of scrimmage, leading to even more problems.
Defensively, they look bad. Casey Hampton looks great one play and bad the next two. The DL isn’t occupying blockers very well (especially Aaron Smith). James Harrison isn’t 100% from his back surgery, Timmons & Woodley don’t look great and Farrior looks very slow (time for Stephenson Sylvester). Troy is playing out of control and his misses are leading to big gains. There’s nothing here they can’t fix - put in Hood and Sylvester as starters, back Troy up a bit and so forth. I’d expect the defense to rebound.
But as it stands, unless they change their game plan on offense, this team isn’t going anywhere. The loss of Willie Colon at RT is killing them.
Aaron rogers had 53 fantasy points for me yesterday.
I still lost. Other guy had the Ravens defense. Damn you SANCHEZ!!!
Washington is now 3-1, though I didn’t get to see it since NFL Sunday Ticket gave up. But I’ve complained enough about that. I’m going to be pessimistic now!
I just don’t see Washington doing well this year. The St. Louis victory is really just a clunker over a team slumping horribly, and we still couldn’t put them away effectively. I think someone else in the division is going to catch us, probably the Giants now. Until then, Rex Grossman just wins, baby!
Here’s the thing. The team is now built very well, plays disciplined, and under control. The defense is pretty much fixed, which is amazing considering how bad it was last year (gave up 172 yards to the Rams, and were beating on Bradford to the tune of 7 sacks). Offensive line actually looks good. Fundamentally, except for one area, this team is extremely competitive. That one area is QB, where we essentially have a very minimal threat at QB. He’s actually more of a dual threat, as he’s a threat to both the defense and the offense…
If this team had a legit QB and passing attack, it’d be fine. Baby steps, Matt, baby steps. I wouldn’t expect anything this year, except that the team will be better than last year (and they are). Shanahan had a lot of work to do to fix the Zornsaster.
I saw the Washington game, much to my dismay, and their offense didn’t show me much. Grossman looked ok but he got lucky. He threw a pick six to a Rams player that got dropped. It wasn’t a good play by the DB but just a bad pass by Grossman. He did get picked later, and that was just a bad pass too. He didn’t see the MLB dropping back and threw it right to him.
The Redskins defense, OTOH, looked good. Seven sacks. They kept Steven Jackson bottled up on the ground. The thing is the Rams offensive line is looking so bad it’s hard to know if it was the Skins defense or if every defense is going to look like this against the Rams.
The Rams also had at least six drops – I think we lead the NFL in drops this year. One drop was a TD. Another was a drop 20 yards down the field with room to run after the catch. The rest I don’t remember, but Mark Sims-Walker had two drops in three plays and killed a drive.
As a Rams fan my only slim hope is that their offensive woes are the result of learning an entirely new system during an abbreviated training camp and that it will come together for them down the line this season. They should be better. They still lack a true #1 WR but what they have should be marginally better than what they had last year when they went 7-9.
But ye gods, what a brutal schedule they have opened with. Eagles, Giants, Ravens, Skins, and the next three are Green Bay, Dallas, and New Orleans. All their division games are on the back end of the schedule for some reason. The Ravens are the best team they’ve played, BTW. It was a mismatch.
The NFL has been putting more divisional games at the end of the year to get more Weeks 15-17 interest, since that used to be the Curtis Painter month. The Rams are getting killed with that, as will the Chiefs in midseason.
I made the exact same “Bizarro Lions” observation to my buddy during the game yesterday. We’ve gone from being the team that consistently finds ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory to the exact opposite.
I guess it depends on where you set the bar for “doing well”. I agree that the offense should have hammered them much harder than they did, especially considering the ludicrous penalty yardage that StL handed them. But in all the Grossman-focused press, no one seems to notice that the defense is playing incredibly well.
The 'Skins held the Rams to fewer points than the Giants or the Eagles. They held Dallas to about a third fewer points than anyone else (granted, against a wounded Romo). Likewise the Giants. Arizona isn’t quite worth bragging about, as Seattle actually did better, but they are making teams settle for field goals where last year half of them would have been TDs.
Don’t get me wrong - they’re not going to the Superbowl, and they might not even win the division, but they are significantly improved from last season and I could see them in the hunt for a playoff berth.
I meant playoff contender, yeah.
Great article on the Skins-Rams game last night in the WaPo, and why it was closer than it really should have been. Rex Grossman, turnover machine.
That’s 14 turnovers in his seven starts since taking over as Redskins quarterback last December. An average NFL quarterback makes about one turnover a game, including lost fumbles. No team can succeed, or ever has in recent times, with a quarterback spitting up the ball anywhere near that twice-a-game rate.
Oh and for you Rams fans, this made me laugh. Sorry.
You can’t evaluate this game honestly without conceding how awful the Rams are. The Rams can’t line up right. (Or left.) It’s like herding sheep.
They jump offsides and hold, but wait until they are in the red zone to do it (three times). They have a punt return man, still conscious at last reports, who appeared not to know he was allowed to make a fair catch. After being smote three times, and fumbling twice, he got an ovation for throwing up his arm. “Jeez, tell you dude to fair-catch it,” one Redskins player told a Ram.
Once, the Rams faked a handoff to no one. “Oh, we saw that,” Lorenzo Alexander said.
Twice, they missed wide-open touchdown passes in the end zone.
They have a tight end named Michael Hoomanawanui who, with all those letters, is still two consonants (and 10 fingers) shy of having any “hands.”
Not to defend Rex too much, but he lost all four of his fumbles last year, plus both of his fumbles this year. On average, quarterbacks last year only lost 40% of their fumbles (source: some quick math on http://www.footballoutsiders.com/stats/qb2010, FK and FL columns). That’s bad fumble luck. In 2007, the last year Rex played a decent amount, he fumbled 5 times and lost 2 of them.
By way of comparison, McNabb fumbled 8 times last year, but the offense recovered all of them. Jason Campbell fumbled 7 times and only lost 1.
So is this the year when we find out that all these promising young QBs aren’t going to pan out? Sounds like Bradford and Sanchez are terrible this year, and Flacco and Matt Ryan are mediocre. But hey, now we have a new batch of promising young guys…
The big change between this year and last year for the Rams is… their offensive coordinator? Because if so, I’d drop him right now. Not in a few games or at the end of the year, but right fucking now. Dear god.
Before the game, I dumbly picked the Seahawks to pull one out at home. By halftime, I remembered it was the 'hawks we were talking about and by the end of the game, they almost made me believe. At least it wasn’t a total blowout I guess.
Calvin Johnsen. Wow. Triple covered at one point and still caught the ball. Sure, he was only coved by “Newman!” at the last, but so what? They quit double and triple teaming him because it didn’t appear to matter. Also, I like Romo, but he has Favre disease pretty bad.
49ers? What a difference a coach can make, huh? Just wow.
Titans are 3-1 now, yes? Seattle, do you wish you kept Hasselbeck now? Because I sure do…
I want to add a comment about the Packers now. But I can’t, because Woodson just stole that shit and Rodgers threw it in the endzone before I could even spit it out. They are on fire.
Forte still plays for the Bears? I don’t think the Panthers knew about him either…
And last but not least, how in the hell do the Redskins keep winning with Grossman throwing 27 picks per game?
