One final hope for the 7-9 Divisional Champion
I can’t really work out, in a quick and rough manner, the probability increase in getting “worthwhile games” with the NFL’s shift to a final week of all divisional match-ups. The idea is to ameoleriate somewhat the standard “playoff locked team with nothing to play for sit starters” routine. But it doesn’t add up — the luck of the draw would have preferred last week’s Green Bay — New York Giants match-up for this week, and indeed flexed into prime-time. As it happens, the New York Giants probably lost out on the playoffs when the Eagles were upset by the Vikings on Tuesday Night Football — thus making it likely that the Bears will sit their starters this week against the Packers as it locked them the #2 seed and bye week.
But the Giants play at the same time as the Packers. The NFL either was smart or lucky, as all these games that may mean something, but quite possibly don’t mean anything, occur at the same time. The “gotta play” effect is maximized.
The one thing the NFL seems to want to have happened was to have essentially a Divisional Tital match-up be ready to be pulled into prime-time. Here the league whiffed. I imagine the league wishes it could have Baltimore play Pittsburg or Jacksonville play Indianapolis for the last week of the season, but instead the only game that unambiguously decides who moves into the playoffs and who doesn’t… a real clash of the Titans:
It hold’s the key to that situation I’ve been discussing here on this blog for weeks, rooting for… It is the NFL’s Worst Nightmare… and even as they moved this game to prime-time, the big whigs in the NFL were probably cursing and swatting at flies…
The 7-8 Saint Louis Rams visit the 6-9 Seattle Seahawks for ALL THE MARBLES!!!
Unfortunately for my long desired spectator sports dream of the 7-9 Divisional Championship, I have no confidence in this team winning, and suspect the Rams will romp forward… thus moving the 7-9 Laughingstock to the 8-8 shrug. The Seahawks are not just a 6-9 team, but they are a bad 6-9 team. Their 9 losses all came in blow-out fashion — one 15 point loss being in a sort of gray area (Can they put their hat on that one, as it came against their likely playoff match-up, the New Orleans Saints?) The worst of the lot was a drubbing by the hands of the New York Giants, which was a game where Charlie Whitehurst started for an injured Matt Hasselback. Whitehurst will make his second start next in this “NFC WEST CLASH FOR ALL THE MARBLES” following Hasselback’s surreal injury in last week’s game. The team started 4-2 — winning their opener against San Francisco in a blow-out which has since been avenged, winning against a San Diego Chargers team that essentially handed them a game gift-wrapped in a game they had no business winning, winning against Arizona, and this makes their victory in Chicago the most impressive win of the season. Their two victories since have come against Arizona again, and against the worst team in the league, the Carolina Panthers.
And the nine losses were all blow-outs.
Seahawks fans appear to be rooting for a loss. This is a booby prize of a playoff appearance which isn’t advancing the team in future years in making strides and improvements, and a better draft pick awaits a loss. The team faces the prospect of either losing and fading into the usual obscurity of bad teams, or winning and being a Laughingstock in the anals of NFL history. (I see references when I google the team up to national sports writers saying the Seahawks could make history with this game, Dubious History they don’t want to make.) For all I know this sense has filtered the team, and the insistance on starting Whitehurst is an admission of absurdity.