From bad to worse: First my CFB predictions, now my NFL ones

I figured my college football predictions were bad.  They weren’t awful but they weren’t good by any stretch of the imagination.  My Stassen score put me near the bottom of the list again.  I don’t do this blog for a living so I am fine with this.  Now I turn my attention to the NFL predictions I made.  Did this work out better?  I’m sure you know the answer.  Same way as the past two seasons: I will take snippets of my NFL predictions post and put them here and see if I was right or if I might have been drunk when I made that prediction.  Let us begin.

Just like I thought last season, I think parity may end up being the name of the game.  I only have five teams getting at least 11 wins: New England, Kansas City, LA Chargers, New Orleans and LA Rams.

I got the Patriots right!  Twleve wins on the nose.  And the Chiefs were close with 12.  A huge miss, though, on the Chargers although the Melvin Gordon holdout was a harbinger for bad times in that soccer stadium outside Los Angeles.  The Saints were arguably one of the best teams to ever play on Wild Card weekend and the Rams were juuuuust outside the playoff picture.  So four out of five isn’t bad.  There was less parity than in recent years as the best teams were a TON better than the merely average teams so I got that one really wrong.

Where will the good division races be?  The AFC North, AFC West, NFC East and, especially, the NFC North should be quite close races.  The Patriots will win by their usual five games and I can’t see the Rams having any trouble this season winning their division.

Man I was awful with this prediction.  The Patriots were good but the Bills gave them a run for their money most of the season.  The Rams finished THIRD and missed the playoffs.  The NFC East was a great race but that’s because there were no good teams.  The other three divisions there were not close at all.  Baltimore won by six games and KC by 5.  Yikes.  At least I knew the NFC South wouldn’t be close.  Small consolation for this statement.

The NFC Wild Card race should be exciting down to the end.  The Bears should get in easy.  I have the Eagles one game ahead of the Falcons, Panthers, Niners and Seahawks and in a virtual tie with the Vikings for the final Wild Card spot in the conference.  I think they somehow win whatever convoluted tiebreaker they have to clinch that spot, sending many upset Viking fans to the bars to drown their sorrows for another season.

Good lord where the fuck do I start with this?  All garbage.  All of it.  The Bears struggled to get to .500.  The Eagles actually won the NFC East but wouldn’t have qualified for a Wild Card spot otherwise.  The Falcons and Panthers were awful.  The Niners were one of the best teams in football and the Seahawks weren’t that far behind.  And the Vikings actually got in to the playoffs rather easily and pulled a first-round upset.  So yeah, this was a disaster of a prediction.

In the AFC, not as much of a race but still a few teams in the mix.  The second-place team in the AFC West should clinch by American Thanksgiving.  I have Lamar Jackson fueling the Ravens to the other Wild Card spot ahead of the Steelers, Texans and Titans.  I doubt anyone else would even be close.

The AFC West, other than the Chiefs, was a joke.  The Ravens were the best team in football.  Again, other than the playoff teams, no one was better than .500.  The Steelers did just lose out on a Wild Card Spot so I was right on that account.  Houston and Tennessee both made the playoffs so do I count that?  I’d say no just to be fair to all the actual experts who probably picked the Texans or Titans to win the AFC South.

There won’t be much of a race to the bottom this season.  As hilarious as it would be if Arizona finished last again, it won’t happen since the Dolphins are so bad that I cannot foresee a way they escape the basement.  The odds for them to win 7 games should be 10,000 to 1.

Arizona and Miami were both bad.  But the Dolphins weren’t as bad as I, nor anyone else, thought.  Instead it was the lowly Bengals, Lions and Redskins filling the bottom three spots.  I wasn’t that far off since I had Cincinnati and Detroit only winning five games and the Skins getting six.  Miami fans should be pretty stoked that they were better than almost anyone figured they would be and that they could get their franchise quarterback in the upcoming draft.

I don’t think Patrick Mahomes will win the MVP award.  Going back-to-back is super difficult and despite the fact he’s a great talent, I can see at least one other guy having an amazing year.  I will go with Drew Brees this year.  I also think that if the Saints somehow win it all that Brees would go out on top.

Mahomes was damn good this season.  Many seasons he would have won the MVP.  But Lamar Jackson was a revolution.  He is slowly redefining the way more and more quarterbacks play.  As for Brees, if he hadn’t been injured, he might have cracked the Top 5 but no one was touching Jackson this season.

As for the Rookie of the Year choices, I will go with David Montgomery and Ed Oliver.  To be honest this is quite a bit of a crapshoot so who the hell knows with these picks.

I took a flyer on Montgomery to be honest since I figured he’d be a bigger part of the Bears offense to take the load off of Trubisky.  I was wrong.  Kyler Murray was the Offensive ROY which is not surprising considering the offensive weapons surrounding him in Arizona.  Nick Bosa was the Defensive ROY and rightfully so.  I am going to go out on a limb and say him and his brother Joey are the first brothers to both win Rookie of the Year awards.

And now my playoffs preview.  Let’s see how good/awful I did:

• I had the Chiefs losing in the divisional playoff and the 49ers missing the playoffs.  Well isn’t this just a great start.
• I also had Chicago losing the NFC Conference Championship so yeah, another shitty pick.
• I am looking through these predictions and I did not have one game where both teams actually ended up making the playoffs.  Can you believe that?  Holy fuck is that ever awful.
• And out of all the shitty playoff predictions, the Chargers were EASILY the worst pick of the bunch.  I’m gonna blame Philip Rivers for this.  Hey Phil, why don’t you just call TLC and have them create a show about your fucking ridiculously massive family and retire from football?

Phew!  Well that was brutal.  I think I could have picked at random and done better.

OK so there is some realignment news.  UConn becomes an Independent starting next season in the FBS.  The American Conference are going with eleven teams (for now) and scrapping the divisions.  I wish all divisions were scrapped but that’s a different story for another day.  However, when it looked like nothing else would happen, the realignment gods (or realignment devils depending on how you want to look at) gave us a gift.  Boise State is rather pissed off with the Mountain West’s new broadcast agreements.  Boise State is taking the conference to court over the agreement they signed with the conference seven years ago.  That agreement basically kept the Broncos in the MWC.  With the new TV deal, commissioner Craig Thompson said it would be the last time BSU’s home games would be negotiated separately.  Boise State says nuh-uh.  So if they decide to take action and leave the Mountain West they could end up being that twelfth team in the AAC.  This would be huge as the former Big East would get that much closer to creating that Power 6 they have wanted for years.  It also drops the Mountain West closer to the level of the other Group of Five conferences in terms of prestige.  Also, who knows what other dominoes would stop because of this.  BYU?  Army?  Possibilities are endless.  So this could be an interesting rest of the winter on this front.

The next post will be the conference tournament schedule and it’s still a while away from now.  The conference tournaments don’t officially start until March 3rd.  As has been the case the past few years, the Atlantic Sun is the New Mexico Bowl of CBB conferences as they begin the festivities.  We will be able to see none of that.  However, the Ohio Valley Conference will not be the first set of tournament action we see.  The Mountain West Conference starts things off on channels we can actually see on March 5th.  I wonder if I should actually set up an FA Cup-style NCAA Basketball tournament, for experimental and fantasy purposes only.  It would be hilarious to see some team from the MEAC go on a crazy run and then they get San Diego State in the sixth round and the Aztecs put up 140 on them.  I’d watch.

Anyway, enjoy your week everyone.

And you thought my college football predictions were bad…

Well as you might know, I thought my predictions weren’t bad for college football, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  My Stassen score was better than last year’s so that meant I was closer in my conference predictions than I was the previous season.  Problem is, compared to the magazines and websites that actually do this thing for a living, I was almost dead last.  Now I turn my attention to the NFL predictions I made.  I am sure this will work out better right?  I’m not holding my breath.  Same way as the past two seasons: I will take snippets of my NFL predictions post and put them here and see if I was right or if I might have been drunk when I made that prediction.  Let us begin.

I can see a fair amount of parity this season. There are always candidates to win more than 12 games this season but I could see it where one or even no teams hit the 13-win mark. The best candidates are the LA Rams, New England, Philadelphia and Jacksonville.

I got the Rams right!  Thirteen wins on the nose.  And the Patriots were close with 11.  There was actually a decent amount of parity this season so I wasn’t totally wrong with that.  A bit of a miss on the Eagles but that was more due to their slow start than anything.  Then there’s the Jaguars.  Ho boy.  Talk about bottoming out.  They were an unmitigated disaster.  This coincides with the end of the Blake Bortles era and the start of the (pick one out of) Kyler Murray/Dwayne Haskins/Drew Lock era.  So in the end, this prediction wasn’t too bad but not fantastic.

I see some great races happening in both South divisions, along with the NFC West and North. The others won’t be near as competitive with the Patriots easily steamrolling to yet another AFC East crown. Also, and let’s be honest here, the LA Chargers will win the AFC West because the rest of the teams just aren’t that good and probably will all be under .500.

Well I was half-correct about the South divisions.  The Saints were seriously good and ran away with the NFC version.  The AFC South was fun though.  The Texans, Colts and Titans came down to the wire in the best divisional race in the league.  I was almost right with the other divisions but the AFC North was also a barrel of fun.  That’s partly because the Ravens and Steelers seemed to one-up each other in trying NOT to win the division and the fact that the CLEVELAND F’N BROWNS were almost .500!  And my apologies to the Kansas City Chiefs, the most exciting team in god-knows-how-long.

The NFL Wild Card race should be pretty something. I have the Packers and Falcons getting those two spots but the Niners, Lions and even perhaps the Giants and Cowboys will have something to say about that.

Good lord what in the hell?  What do I make of all this?  Well the Cowboys won the NFC East!  But that only happened because the rest of the division was garbage most of the season.  The rest of the teams I listed were awful.  I get a pass for the Niners since they would have been much better if Jimmy Garoppolo hadn’t been injured.  The Packers and Falcons might have to actually rebuild after their shitty seasons.  Yet another Bill Belichick disciple failed as a head coach.  Go figure.  And finally the Giants…well they have Saquon Barkley.  That’s good right?

In the AFC, it almost feels like a race to get over .500 to get into the playoffs. Or maybe just to .500. I think the Texans and Titans will be the two Wild Card choices and to be honest, do any of the other non-qualifying AFC teams deserve to make it? Probably not.

The Titans were close, at 9-7.  The Steelers were even closer at 9-6-1.  But yeah, other than those two teams, every other AFC team that missed the playoffs was under .500.  But Indy was surely better than I figured they’d be but that sounds like something most experts would be saying right now.

Should be a three-team race for the bottom with Tampa Bay, Indianapolis and Washington vying for that #1 overall pick. Buffalo and Cleveland should be juuuuuuuuuuuuuust good enough to not be lumped in with those three teams which is an improvement for the Browns and a bit of a disaster for the Bills (who fully look like they are attempting to tank this season).

Buffalo wasn’t good but Cleveland was fun to watch.  And Indy, as I said before, was damn good.  At one point it looked like the Redskins would actually win the horrifically bad NFC East but tailed off down the stretch.  Tampa Bay was awful though so that’s close.  No, it was San Francisco (who shouldn’t have been this bad but Jimmy G) and the Cardinals who were the dirt worst.  Oh and the Jets.  The fact I didn’t include them in this part baffles me even to this day.

Last year I said Jameis Winston would win the MVP. Good fucking lord. This year I will select Jared Goff. Sorry Jared.

Goff was good.  Quite good.  But Patrick Mahomes had a season for the ages.  And so did Drew Brees.  So there was no way Jared was getting into that MVP race despite the fact the Rams were the second-best regular season team this year.

I am not even going to pick a Rookie of the Year. No point. I’ll just be wrong.

I honestly would have picked Saquon Barkley as the Rookie of the Year.  He was…the offensive ROY.  The defensive ROY was Darius Leonard who I never would have picked to win that award.  So I would have been half-right.

And now my playoffs preview.  Let’s see how good/awful I did:

• I had the Rams winning the Super Bowl and the Patriots losing in the Conference Championship.  Not bad.
• I did have Pittsburgh winning the AFC though so that wasn’t so good of a prediction.
• Get this: I had the Rams beating New Orleans in the NFC Championship.  Wow!  I am pretty damn proud of myself for that.
• The team I whiffed on the most was easily Jacksonville.  Who knew that 2017 would be an anomaly?  I also had Atlanta and Green Bay in and they were pretty bad.

All in all, I had a pretty good year with my NFL predictions.  Which is stunning to be honest with you.

For the most part, we are into the third year of no offseason realignment news right after the college football season has finished.  There will always be rumblings but nothing serious since the Big XII did their disastrous look into expanding.  I still think we will see major happenings on that front but we are at least a year or two away from that.

The next post will be the conference tournament schedule and it’s a while away from now.  The conference tournaments don’t officially start until March 4th.  As has been the case the past few years, the Atlantic Sun is the first conference to start the fun.  But we won’t see any of that.  As per usual, the first conference tournament action we will see will be on the Friday night (March 8th) when the Ohio Valley Conference has their second semi-final matchup.  Things are kind of slow through that first weekend, then everything goes crazy the following Monday with a string of days containing a ton of games to watch.  I still wonder if the NCAA Tournament would be better if it was done FA Cup-style.  So that we would be bound to see a team in like the SWAC or WAC or Metro Atlantic go on a crazy run through the first few rounds.  Then their fifth-round matchup would be again Duke and Zion Williamson would pour in 65 points and the Blue Devils would win by 80.  Good times.

Anyway, enjoy your week everyone.