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| He is back, and he looked good. Look out AFC West! |
# 5 With the Redskins' surprising victory over the Saints, the Cowboys looking impressive, and the Eagles (great expectations) and Giants (less than Philadelphia, but still recognized as the defending champions) to round off the division; is the NFC East the most interesting division in football? Which team will ultimately emerge and win the division and the automatic playoff berth that comes with it?
To put it simply, this is a division where any team can beat the other, and every division game matters. Just to put into context how wacky this division actually can be, last year the Eagles had the best division record at 5-1 yet did not finish first (if you watched their game against the Browns, you might see why that occured), perhaps even more odd is that the Redskins managed to beat the eventual Superbowl champion New York Giants twice! If RG3 can replicate his effort against the Saints and play the whole season like he did in week one, it is very possible that all four teams could be competing for a division title in the last two weeks of the season. This division will definitely be one of the main points of discussion all season not just on this blog, but on major sports networks as well. There is no way to make an accurate prediction until more games are watched, but at gunpoint I would pick the Cowboys right now.
# 4 Did you know that there is a Thursday night game in every week of the season? Is this a good idea? Bad idea?
I was really happy when I heard that the NFL network would air Thursday night games throughout the season. This is a nice bridge between the six-day wait between the Monday night game and the early Sunday games, and gives us a nice football fix in the middle of the week. Whether its a good idea or not remains to be seen. For fans I think its great, but what about the teams? The Packers (more on them in a bit) and Bears only had 96 hours to prepare for a crucial game. How will their performance be affected? What if one team has more time to prepare for the other, even if it isn't their BYE week? Does it benefit teams for their next game? (The Giants and Cowboys have had a lot of extra time to prepare for their games against the Bucs and Sea-hawks respectively). Only time will tell, but I would be very interested to see statistics of the records on Thursday night and then of the following game(s).
# 3 Can the Green Bay Packers avoid going into an early 0-2 hole against their division rival: the Chicago Bears? Will the Bears take advantage of this opportunity and nick an important division win and start off strong at 2-0?
Speaking of Thursday night games, this is our first one, and what a match-up it is! This game will be Green Bay's second home game already so it puts that much more importance on it, as starting 0-2 with 8 road games to go has 'disappointing' season written all over it. Having said that, I fully expect Aaron Rodgers and his Packers team to recover and beat Chicago in convincing fashion. They are simply too good to go 0-2 (Then again, we thought the same thing about the Eagles last year, the NFL is a weird league and weirder things have happened). This seems like a good place to mention that I will be making picks throughout the year against the spread, and will post the meaningless results in every week's 'big picture' post. For this game I pick the Packers (-5.5) over the Bears.
