Week 5 Prognostications - The Saga Continues

In the middle of last Sunday’s games, I had to send Van an e-mail admitting that I knew absolutely nothing about football. Whatever else happens, a football prognosticator should always be able to outperform a coin.

Donald Rumsfeld went over my picks and was appalled at how I had misinterpreted the information available to me.

Van: Leave Rummy alone. As we speak, he’s checking the sock drawer for those WMDs that he was sure he’d left in Iraq for CNN to find…

So Van extends his lead. In related news, swimsuit model Brooklyn Decker is working Sports Illustrated’s resident expert Dr. Z. Coincidence? Perhaps. Van looks awful in a two-piece.

Van: Only if it’s a Van Heusen 17 two-piece with the bad lines and a short vent. Now, put me in a silk, charcoal colored, long cut Perry Ellis After 5, pleated baggies and a 4-button front, well, hide the women or put me in the Pope-Mobile for my own safety.

It is time to hit the comeback trail. I raised a lot of money this quarter and I am ready for a big run. If you guys have any doubt that Van is ripe for a fall, scroll down and check out his superhero commentary. Dude, put down the twenty-sided die and come out with your hands up.

Van: Axis and Allies, baby, Axis and Allies…

Miami at Houston
Bill’s Pick: Miami
Hell of a way to kick off the new me. Matt Schaub can be as great as he wants to be, but unless he is planning to run quarterback draws all day, I do not see the Houston offense getting a lot going. When Andre Johnson got hurt, we all scrolled down the depth chart and wondered who Jacoby Jones was. Now Jones is also hurt, Johnson is still out, Andre Davis has a dislocated finger and Ahman Green still may not play. You remember in college you could play intramural basketball and then one of your Alpha Phi buddies would come up and be like “hey, Bill, we’re short a guy, you wanna run with us?” I figure Schaub is calling T.O. and Patrick Crayton right now, saying, “Hey, I know you got a game Monday, but if y’all aren’t doing anything Sunday…” Meanwhile, there are signs of life in Miami, where Ronnie Brown suddenly sacked up and started hitting some fools and the spiritual center of their defense, Zack Thomas, is set to return after missing two games with a concussion.

Van: If Houston were healthy, they’d be a lock to win this one. And if ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a happy Hannukah…

Jacksonville at Kansas City
Bill’s Pick: Kansas City
K.C. has one of the five best home-field advantages in football, and unless Jack Del Rio used his bye week to learn that Maurice Jones-Drew is his best offensive player, then I like the momentum the Chefs have coming off of the win in San Diego. The biggest difference between who the Chefs are and who we thought they were is Dwayne Bowe. Period.

Van: Because of Bowe, UV-deprived fantasy owners will see more of last season’s Larry Johnson in this game than they’ve seen of their alleged families this season.

Cleveland at New England
Bill’s Pick: New England
Romeo Crennel is the kid proudly bringing home a short story about aliens to his Pulitzer Prize-winning father. Dad can take the high road (“Great work, Rome. Let’s have some ice cream to celebrate.”) or he can dispense truth (“If that’s all you got, that’s fine, but big boys write in this house.”), but nothing will change the fact that the story is not good enough to impress Dad – it’s just an improvement over last year, when the kid kept spelling his name wrong. The Browns look like they might have a football team, but this will not be the best week to show it off.

Van: The Patriots game plan comes straight from early Ah-Nold – “Crush your enemies! See them driven before you! And hear the lamentation of the women!”

Carolina at New Orleans
Bill’s Pick: New Orleans
Sean Payton brought a wagon into the practice facility to motivate his team with all of the people who are off of the Saints’ bandwagon. First of all, I hate with the mightiest vitriol cutesy motivational techniques. Second of all, there will be no whining about disrespect if you actually earned it on the field. What I am doing here is taking a flyer that Sean Payton did something else during his bye week, like maybe addressing his ethereal blocking schemes, because Carolina is fading faster than my respect for Reggie Bush. Dan Morgan is hurt again. Nobody seems to have noticed that Morgan is Kerry Wood, the guy to whose health the team’s fortunes are always tied, which is a complete embarrassing waste of time because of course he is not going to be healthy. That’s just not who the guy is. With David Carr at the helm of the Morganless Panthers, their fans better start investing in paper bags.

Van: Sooner or later, the Saints are going to Justify (Bill’s) Love (thanks, Madonna). As for me, I’m not quite ready to buy real estate in the Crescent City just yet. FEMA’s got a little more hatin’ on black folks yet to do (thanks, Kanye) before I pick the Saints.

The Jets at the Giants
Bill’s Pick: The Giants
I got a concussion last week just watching the G-Men tee off on a defenseless Donovan McNabb, and this week the inexplicably resurgent Giant D faces the last word in defenseless quarterbacks, Chad Pennington. The over/under on Pennington’s day is 8:00 in the second quarter. Betting lines are provided for entertainment purposes only, please, no wagering. Unless you want the over, in which case I will cover it for you.

Van: Donovan McNabb was last seen hiding in the holding cell beneath the stadium, shaking uncontrollably and muttering “Momma, there go that man again!”

Seattle at Pittsburgh
Bill’s Pick: Pittsburgh
Seattle is better than I gave them credit for – they are probably better than you gave them credit for, too, but you probably came around quicker than I did. Hale Bopp comes around more quickly than I do. But Pittsburgh is a killer at home and until they ran into the clairvoyant buzzsaw formerly known as their offensive coordinator, they were comfortably the third-best team in the AFC. Seattle does a nice job keeping a lid on long pass plays, so Pittsburgh will hitch themselves to Fast Willie Parker and pull away in the second half.

Van: If Seattle is smart, they’ll let Deion Branch be a real nuisance to Pitt’s secondary and a nice complement to Shaun Alexander. Since they’re not, they’ll try to bludgeon a defense that was built to stop the better AFC running backs and lose handily.

Arizona at St. Louis
Bill’s Pick: Arizona
I would like to publicly apologize to the Raiders – the Rams are on the clock. This week’s brilliant idea to save the franchise is Gus Frerotte. Let me know how that goes for you. The Cardinals are living on borrowed time with their platoon quarterback system, which has literally not worked in the NFL since George Blanda, but they are otherwise engaged in winning football games with running and defense, which I am sure Van will tell you is how it is done. He will also have to admit now that the Cardinals are doing it.

Van: What? Arizona gets what amounts to a Saturday walk-through against the corpses in St. Louis and now I have to admit something about the Cardinals? I admit that the Cardinals coaches gave away every possible dirty secret they could in beating Pittsburgh in the desert. I admit that Ken Whisenhunt has two starting QBs, which is the same as saying that he has no starting QBs. I admit that Edgerrin James has scared no one since he cut his dreads…no…took his grill out…no…OH, right, since he LEFT THE FRIGGIN’ COLTS. And I admit that the Cardinals, quoting previous head coach Denny Green, are still what we thought they were: sorry as hell.

Atlanta at Tennessee
Bill’s Pick: Tennessee
I think the Falcons’ win last week said more about the Texans’ triple amputee offense than it did about the Falcons. The Falcons really do suck. You should not confuse one lonely win in a sea of suckitude for land. While Tennessee should win this, their pass defense is vulnerable, and somehow nobody will admit that Joey Harrington has actually been playing better than Atlanta could have expected Mike Vick to play. I imagine Jeff Fisher is enough of a professional to look at the facts and gameplan for them, even if everyone else is reluctant to give Harrington his due.

Van: Joey Ballgame has had two good games in a row. It sez so right here that reality crashes in on him this weekend in the angry form of Keith Bulluck and a Titan defense at home.

Detroit at Washington
Bill’s Pick: Washington
I have vacillated about a dozen times on this game. I can see it going either way. Detroit’s last road trip resulted in a violent bludgeoning at the hands of an Eagle team that has been mysteriously unable to do, well, anything against anybody else. Washington can do what Chicago, Minnesota and Oakland could not, which is to control the ball and grind out long drives to keep Martz’s madmen on the sidelines to entertain themselves. Even the Lions’ win over the crippled Bears came with a freakish outburst of true weirdness in the fourth quarter unlikely to be duplicated here or anywhere else anytime soon. I was going to make the argument that despite all that, the Lions are warriors for Christ, playing with the confidence of the truly saved, but forget it. I just bought my own arguments and changed it back to Washington.

Van: Don’t forget, Washington QB Jason Campbell’s confidence is growing by the day, and his receivers are the beneficiaries. Detroit won’t find Washington’s O-line as porous as Chicago’s was in the fourth quarter of last week’s clusterfudge…and we’re four games into the season and no one is impressed with Detroit’s running game yet.

Tampa Bay at Indianapolis
Bill’s Pick: Indianapolis
The Colts are not as good as you think they are. They humiliated the Broncos, but that is simply what Peyton does. Some people talk a lot, some people like tapioca pudding, Peyton pounds the Donkeys. Tampa Bay has already clinched their division and has nothing to play for, but they may still sneak up and win this if two of the big three injuries (Joseph Addai, Marvin Harrison and Bob Sanders) cannot go on Sunday. I am betting they all play and the Colts escape with a surprisingly hard-fought win.

Van: Quit hating on the Colts. You’ve been mad at them ever since they pimp-slapped your beloved Saints in Week 1 in front of God and three other white men. Only the Patriots and the Cowboys have easy games every week; everyone else has to work for a living. The good news is that Tony Dungy now has a Colts team with the cojones to get their hands dirty and occasionally grind victories out. Beating teams while injured makes them easily as impressive as New England blowing teams out while healthy.

San Diego at Denver
Bill’s Pick: San Diego
Speaking of pounding the Donkeys, even Norv Turner can watch last year’s game film and figure out how to hand the ball to LaDainian Tomlinson…right? LT ran wild last year over what was probably the best Broncos run defense ever, and this year’s version is…not. If LT gets fewer than 30 carries, the Chargers lose in Denver and A.J. Smith is not man enough to admit he was wrong, I authorize the citizens of San Diego to take matters into their own hands and exact a little vigilante justice, although I caution them to take the vice-president, too. You don’t want to lynch Norv just to end up with Ted Cottrell as your head coach.

Van: Continuing on a theme, Norv Turner is exactly who we thought he was: a guy so clueless about running a football team that he still hasn’t figured out a way to get LaDainian Tomlinson the football more than 17 times in a game. For goodness sakes, even Cro Magnon Marty Schottenheimer knew that his bread was buttered by Number 21…no way San Diego mans up and wins on the road. No way.

Baltimore at San Francisco
Bill’s Pick: Baltimore
Dear Mr. Billick: Tennessee owed Steve McNair better than they gave him, but you do not. Bernie Kosar looks younger and sprier than McNair right now, so Kyle Boller certainly does. Speaking of spry, have you seen how slow Willis McGahee looks? Is he hurt or just fat? For all of the Ravens’ difficulties, they are better off than the Niners right now. The Niners have the also-older-than-Bernie-Kosar Trent Dilfer under center throwing to my least favorite NFL player, Darrell Jackson. If there is a player with the astonishing lack of brains, balls and heart weekly displayed by Jackson, I have not seen him. Facing ten guys in the box (you have to at least cover Arnaz Battle) as well as puzzling play-calling from his own sideline (averaging only 17 carries a game), Frank Gore has been unable to help much. Obviously, San Fran’s defense gets tired of being on the field after a while. They will this week, too.

Van: Dilfer might have Tampa Bay flashbacks during this game, none of them good.

Chicago at Green Bay
Bill’s Pick: Green Bay
I just saw, I am not kidding, a fantasy football expert (read: virgin) on ESPN advise everyone not to start Cedric Benson this week. Thanks for that, Mr. Virgin. You might want to sit Roman Gabriel and Funky Winkerbean, as well. Although I like the Packers at home, this game is not the mismatch it appears to be. Last week, the Bears fielded a defense with two CFL guys and four cardboard cutouts and still slapped around the high-powered Lions’ offense for three quarters before whatever the hell that was happened. This week, the real Bears’ defense starts to trickle back, and with just a little help from the offense they can still turn it around and compete for a playoff spot.

Van: I’m a Bears fanatic, and I’ll say what y’all are too scared to say (thanks, Bernie Mac): This Bears Team Officially Sucks. As long as there is a Brett Favre inside that Number 4 jersey, he will continue to own the Bears. As long as this Bears team continues to exhibit an appalling lack of…spine?...testicular fortitude?...they will continue to lose games like this. Before the season, I concluded that this game was a foregone conclusion. Turns out I was right, just about the wrong team.

Dallas at Buffalo
Bill’s Pick: Dallas
Tony Romo can take Cthulhu. Did you see him use his Jedi powers to convince the Rams that they had a horrible defense? Oh, right. Anyway, DeMarcus Ware, Greg Ellis and company will do to Trent Edwards what the Jets could not, which is welcome the rook to the show in style. Look for the offense to take the foot off the gas in what will unquestionably be a hideous game, but the defense will score enough to beat Buffalo by themselves. Bring on the Patriots.

Van: Dallas will win, but Dallas’ defense will not shut Buffalo down. This game will score into the ‘90s, like Cleveland and Cincinnati did. You heard it here first.