The Designed Rush, Week 8: In Which We Are Left Searching For A Clear Frontrunner

By Michael Tunison

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Nov 1, 2010 - The accepted NFL truth last week was the NFC needn't bother even send a representative to the Super Bowl this year, as it would roundly suggested that the five or six best teams in the AFC are more than qualified to wipe the floor with just about anyone the other conference has to offer.

Given the disposable nature of those kind of assumptions, we shouldn't be surprised to see how much that's changed after the two biggest interconference games from Sunday - Green Bay/Jets and Pittsburgh/New Orleans - ended with punishing and hard-fought victories for NFC teams.

What's more, the games dealt sobering, self-examination-inducing losses to two teams considered among the class of the NFL. The Jets and Steelers offenses looked wholly unprepared to deal with attacking defenses. The Jets receivers had a host of issues and the Steelers looked balky when trying to trot out the no-huddle offense that has yet to gel with Ben Roethlisberger only having been under center for three weeks this season.

The Patriots, of course, were the lone team with a winning record in the AFC to top its NFC opponent, but then that was the floundering Vikings. The win places New England at 6-1 and thus makes them the owners of the best record in the NFL. At this time last year, of course, there were still multiple unbeaten teams. Instead in 2010, after the Monday night game in Indianapolis, there is New England, then likely an eight-team glut of 5-2 teams.

The knee-jerk reaction is to exclaim "PARITY!" It's tempting to try to dismiss that as too easy an explanation, but given that a true favorite to win the Super Bowl is much more difficult to identify this year than seasons past, it's certainly going to be a theme well discussed in the months to come.

Who are we left with, then, to call the team to beat? Is it New England, with the best record, but an unimpressive defense, a promising but unproven deep threat in Brandon Tate and a loss to the Jets? Is it Baltimore, which has beaten both the Jets and the Steelers, but lost to the aforementioned Pats? Are the Jets and Steelers to be trusted with devastating defenses but offenses that have shown that they can be stymied enough to lose? Have the Giants built enough momentum since suffering early season stumbles? Was yesterday's win enough to propel the Saints to a strong finish?

That's the thing. There isn't a team left without at least one glaring question. Perhaps it's a little glib to say that complete parity is here, but the image of it is more present than last season, when the entire league was playing catch-up to the Saints and Colts. Injuries and high expectations have brought those two back to Earth to some degree, making the hunt for a championship a much murkier scene than it was a season ago.

NFL Player Tweet Of The Week

 

Those crazy homophones will trip you up every time. Morrison, naturally and amusingly, means the KFC colonel costume he came across somewhere in his Halloween travels. Am I wrong in thinking that a costume representing an actual kernel of fried chicken would be more amusing than yet another of the colonel?

Hey, here's another one from last night in the Superdome.

An amorphous blob of brownish wrinkles might not be the most comfortable or even logistically sound, but nail the articulation on the fried skin and you've got my admiration.

Speaking of the Superdome costumes, it was sad not to see one riffing on Ben Roethlisberger's off-season problems in Milledgeville. Of course, it could have simply been that NBC was unwilling to show one and the network only deigned to show viewers a bone with this fairly benign one riffing Brett Favre.

Your crowd might have been unjustly bowdlerized, New Orleans. For your sake let's hope so and the delightfully inappropriate costumes show up somewhere on Twitter later today.

Truth About Advertising

 

Apparently this McDonald's ad was first loaded onto YouTube in April, though I haven't seen it on television until last night. It's possible I'm just not watching enough television or the corporate behemoth was allowing this dreck to fester furtively on more diffuse media before beaming it straight to millions of TV screens across the country. I'm not sure which notion in this spot my intelligence is more offended by - that minimally paid McDonald's employees would exercise any added effort to accommodate a crazed parent looping around the restaurant - rather than just call the police - or that a parent taking his hands off the wheel of a moving car to grab some coffee, all for the sake of not rousing a child who probably wouldn't wake even if the car stopped, is some sort of sympathetic figure. Unless of course there was a McRib in that bag. Infants crave those things and I'll be damned if I'm sharing with some anklebiter.

Facepalms of Note

 

Certainly it sucks for the winless Bills to have had to go to overtime the past two weeks and both times fail to emerge with the team's first victory of the season, but it's done wonders for the consistency in Ryan Fitzpatrick's sulk game. Man, look at the uniformity between those two shots. It's like I just did a horizontal image flip in Photoshop. What a rock solid arm fold. And a perfect crease on that mouth pout. He may never challenge Jay Cutler for sulking supremacy in the NFL, but Fitzpatrick is quickly proving himself a force to be reckoned with when it comes to dourly showing his disappointment on the sidelines. And might I say the beard acts a poignant vagrant's touch to the presentation. Well done, Harvard boy.

Blount and Bowe, United Through Aerial Feats

When a ball carrier attempts to hurdle a tackle, the result is usually either spectacular in success or shocking in its failure. LaGarrette Blount's leap at the end of the Bucs' win over Cardinals victory yesterday, the former obvious applies, but credit to Dwayne Bowe for nimbly protecting himself after being upended in the open field.

 

A Delicious Bundle Of Gripes

- Between it being Halloween and Sunday marking the return of Randy Moss to New England, there was guaranteed to be Pats fans decked out as their team's former deep threat. That put the danger of black face at the highest level in Gillette Stadium since... the last Pats game. Fortunately, no one went the black make-up route, but the Moss masks and the disembodied Moss model head for some reason on display in Patriot Place were no less disquieting.

- I guess Santana Moss is to be commended for not giving up on the Rex Grossman fumble that led to the Lions' clinching touchdown late in the game in Detroit yesterday, but Ndamukong Suh's reaction to wee Santana's attempt to bring him down might have been one of the more hilarious sights all day yesterday.

 

-Todd Haley late in the 4th quarter yesterday used his final timeout just as the Chiefs snapped what would have been a successful conversion on a 4th and 1. Rather than call him on his blunder, the announcers are instead content to praise Haley for not being afraid to go to overtime. See, it's things like that that make the Bills overtime loss that much more depressing. Aw, I got Ryan Fitzpatrick pouting again.

 

- If you'll indulge me in a small nugget of homerism, this no-call on Leigh Torrence's launching helmet-to-helmet shot on Hines Ward in the end zone might have been the most egregious officiating oversight on Sunday. I don't expect anyone to have any sympathy for the Steelers in such matters after the debacle last week in Miami or the fact that James Harrison hit Drew Brees late on a pass attempt in the second half (though if you're talking about endangering a player's safety, Harrison's hit was far less serious than Torrence's) but this is troubling for any NFL fan looking for consistency in the new emphasis on protecting defenseless receivers.

And to those celebrating that Antwaan Randle El's touchdown catch was rightly overruled - thus forcing the Steelers to have to "earn" a touchdown on their first scoring drive - Pittsburgh was also likely denied one by the officials two plays later when Rashard Mendenhall landed with the ball breaking the plane of the goal line but was ruled short. These calls didn't cost Pittsburgh the game by any stretch, but perhaps they will serve as a counterbalance to the scads of conspiracy theorists who presume the refs try to give games to the Steelers.

 

-And because I'm actually a 12-year-old, I got an undue amount of joy from an announcer saying that Tom Brady "pitched a tent" on a dropback that resulted in a throwaway out of bounds. HA HA! IT'S FUNNY BECAUSE POCKETS GIVE HIM AN ERECTION. In my defense, I'm not entirely sure what the announcer is trying to convey with that idiom. Is that supposed to mean he planted his foot firmly. If so, maybe time to update the phraseology on that.

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