Let’s all calm down a little bit. We’ve not even reached the official end of Week Three of the NFL season and the hyperbole is already flowing like the beer that flows like wine. It’s time to pull it together before our pets start losing their heads.
And, yes, the French are assholes, but that’s no reason for us to pack the NFL season up and head to Aspen. Come on. We’ll work through it.
Jeff Fisher is a coaching HPV infection
The human papillomavirus is the most common STD in the United States. Currently about 79 million Americans are infected with HPV according to the Center for Disease Control and 14 million new people are infected each year. It’s also three games into its fifth season as the head coach of the Los Angeles Rams.
HPV is basically genital warts that pop up from time to time, but can eventually give you ball or vagina cancer and I can think of no better analogy to Jeff Fisher’s head coaching career. Most of the NFL can ignore him for long stretches at a time, but every five years or so there’s a Jeff Fisher outbreak. He puts together a winning team, gets bounced from the playoffs early, but gets a coaching extension so he can lay dormant in the NFL’s immune system for another half-decade. God help us all, I think that might be happening with the Rams this year.
Jeff Fisher is 5-0 against the Buccaneers in five years with the Rams.
— ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) September 26, 2016
If you look at the NFC West standings today, you’ll see the impossible. The Rams are leading the division by a half game over the Seattle Seahawks. They both have 2-1 records, but Los Angeles currently has the advantage thanks to winning the head-to-head match up.
As I’ve said many times, Fisher, in his time with the Rams, has assembled an incredible roster of football players. Players that he and his coaching staff have no clue how to use in an actual NFL game. Because of this, it’s actually exciting, as a Rams fan, to think of Fisher getting fired. An actual NFL head coach could really do something with this squad. If Fisher keeps stumbling into these stupid wins this season, we may never get to find out.
So that is my overreaction. The team I root for and want to win might actually do it this season, put a winning record together and make the playoffs. God, what a nightmare.
Carolina and Pittsburgh, don’t panic
It’s easy to look how your teams shit the bed over the weekend, but just relax. Yes, these were both bad losses. For the Panthers (1-2), it looks bad. You were at home and played a potential playoff team and never really showed up. For the Steelers (2-1), it’s just as bad since the team you were playing started a rookie QB and you made him look like he’s going into Canton next week.
But it’s a long season. Every team has a game they’d like to erase from the digital hard drive and this can be yours. What the Steelers and Panthers can’t do is let it happen two weeks in a row. That’s when you know it’s not an aberration, but who you are. Both teams have home games coming up. Carolina hosts Tampa Bay and the Steelers have the Chiefs.
Bengals, Cardinals and Jets, you should panic
Cincinnati’s Super Bowl window closed like John Belushi was outside watching it undress. That loss to the Broncos was bad, not just because it was at home, but because it was barely a game in the second half. Denver should have been beatable on the road with Trevor Siemien at QB, but the Bengals made him look like Peyton Manning in his prime. It was the best game of his life by a mile and Cincy is supposed to play defense.
Bengals fans sry about the lost we gone get #yadigg #loveyall
— Dre Kirkpatrick (@DreKirkSWAG) September 25, 2016
The Cardinals loss is even worse. This was a Bills team in complete dissarray with a Dead Coach Walking at the helm and Arizona was blown out of the stadium. Did Carson Palmer think this was a playoff game? As much as I talked shit about new Buffalo offensive coordinator Anthony Lynn, the fact that he got LeSean McCoy to run downhill may have flipped the entire Bills offense. Good for him. The Cards, though. Damn.
The Jets were not going to beat the Chiefs in Kansas City, make no mistake. But there are degrees of losing and Ryan Fitzpatrick tossing six interceptions in a single game is like accidentally falling into a volcano while taking a selfie.
