nfl Archives - Page 26 of 35

What does it mean to start or sit someone in fantasy football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does it mean to start or sit someone in fantasy football? Fantasy football owners can’t actually control who plays in a real football game, right? So what gives?

Thanks,
Sal

— — —

Dear Sal,

Ha! I can tell from your question that you understand a little more than you’re letting on. No, of course, you’re right that a fantasy football owner can’t control which real players play in real games each weekend. Like many aspects of fantasy football, this is made more complicated by the fact that fantasy vocabulary shares terms with football but they mean slightly different things in different contexts. The choice to start or sit a player on a fantasy football team decides whether or not that player’s real stats will count toward the fantasy team’s score for the weekend. Making these choices is a big part of what makes fantasy football so fascinating and addictively torturous for people who play fantasy football. We already published a comprehensive post on how fantasy football works, so we’ll stick just to your question about starting or sitting a player. Here’s how it works.

Fantasy leagues vary greatly in how they are set up, but a fairly standard fantasy team will consist of 16 players. Of those, each week, only the statistics from nine of them will count towards the fantasy team’s total. The decision of which nine players of the 16 should count each week is the choice you’re asking about. Players that a fantasy owner selects to have their stats count are said to “start” or “be starting.” Players whose statistics an owner chooses not to have count are said to “sit” or “be sitting.” These terms mirror the decisions that real football coaches make about players on their roster for reasons of injury, relative skill, game-plan, or other factors, but they decide different things. In real football, the decision determines who plays in the football game and potentially who keeps their job and who gets fired. In fantasy, the decisions don’t actually affect the players in question, they only affect the fantasy owner and her fortunes that week.

The interesting thing about the start or sit decision in fantasy football is that fantasy owners have to make it before the games start each week. It’s all about prediction. The decision to start one player over another can be a determining factor in a fantasy game. For example, this weekend, I decided to start Jarett Boykin, a wide receiver on the Green Bay Packers, over Brandon Marshall, a wide receiver on the Chicago Bears. Boykin caught one pass for six yards. Marshall? Five catches, 48 yards, and three touchdowns. If I had chosen to start Marshall, and therefore had his stats count towards my totals, I would have won. Instead, I started Boykin and lost. Why did I make this decision? Well, similar to a real coach, I made it based on injury, relative skill, game-plan, and other factors. Marshall had a badly sprained ankle, my twitter feed was telling me he wasn’t likely to even play, and I thought that Green Bay would have an easy time throwing the ball against the Jets and Boykin would benefit from it.

Hindsight is 20/20 but foresight is variable. The more information about football games a fantasy owner has, the more reading and listening and watching and studying they do, and the better they are at compiling the data in their brains and their guts, the better their foresight is going to be. The more work a fantasy owner does, the better his or her start or sit decisions are likely to be and the more likely they are to win. This is the logic that makes start or sit decisions such an integral part of fantasy football and fantasy football such a force in driving interest in the NFL and the sport of football.

Hope this all makes sense,
Ezra Fischer

Cue Cards 9-17-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Tuesday, September 16

Two divisions settled in baseball — Yesterday we mentioned that the baseball season is coming to an end soon. Just to prove the point, two of the six division winners in Major League Baseball (MLB) were conclusively settled last night. The Washington Nationals won their National League East division after beating the Atlanta Braves 3-0. The Nationals have now completed their three-year journey from surprisingly good to incredibly disappointing and now to living up to the expectations of being good. Their geographic neighbors, the Baltimore Orioles, also clinched their division after winning 8-2 over the Toronto Blue Jays. The Orioles are in the same division as two giants of baseball, the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, so division victories are hard to come by. Congratulations to both teams!
Line: Are you ready for the baseball playoffs? In case you don’t know how they work, here’s a Dear Sports Fan post explaining it.
Crime and punishment still reign over the NFL — The scandalous season of the National Football League (NFL) continued yesterday with three stories. In the Adrian Peterson story (arrested for child abuse in Texas for beating his four year-old child) the Vikings reversed course. After benching Peterson for a week, they had announced he would practice and play this week but then yesterday they changed their minds and re-benched him. Maybe it had something to do with a major sponsor dropping the team. Meanwhile, the NFL Players’ Association (NFLPA) is officially appealing Ray Rice’s suspension. When you think of it just from a labor/management perspective and look at the process, it is a pretty messed up process. First he was suspended for two games, then the league changed the rules about domestic abuse so that they called for a six game suspension for a first offense, and then a week or two after that, the league suspended him indefinitely and has still not put a time-frame on the suspension. It’s good that the players’ association is playing their role properly here, no matter how repugnant the crime is. In other policy-changing-after-the-fact news, the NFL and NFLPA is about to agree on more lenient punishment for drug violations which will retroactively lesson the punishment for 20 or so suspended players, including some high-profile ones like wide receiver Wes Welker of the Denver Broncos.
Line: So, lemme get this straight, Welker’s suspension gets shorter, Ray Rice’s is being appealed, and Adrian Peterson? After one day of practice, he’s “excused” from team functions again.

Cue Cards 9-16-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Monday, September 15

Eagles beat Colts, no one was arrested — The Monday night football game was between two teams that most everyone thinks are in the top third of the NFL. They played true to form by having a close, tightly contested, high scoring contest. The Eagles won, 30-27, moving to 2-0 (two wins, zero losses) while the Colts moved to 0-2.
Line: Did you know it’s the first time the Colts have lost two games in a row since Andrew Luck became their quarterback?
Rutgers apologizes for “classless fans” — Over the weekend, my alma mater, Rutgers, hosted their first ever Big Ten Conference game in football against what, geographically speaking, should be our new rivals, Penn State. Rutgers lost the game 13-10 but we upheld our reputation for vulgar behavior when some fans publicly and visually mocked Penn State for its recent sexual assault scandal. I can’t say I condone the behavior… but when I was at school there, we were way better at ceaselessly mocking the other team than we were at beating them in football.
Line: There’s been so many other scandals lately, Penn State’s issue feels antique in comparison.
Baseball’s checkered flag — In car racing, a checkered flag means ‘one more lap.’ Major League Baseball teams have about twelve games left in their 162 game season. Playoff races are in full swing (pun intended) and last night the first team clinched a playoff spot. That team was the Los Angeles Angels. The Kansas City Royals also helped their playoff cause by beating the White Sox in a “dramatic ninth-inning comeback.”
Line: Wow, the playoffs are coming up fast. I better start paying attention to baseball!

Why do quarterbacks slide?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do quarterbacks slide? I guess there’s some rule that you can’t touch the quarterback if he slides with the ball? Seems kind of unfair to me.

Thanks,
Fred

— — —

Dear Fred,

Why do quarterbacks slide? It’s a good question. You’re right that they are taking advantage of a rule when they do slide but it might not be as unfair as you think. We’ll look into the rule, discuss why it is that quarterbacks slide and other positions don’t, and check out a couple creative ways that players really do look to get an advantage out of sliding.

The sliding rule comes from a set of scenarios that end a play in football. In the NFL, that list includes criteria like, “when a forward pass (legal or illegal) is incomplete,”when the ball is out-of-bounds,” and the one that we care about in this post, “when a runner declares himself down by sliding feet first on the ground. The ball is dead the instant the runner touches the ground with anything other than his hands or his feet.” This rule applies equally to all the players on the field, quarterbacks are not special when it comes to sliding. Anyone who has the ball, can at any time for any reason, make the play end by sliding feet forward on to the ground. Once the play is over, of course, no one is allowed to hit the player with the ball unless they’ve already committed irrevocably to the motion of hitting the ball-carrier before the play ended. When we talk about rules on this site, we often end up categorizing them into rules intended to create even and exciting competition and rules intended to create relative safety for a sport’s participants. This one is definitely a safety rule but it has a competitive wrinkle built-in. As opposed to when a player dives forward with the ball, a player that slides feet forwards only advances the ball to the place where they first started their dive. Their team therefore loses out on a territorial advantage if a player decides to slide feet first.

The reason why sliding is commonly thought of as something only quarterbacks can do is because it’s usually something only quarterbacks actually do in practice. Part of this is tactical — there’s often a much greater difference between the starting quarterback and the backup compared to the starting running back or wide receiver and the next one on the team. It’s more harmful for a team to lose a quarterback than virtually any other position. Part of it is also cultural though. It’s simply not accepted for a running back or a wide receiver to voluntarily end a play by sliding the way it is for a quarterback. Quite the contrary, even running backs or wide receivers who run out-of-bounds or dive head first to avoid a hit are looked on slightly askance. As the impact of brain injury becomes more well understood, (and perhaps more importantly for this conversation, the protocols for handling potential brain injuries, because they take players off the field for a time, become more seriously enforced,) this cultural norm about sliding might change.

Some of the leagues craftier quarterbacks still look to get an advantage out of sliding. Not only do they protect themselves but, they think, what else can I get out of this process for my team and me? In Tom Brady’s case he thought, “maybe I can injure (or at least either scare or anger) my opponent while sliding.” So, he slid with his cleats up, like way up… like a baseball player sliding into second trying to cancel out a double-play. That’s a pretty perverse thing to do — to turn a move designed to guarantee one’s own safety into an attack. Smart man. Andrew Luck, quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts seemed to have been working the rules in a preseason game this year when he kind of slid sideways in a rolling kind of movement. Backup quarterback and connoisseur of treachery, Matt Hasselbeck, had this to say about it:

“It was sneaky,” backup quarterback Matt Hasselbeck said through a wry smile. “It wasn’t really a slide and it wasn’t really a dive.

“I thought he was trying to get away with the barrel-roll. I think he was trying to score. (If) nobody tags him down, he gets back up and runs. Watch the film. Genius.”

The slide in football is pretty much a quarterbacks only move now but I think we’ll begin to see that change over the next couple of years. My concern with the sliding rule, as a person with bad knees, has always been that sliding feet first, with cleats on, isn’t actually a safe move even if the rules say it’s safe. It’s way too easy to catch a cleat on the turf and end up with an injured knee. In college football, sliding is unnecessary because any contact with anything but hands or feet when a player has the ball immediately ends the play. That’s a safer rule and it doesn’t steal much excitement from the game at all. Maybe we’ll see that migrate to the NFL in time as well.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Cue Cards 9-15-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Sunday, September 14

The NFL plays football — After a week full of ancillary cultural stories, the NFL actually played football games yesterday. Read the Week Two NFL One Liners for full (and brief) coverage of each game.
Well, that was easy — The United States Men’s National Basketball team finished their romp through the FIBA World Cup of Basketball with a 129-92 victory. Looking back on the tournament, the toughest game the team had, was against Turkey in the group stage. It may have been different if Spain had made it to the finals, because they were expected to be around even with our team, but they were knocked out of the tournament in the quarterfinals by France.

Week Two NFL One Liners

On Mondays during in the fall, the conversation is so dominated by NFL football that the expression “Monday morning quarterback” has entered the vernacular. The phrase is defined by Google as “a person who passes judgment on and criticizes something after the event.” With the popularity of fantasy football, we now have Monday morning quarterbacks talking about football from two different perspectives. We want you to be able to participate in this great tradition, so all fall we’ll be running NFL One Liners on Monday. Use these tiny synopses throughout the day:

Week 2

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, AT 1:00 P.M. ET

Miami Dolphins 10, at Buffalo Bills 29

This past week, Buffalo got a new owner for the Bills who is likely to keep them in Buffalo instead of moving to Toronto or somewhere else. The Bills capped off a good week for them with a victory over the Dolphins.

New Orleans Saints 24, at Cleveland Browns 26

Mirage or reality? Both teams are wondering that after the ordinarily terrible Browns start the season respectably and the Saints start the season disrespectfully.

Detroit Lions 7, at Carolina Panthers 24

Panthers quarterback Cam Newton returns from bruised ribs and makes the Lions’ defense look like figs. (I am allowed one Fig Newton joke per year.)

Atlanta Falcons 10, at Cincinnati Bengals 24

The Bengals continue to be a really good team that doesn’t get the credit they deserve, I think maybe because they wear animal print uniforms and have a red-headed quarterback.

Dallas Cowboys 26, at Tennessee Titans 10

The Cowboys have become such a soap-opera that its surprising when they win a boring, well-played football game like this one.

Jacksonville Jaguars 10, at Washington Redskins 41

The big story here isn’t the convincing win but the dislocated ankle of Washington’s quarterback, Robert Griffin III. He was replaced ably by Kirk Cousins who, an infinite number of bloggers and media pundits will tell you, just might not relinquish the job even when RGIII’s ankle is healed. Drama!

New England Patriots 30, at Minnesota Vikings 7

Good team beats less good team missing their star running back because he was arrested for child abuse. Gah!

Arizona Cardinals 25, at New York Giants 10

After the first week, many people suspected the Giants were bad. Now, after losing at home to a team who had to start their backup quarterback at the last-minute, that suspicion is confirmed.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, AT 4:05 AND 4:25 P.M. ET

Seattle Seahawks 21, at San Diego Chargers 30

Down go the champs! Arm-chair sports psychiatrists will tell you this is actually a good sign for the Seahawks because it keeps them from getting too cocky.

St. Louis Rams 19, at Tampa Bay Buccaneers 17

Third string quarterback, Austin Davis, started this game for the Rams because of injuries to the top two quarterbacks and played well enough for the Rams to beat the Bucs.

Kansas City Chiefs 17, at Denver Broncos 24

Oddly, this close defeat may be the high point of the season for the Chiefs who just seem cursed this year. They lost another two important players, Jamaal Charles and Eric Berry to injury today.

New York Jets 24, at Green Bay Packers 31

Both teams are 1-1, both teams wear green, and we’ll have to wait at least one more week to figure out if both teams are good, bad, or just middle of the road.

Houston Texans 30, at Oakland Raiders 14

No such questions here, the Raiders are bad! Sorry Oakland fans.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Chicago Bears 28, at San Francisco 49ers 20

The story of this game was penalties. So many penalties! The announcers, much to my amusement, didn’t even bother to hide their disdain for the number of penalties in the game. After pulling out to an early lead, the 49ers kinda fell apart and Chicago came back to win.

NFL Week 2 Good Cop, Bad Cop Precap

The NFL season has started but how do you know which games to watch and which to skip? Ask our favorite police duo with their good cop, bad cop precaps of all the Week 1 matchups in the National Football League this weekend. To see which games will be televised in your area, check out 506sports.com’s essential NFL maps. If you’re worried about watching too much football or if you’re negotiating for a little break during the weekend, read our weekly feature, Do Not Watch This Game.

Week 2

Sunday, September 14, at 1:00 p.m. ET

Miami Dolphins at Buffalo Bills

Good cop: The Dolphins and Bills are both 1-0 after surprising victories in week one! After this game, one team will be 2-0!

Bad cop: You did say, “surprising,” didn’t you? I’m surprised that you’re so enthusiastic about this matchup between teams that are going to inevitably fall apart, just like they do every year.

New Orleans Saints at Cleveland Browns

Good cop: Both teams are coming off high scoring, close losses to rivals! This one should be good!

Bad cop: Cleveland’s loss to Pittsburgh looks a little less like a sign of quality after Pittsburgh’s sad showing versus the Ravens. This is going to get ugly fast.

Detroit Lions at Carolina Panthers

Good cop: Wow, did you see Detroit wide receiver Calvin Johnson last game? He’s unbelievable! I can’t wait to see what he does this week!

Bad cop: Teal and Honolulu blue together are an eyesore. Just like this game.

Atlanta Falcons at Cincinnati Bengals

Good cop: I can’t wait to learn more about these two teams! Both looked great in week one, what will happen in week two?!!

Bad cop: One team will win, one team will lose, and you will overreact like a crazy person.

Dallas Cowboys at Tennessee Titans

Good cop: That wasn’t very nice! You’re not very nice! This game is nice though! Both teams have great pass offenses — should be fun!

Bad cop: Now you’re starting to understand. I’m Bad Cop. I’m not nice. Neither is this game. Both teams are awful. Why would you watch this junk?

Jacksonville Jaguars at Washington Redskins

Good cop: The Jaguars got off to a great start last week with 17 straight points! The Redskins didn’t play well but how long can you hold them down? They’ve got such explosive offensive players!

Bad cop: You’re not mentioning the 34 unanswered points the Jaguars allowed after that first 17. And the Redskins lost 17 to 6 to the Titans. Come on.

New England Patriots at Minnesota Vikings

Good cop: Bill Bellichick and Tom Brady are angry after their week one loss! I don’t understand that emotion but I think it makes for entertaining football games!

Bad cop: Ha ha ha. You’re funny, an emotion I don’t understand well. Another thing I don’t understand is how you think the Vikings are going to have a chance against the Patriots here. Boring.

Arizona Cardinals at New York Giants

Good cop: The Cardinals looked good last week!

Bad cop: The Giants looked horrible last week.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, AT 4:05 and 4:25 P.M. ET

Seattle Seahawks at San Diego Chargers

Good cop: The defending champs against many people’s favorite long-shot to win the Super Bowl this year!

Bad cop: Seattle? With ten days rest? Against San Diego with six? Blowout.

St. Louis Rams at Tampa Bay Buccaneers

Good cop: These teams both have great defenses!

Bad cop: These teams both have incompetent offenses.

Kansas City Chiefs at Denver Broncos

Good cop: Division rivals! Two playoff teams from last year!

Bad cop: Ha. You walked right into the trap. Read this week’s Do Not Watch This Game.

New York Jets at Green Bay Packers

Good cop: Gang Green against Green Bay! So much green!

Bad cop: I don’t even understand. How does that make me want to watch this game?

Houston Texans at Oakland Raiders

Good cop: I was just trying to distract you from this game! Even I don’t want to watch this game!

Bad cop: Really? I do. I love train wrecks.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Chicago Bears at San Francisco 49ers

Good cop: This game has everything! Two great coaches! Two exciting quarterbacks! Dynamic wide receivers! Solid running backs! Strong defenses!

Bad cop: A classic ‘too good to be true’ game. Something will happen to mess it up.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Philadelphia Eagles at Indianapolis Colts

Good cop: A great test of system vs. singular talent! Philadelphia’s got a remarkable offensive system but Colts quarterback is an amazing talent! I can’t wait to see them compete!

Bad cop: You do know that the offenses don’t play against each other, right? They both have bad defenses.

How does the coin toss work in football?

Dear Sports Fan,

How does the coin toss work in football?

Thanks,
Tod

— — —

Hi Tod,

When I was a kid, I played a lot of soccer, and I was often the captain. The captain’s one job was to go to the center of the field before the start of the game and be a part of the coin toss. It was pretty simple: one team, I think the away team, called ‘heads’ or ‘tails’. Whoever won the coin toss could choose to select either whether they wanted the ball first in the first half or the second half OR they could choose which side of the field they wanted to start on. The other team got the choice which was left over. If you won the toss and took the ball, the other team got to choose which side they started on. If it was windy and you wanted to choose a side, they got to choose which half they started with the ball. Simple, right?

The NFL’s coin toss is a little complicated but it’s not so hard to understand. Take a deep breath and… here we go!

The coin toss helps facilitate a set of decisions that need to be made before the start of an NFL game and before the start of the second half. The decisions are as follows:

Who kicks the ball and who receives the ball?
Which side does each team play on. (The teams will switch sides between the first and second and the third and fourth quarters no matter what.)

Each time these decisions are made, one team gets first choice on one of them and the other team gets first choice on the other. So, if you choose who kicks and who receives, I get to choose which side I want to play on. To make things fair, one team will get to choose which decision to make first in each half.

The coin toss exists only to decide which team gets to choose which decision to make first in the first half versus the second half. The team that wins the coin toss gets to decide: do I want to choose first between kicking and having the side I want in the first half or the second? If they choose the first half, then they get to make that choice immediately. Would they like to kick or receive or would they rather leave that choice to their opponent in the first half and instead choose a side to start on. If the team that wins the coin toss decided they’d rather make that decision in the second half, that’s their right to decide. Choosing to choose in the second half is called “deferring.” Here’s a diagram that shows the set of choices the team that wins the coin toss has:

For more information, the official NFL rulebook is succinct and logical on the subject of the coin toss but not very understandable. Instead, I suggest the Wikipedia entry on the subject.

One of the things that’s interesting to me how the coin toss works in football is that it reveals something about the history of the game. Given the rules, one team could get the ball to start the first and second halves, if they choose to receive in one half and their opponent would rather choose a side to start on in the other half. It’s not necessarily the case, like in my youth soccer experience, that one team starts with the ball in one half and one in the other. This reveals that having the ball wasn’t always seen as an advantage. Football is often said to be a “field position” game, which means that it’s more important where the ball is on the field than who has it. That’s not really true anymore because offenses are so proficient at moving (or matriculating, to use a football cliché) the ball down the field. Now, most teams really do want the ball. In the old days though, football games often went back and forth, with each team having the ball, getting a first down or two, and then punting. If you don’t expect to get several first downs each time you have the ball, then it’s more reasonable to want to start half with your opponent in possession of the ball but way down at their end.

In today’s NFL, teams that win the coin toss almost always defer their choice to the second half. The losing team almost always chooses to receive the kickoff in the first half and the winning team almost always chooses to receive the ball in the second half. This is because it’s a winning strategy. In fact, according to this Bloomberg article, teams that won the coin toss had a .530 winning percentage in 2013. The fact that this has become so formulaic is actually part of why it’s hard to understand how the coin toss works in football. It seems like the team that wins the coin toss by rule gets to receive the kickoff in the second half. It’s more complicated than that but now you know how it works.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Cue Cards 9-12-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Thursday, September 11

Goliath beats David easily — After France’s upset of Spain in their FIBA Basketball World Cup quarterfinal game, it was easy to feel like upset was in the air, and to get a little nervous about the United States’ game against Lithuania. Not to worry though, after a slow start, the United States outscored their opponent 53 to 24 in the second half. The U.S. team moves on to the finals in Madrid where they will face the winner of France vs. Serbia.
Line: It’s starting to look like the U.S. team, even missing some of our biggest stars like LeBron, Kevin Durant, and Paul George, is simply in a different class from its opponents.
It’s us against the world = victory — One of the incongruities of how people within the NFL talk about football is the subject of “distractions”. “Distractions” like from having an openly gay player on your team are seen to be a legitimate cause of concern as something that could derail the performance of the team. But, predictably, when there are real distractions, like when your team is embroiled in a domestic abuse scandal and potential cover up, that “distraction” gets used as a rally cry within the team’s locker room and seems to almost always lead to a victory. So it was last night when Ray Rice’s old team, the Baltimore Ravens played their division rivals, the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Ravens won, 26 to 6.
Line: I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised at the Ravens performance. Doesn’t it seem like teams in the middle of scandals always play well and usually win?

Do Not Watch This Game 9.13.14 Weekend Edition

For sports fans, the weekend is a cornucopia of wonderful games to watch. This is particularly true in the fall with its traditional pattern of College Football on Saturday and NFL Football on Sunday and Monday. As the parent, child, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, husband, wife, roommate, or best friend of a sports fan, this can be a challenge. It must be true that some games are more important to watch than others but it’s hard to know which is which. As a sports fan, the power of habit and hundreds of thousands of marketing dollars get in the way of remembering to take a break from sports and do something with your parent, child, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, husband, wife, roommate, or best friend. To aid all of us in this, and just because it’s fun, I’m going to write a weekly post on Friday highlighting a single game that is ideal for skipping. Use this to help tell yourself or someone else: “Do not watch this game!”

Sunday, 4:25 p.m. ET, NFL Football, Denver Broncos vs. Kansas City Chiefs. It’s on CBS but do not watch this game!

I can hear the objections already. “Denver has Peyton Manning, a god among dominant-football-players-who-still-manage-to-remind-you-of-accountants.” or “But the game is a division rivalry!” Don’t listen to them, this game is almost definitely not worth watching. The Chiefs simply aren’t the same football team they were last year. They might not have even been the team we thought they were last year. One of the cool statistical things about football is that turnovers (fumbles and interceptions) are essentially random. Because they’re also extremely important, you can often predict when a team got really lucky one year and is likely to do worse the following year without all that luck. Last season, the Chiefs opponents turned the ball over 18 more times than the Chiefs did. That was a part of why they seemed like they were really good. Since then, they lost two star players, Brandon Flowers and Branden Albert to free agency during the offseason at essential positions, cornerback and left tackle respectively. Then, last week, in the first game of the year, they lost Derrick Johnson, their best linebacker to an Achilles tear. Just as a bonus prize, Mike DeVito, a defensive tackle also tore his Achilles. While everyone was busy tearing tendons, the Chiefs lost convincingly to the Tennessee Titans, a team that is a 75/1 long-shot to win the Super Bowl. Meanwhile, their opponents are thought to be the second most likely team to win the Super Bowl at 11/2 (if the season was played eleven times, Vegas thinks the Broncos would win twice.) And they played like it last week, shooting out to a 24-7 lead in the first half of last week’s game.

I know there’s tradition and rivalry involved but when it seems so likely — the Broncos are favored by almost two touchdowns — that the mercy rule would be involved too (if the NFL had one), it’s time to give this one a pass. Do not watch this game!

Of course, if you or the fan in your life is a Denver Broncos or Kansas City Chiefs fan, this isn’t a good game to skip. As an alternate, skip the Thursday night game between the Baltimore Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers. Why? Because the who wants to listen to another three hours of talk about Ray Rice and the NFL’s complete incompetence?