No pre-amble today, as I am going to the Heat/Nuggets game tonight and want to save my wittiest insults for the Whore of Akron. Brewing up something about his mother and the 4th quarter. I’m sure it will be GOLD. Let’s get right to the picks.
We’ve picked the Saturday games, so time to move on to the Sunday games.
Houston @ Baltimore
Halftime: Baltimore (-4.5)
Full Game: Baltimore (-8)
By far the least interesting match-up of the weekend. It isn’t even close. This is the John Mayer of NFL Divisional playoff games. Some beautiful women will find it inexplicably attractive. I find it dull and struggle to see the attraction.
A rookie quarterback on the road. A stout, but older defense. An elite home playoff team with the most questionable quarterback since Rex Grossmann took a team to the Super Bowl. This game could end up 13-7 or 28-3 or 31-28. I have no feeling for it and after it ends will wake up from my nap say ‘huh’ and go take a shower.
But I do know this: every year one decent team uses momentum from Wild Card weekend to come in and jump on a home team struggling to find its rhythm after a week off. The Jets last year. The Cardinals at Panthers a couple years ago. The Ravens at Titans the same year. The Texans looked so stout at home last week, it is easy to envision Arian Foster running right past the Ravens. On the other side of the ball, is the Ravens offense really that much better than the Bengals? If the Texans can slow down Ray Rice, would anyone in Maryland be willing to bet a crab cake on Joe Flacco leading the team to a playoff win through the air?
But this still requires TJ Yates to play well on the road and ignore the vaguely homoerotic Ball So Hard slogan of Terrell Slugs. And let’s not forget Arian Foster is still a young guy that went undrafted out of college. Haloti Ngata eats those guys for breakfast.
Literally. He calls it his ‘Captain Cook’-ie Crisp cereal.
Texans come out swinging and the Ravens come out sluggish, take the Texans and points at the half.
But Ray Rice-a-roni the Baltimore treat (not to be confused with crack the real Baltimore treat) finds his legs in the 2nd half, the defense stuffs the Texans and Joe Flacco’s eyebrow finds Torrey Smith deep a couple times.
Take the Ravens, give the points for the full game.
NY Giants @ Green Bay
Halftime: Green Bay (-5)
Full Game: Green Bay (-8.5)
A few years ago, an up and down Giants team went into Green Bay and shocked the heavily favored Packers in the NFC title game. We all remember this game for Favre’s fitting final throw/interception as a Packer – losing the game in overtime (but he was just having fun out there). But you may not remember the single greatest thing about that game. The introduction of the Tom Coughlin Everest Face!
He may have won a Super Bowl and be on the verge of being fired each year, but for me Coughlin’s career highlight always has been and always will be coaching a game while looking like a mountaineer that survived a fierce storm at 26,000 by gnawing on George Mallory’s femur for energy and warmth.
I may or may not have the motto “those that don’t remember the past are destined to repeat it.’ (in Comic Sans) tattooed on my body, but in this case, I actually think that history works against the G-men.
Where they were once inspired by a coach that some thought was about to turn into Violet Beauregarde after the blueberry bubble gum, this weekend’s forecast in Green Bay calls for significantly less sinister temperatures.
Will the Giants be as motivated with a coach that doesn’t look like he is about to be wheeled away by the Oompa Loompas or have his nose amputated by a Nepalese surgeon? I doubt it.
In other, more subtle reasons why the Packers will win, Aaron Rodgers is not Brett Favre. None of us have seen his package and he doesn’t distribute the ball to the opposing team like a party host with a tray of mini-pigs-in-blankets.
That Packer team also didn’t have Clay Matthews on it. I imagine a cold evening in Green Bay will mean a huge night for Matthews in his on-going attempt to secure a role in the next Nordic mythology movie.
I say you take the Packers in the first half – they come out fast and come out mean, driving at will and making the inevitable Private Box shots of the Manning clan irrelevant.
In the 2nd half I think the Giants slow the Packers and crawl back into the game, with a bomb to Victor Cruz and a long sustained drive by the 2-headed running back tandem.
Giants keep it close and cover that too-big-spread bu,t in the end, their Super Bowl dreams disappear Into Thin Air.
