Beer and football VIII — week seven

The game: Falcons at Patriots
The beer: Anderson Valley Fall Hornin' Pumpkin Ale
The result: Win, 23–7; Cowboys win, 40–10
The commentary: I thought the death blow was coming for us all. Given the reasons I listed last week, none more so than "watch your ass," I suspected an overabundance of Steelers, Panthers, Titans and, yes, Cowboys enthusiasts (since no one took the Chiefs) would be dragged into mediocre depths. Instead the weekend played out as an overdue correction—no losses, no eliminations… even though Craig didn't register a pick. We're down to twenty if he's out. I'll have a word with Commissioner Rico about that.

A fifteen-minute timer designed to wake me after a Super Bowl LI-II halftime power-nap? These are the innovations I create for myself. Falling back asleep minutes into the third quarter? Not so much. I missed nothing except for the possible end of the Falcons' short run of success. And the Pats? Their first signature had-em-all-the-way win of the season. "Maybe, just maybe, there's the one you need." DVR is wonderful.

A different year, a different scarecrow and a different attempt to use distance and scale to keep G. young and small. It won't work forever. Drag.

Up next: Remember, "Frankenstein" refers to the scientist and not the creature. Happy Halloween!

Beer and football VIII — week six

The game: Patriots at Jets
The beer: Ballast Point Dead Ringer Oktoberfest Lager
The result: Win, 24–17; Texans win, 33–17
The commentary: "Recency bias is one of the trickier forms of bias that may interfere with an effective performance review. When managers RICO perps are affected by this they tend to over- or undervalue short-term events to the detriment of the employee's long-term performance one's undocumented winnings. Failing to take into account the entire time period can lead to ineffective and false results." Man, I had to clean up a lot of grammar and redundancy there. Maybe "learn that" before teaching anything else.

I blame recency bias for thirty-six outright eliminations through six weeks so far, a ridiculous total befitting the season. Last week saw Atlanta and Denver wound three players and murder ten more and I was lucky to avoid both: Atlanta because I'd already picked them in a white-knuckle opening week and Denver because, plainly, I hadn't the patience to wait for Sunday Night Football. "Ohhh, Sunday night." Enjoy your artificial career and dipshit fanbase, Carrie Underwood.

Inner turmoil over recency bias—and its backlash—consisted of the following points and counterpoints last weekend:
1. The Falcons are too good to lose two in a row.
2. The Falcons are too good to lose at home to the Dolphins.
3. The Dolphins are awful.
4. Both Jay Cutler and the Dolphins have fucked me before.
5. Thee Falcons? Indeed…

6. The Broncos never lose at home.
(6½. The Broncos never play away from home.)
7. The Giants are awful.
8. As a Patriots fan, the Giants can never be counted out.
9. The Giants are due.
10. "Ohhh, Sunday night…"

11. Deshaun Watson and the offense are good enough to overcome the losses of JJ Watt and Whitney Mercilus on defense.
12. The Browns are awful.
13. The Browns, maybe, are historically awful.
14. The Browns will win a game this season.
15. Watch your ass.

This was the progression and, in the end, I felt pretty good that the Texans would whoop the Browns in a league where such confidence is often punished. I was certain the Dolphins had no chance in Atlanta and would absolutely have taken them birds were I able. Thank goodness for small, twenty-two-hundred-unit favors because the Falcons by themselves are responsible for sixteen strikes, second only to the Steelers and their twenty-five. In related news, I'm considering said Steelers over the Bengals on Sunday.

"I'm feeling pretty good."
Hillary Clinton
October 27, 2016

Here is this week's attempt (so far) to buck recency bias and pick a team that won't keep me awake all weekend, phase one of which lasted until kickoff last night and was rewarded immediately upon waking this morning:
1. The Chiefs are too good to lose two in a row.
2. Charcandrick West is out but Tyreek Hill is in.
3. Derek Carr's fractured spine can't hold up over two games in five days.
4. It would be nice to get a win out of the way before the weekend.
5. Are the Raiders bad enough to doom their season so early?
6. Carr's stats against the Chargers weren't bad for someone with a fractured spine.
7. I'd feel better if the game were being played in Kansas City.
8. The Raiders are honoring Al Davis and the 1967 AFL championship team.
9. It's bad juju to pick against a team after picking them—successfully—to win earlier in the season…

10. The Panthers are due to bounce back.
11. Mitch Trubisky is potentially lousy.
12. The Bears stink.
13. Thee Bears…

14. Domestic violence is preferable to… air-pressure gamesmanship?… so Ezekiel Elliott is playing.
15. The 49ers stink.
16. The 49ers have kept things interesting since week two.
17. The 49ers kept things too interesting in week three.
18. The Cowboys are a total wild card and I have never picked for or against them through four-plus seasons of knockout-pool entertainment…

19. The Steelers are probably kind of pretty decent.
20. Ninety-one percent of NFL "experts" can't be wrong again.
21. Those twenty-five strikes noted above have resulted in ten eliminations.
22. The Bengals have only scored eighty-four points so far but have given up eighty-three.
23. The Misfits are not walking through that door…

24. The Titans eventually looked dominant against a shitty Colts team on Monday.
(24½. I'm still rooting for Jacoby Brissett.)
25. Marcus Mariota can borrow someone else's hamstring for a few hours.
26. The Browns, maybe, are historically awful.
27. In a season lacking sure things, the Titans are not a sure thing.
28. I'd feel better if the game were being played in Nashville.
29. I'd feel better if the Titans were called the Nashville Kings.
30. Watch your ass.

I still don't know whom to pick—or whom to pick against—and I'm overthinking things even worse than I did leading up to 2015's Raiders–Bears unpleasantness. I even resorted to superstition in noting to A. this morning that the Chiefs' loss, after a last-minute recusal, is "maybe a good omen." I'm holding onto this extra life like it's Rush'n Attack and I need to get on with it.

As for the Patriots, I considered them last weekend as well but decided to save them for a later game when their intentions will hopefully be clearer. One can dream. It should never have come down to an overturned touchdown but that's the way it is with this defense. A win is a win (PFW's Paul Perillo admitted to feeling guilty over the touchback and I agree that it is an odd rule) (just like the tuck rule!) but I'm dying for a comfortable blowout sometime soon. It probably won't come Sunday night—"Ohhhhh, Sunday night"—against an equally flawed Falcons team in a game that has generated more talk about whether or not it can be called a "Super Bowl rematch" (since the stakes are different) than about how the teams are sloppy, unreliable shadows of their 2016 selves. Both offenses and both defenses have something to prove and, if I were to gamble outside CBS's lawless haven, I would take the over.

And if I were (shudder) a Jets fan? I'd prefer that a team of overachievers win as many games as possible and compete well in losing efforts. Drew Bledsoe was the consolation prize in 1993, not the goal, and some other dude was a sixth-round afterthought.

Nothing out of the ordinary from the Old Lady Book Club meeting the other night. I timed things perfectly and finished Romantic Outlaws on the train ride home that evening, though only two others were so fortunate—I couldn't read six hundred pages in a month either were it not for my commute. Clearly, bizarrely, I was the most enthusiastic about the double biography and its alternating-chapter format, suggesting that it was the only way to present both Marys in detail while demonstrating the parallels in their lives (so much so that we all admitted to occasionally checking the chapter headers to see whom we were actually reading about). One Lady said the book bored her with constant reminders of female oppression in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries since it was "nothing new," to which I responded that this eye-opening account might be the reason I enjoyed it so much. My input was welcome, I appreciated the discourse—avoiding the instant closure of "finishing one book and starting another five minutes later" like I'm about to do with Ian McGuire's The North Water—and I'm glad I joined. Up next for the Ladies and me is Ben Winters's Underground Airlines, another among a strange batch of "thought-provoking" speculative fiction where the bad guys prevail. "What if the Civil War never happened?" "What if Germany won World War II?" "What if the moon landed on us?" Enough. At three hundred something pages, though, more readers should finish this time.

Up next: Julio Goddamn Jones. Cheers!

Beer and football VIII — week five

The game: Patriots at Buccaneers
The beer: Bear Republic Racer X Double India Pale Ale
The result: Win, 19–14; Eagles win, 34–7
The commentary: Too soon? But that's my ET stuffie since Christmas 1982!

This fucking defense still blows but what are you gonna do? Trade Malcolm Butler for a tight end? No thanks. An off day for the offense forces Nick Folk to lose the defense to win this one. Win. Any way you can get one.

Just ask the twenty—twenty!—people whose Steelers got thumped by the Jaguars on Sunday in the ultimate stay-away game. Eleven of these motherfuckers are now eliminated, along with three who staked their survival on the Giants—I get it, they're going to win eventually, but shouldn't you witness it before guessing? This marks three straight weeks of an upset wiping out a collection of rash Peter King followers after fifteen casualties/one fatality for Miami and ten/three for Atlanta. We're down to thirty-two after five weeks (smell the magic: thirty-eight) and this is progress I never anticipated, especially since twenty-four of us—though not I—have already lost once. A league full of mediocre teams and toss-up contests will do that. Who are the dominant teams? The Chiefs alone are undefeated—three remain winless, which is just as red-flaggy to me—but can they be trusted much longer? Not by me until they lose, which might happen Sunday against the confounding Steelers. Who knows. Good grief.

Gimmes are few and far between and my choice of the Texans over the Browns, sitting at a solid ninety-eight percent at NFL Pick Watch (and only because a substandard and panicked Jason LaCanfora is resorting to a string of improbable upsets to boost his rating), is likely to be a common one. Will orange (strike one) and red (strike two and you're out) instances of HOU populate an otherwise black row on Monday? Let's hope not, for my sake. For my spreadsheet's sake.

Two nights ago, some dogmatic bastard with an unread blog indicated to Commissioner Rico (not to be confused with RICO, though coincidence becomes a pattern) that shenanigans were afoot. Shenanigans! Player Oren was granted an apparent third life after losing in weeks three and four but my man admitted he accidentally gave him the Chargers instead of the Cardinals two weeks ago. (I believe him because who takes the Chargers at all?) (However… who takes the Cardinals? Hmm.) Rico is learning the hard way that the CBS RICO environment cannot handle a two-strike league and so he has to manually enter picks for those of us—though not I—with one loss, work he hoped to avoid by offloading data management to the inter-net. Drag. Errors are inevitable and I am watching everyone like a hawk. (The easy solution? I should run this myself. The complication? It's a legal minefield I want no part of.) Take one of the Jeffs: CBS recorded a skipped week four (equating a loss) but Rico took the blame, claiming Seattle was the emailed pick that was never entered. Fair enough—eighteen others took them as well (Colts blowout) so skepticism wanes, since eliminations are in Rico's interest given hist last-leg urgency (thanks again, Dolphins!). I'm also keeping an eye on Kim and one of the Matts, for they each have several empty cells after losing for the first time in weeks three and two, respectively. Stay dead, you. These four are marked with asterisks and the fury will manifest should one of them win the pot. Enabled macros never forget.

Up next: Sure, go ahead and schedule that birthday party during a Pats game for the second year in a row. Cheers!

Beer and football VIII — week four

The game: Panthers at Patriots
The beer: Castle Island Candlepin Ale
The result: Loss, 33–30; Packers win, 35–14
The commentary: This fucking defense blows. This? Fucking defense! Blows this. Fucking… this fucking defense blows. This fucking defense—this fucking defense—blows. Blows!

Up next: This fucking… defense?… blows. Cheers!