Acme Packing Company
This is the dumbest NFL season I can ever remember. To be clear, what I mean is that it’s a dumb season because all of the teams are dumb, even the good ones, which does make things interesting, to be sure, but also a bit frustrating.
In a normal season, there is a Mahomes or Brady that you can count on to be there in the end. They are the villain that everyone else is shooting for, and they provide us with the general narrative for the season. This year is more like the movie “Sing,” a terrible kids movie where none of the anthropomorphic animals in the singing contest are really bad guys per se, except for Seth McFarlane’s mouse, but he’s less an overall movie villain than a good proxy for the NFC South.
(The actual villain of “Sing” is Matthew McConaughey’s Koala, Buster Moon, an incompetent, union-busting thief with no talent of his own, who plans to exploit his labor up to and including not paying them their promised prizes in order to continue to fund his unearned lifestyle. The league refused to confirm or deny whether Roger Goodell was involved.)
The NFC, in particular, is just a collection of rag-tag teams trying their best not to screw up on stage. The Seahawks are the current one seed despite a severe case of Darnolding over the last few weeks. The Rams were, by most metrics, the best team in the conference, but they’re in third place in their division, and they just lost to the Falcons, which should disqualify you from playoff contention altogether, and they’ve lost three of their last five games overall.
The Eagles may end up as the two seed, but they are also the subject of this hilarious chart.
These hilarious charts.
I mean, I know they won the Super Bowl last season, but I don’t really think you can be a contender and also be on these charts.
The Bears are looking pretty good and may actually have something with Caleb Williams, but they also can’t stop anyone, including the 49ers, who just destroyed them in a shootout, and do you really trust them to actually shut down a real NFL offense?
The best team may actually be those 49ers, but they also got lit up by the Bears’ offense, and while they’re on a fun little six-game winning streak, it was mostly against the Shadeur Browns, the Titans, the Cardinals, the Colts with a 45-year-old grandpa at QB, and a member of the NFC South. It’s not awe-inspiring.
Speaking of the South, it would be nice if they actually decided to play like a real division at some point. The best team in this division over the second half of the season is probably the Saints, who actually have the best defensive EPA in the league since Week 10. The Panthers have beaten the Rams and Packers, so nothing is impossible, but generally speaking, it would be beyond parody if the...
