It’s week 21 of the NFL season, and it’s officially old enough to drink. Who will be sipping champagne after the games, and who will be sitting alone at the bar with a cheap bottle of whiskey, trying to forget their many, many failures?
Sunday (all times EST)
3:05 pm: 4 Cincinnati Bengals @ 2 Kansas City Chiefs (-7)
6:40 pm: 6 San Francisco 49ers @ 4 Los Angeles Rams (-3.5)
I’m done picking winners after my failure last week, so instead I’ll predict that these games will not be as exciting overall as last week’s. I feel pretty safe with that one.
Will the Chiefs run roughshod on the Bengals as everyone seems to think? Will the Niners streak of six consecutive wins against the Rams continue?
Pulling for the Bengals, as well; they are the one team in the remaining quartet which has never won the Super Bowl, as well as being the one which has gone the longest since their last Super Bowl appearance.
As a Chiefs fan, I’m certainly not hoping the Bengals win. But I also think it’s going to be a lot closer than the spread. The Chefs were down several OLs in their last matchup with Cincy, but their secondary is still just as pathetic. Joe Burrow is a great story, and the winner of this game likely is my favorite for the Super Bowl.
On the NFC side, I think the Rams pull ahead early, and it’s a boring game after that.
There is a one-hour NFL Films special on FOX each week of the playoffs — NFL Championship Chase — which may go unnoticed among all the other local and national pregame shows. I’m plugging this week’s “Championship Sunday” episode here since I’m confident they’ll do a nice job looking back at last weekend’s insane divisional playoff games. Looks like it is on at noon on Sunday in the TV markets near me.
If you haven’t heard any NFL Films narration recently, I promise you’ll get used to Method Man pretty quickly.
Given everything we’ve seen in the playoffs for the most part, especially last weekend, I cannot imagine any blowouts, unless one of the QB’s plays super badly (most likely candidates for that to me are both NFC QB’s with SF’s defense and Jimmy G being the least skilled of the bunch, but still not likely at all). But I can easily see a high-scoring affair between the Chiefs and Bengals given both offenses’ propensity for scoring in seconds (sometimes as little as 13!).
I’m not too focused on the NFC game although I will watch it and the Bengals advancing to play either would be interesting outcomes. Banish By Burrow all curses in one fell swoop with the 49ers, or maybe a gaudy offensive display between Stafford and his WR’s and Burrow and his?
The first football game I remember watching as a kid was Super Bowl XVI, which featured the 49ers vs the Bengals and which was hosted at the Pontiac Silverdome which was about 15 miles from my house. Last week I believe was the 40th anniversary of that game. For purely nostalgic reasons, I’m picking the Bengals and the Niners.
I know this isn’t the SB thread, but I take Burrow over Jimmy G in the big game 21-17, Jimmy G rides off into the sunset and plays somewhere else next season as the Trey Lance era begins in Santa Clara.
When in doubt, I always default to the team that’s never won it all before. This year that’s the Bengals. Underdogs with a young QB, on a team that’s been a laughing-stock for years, which has never won a Superbowl and who hadn’t won a playoff game in more than 30 years before this season.
Alternatively, the Rams; a win for Matt Stafford, who has been an underrated QB trying to drag the Detroit Lions to relevance, now free of the team and going on a run that Calvin Johnson could never get a shot at.
The Lions are my team (speaking of long-suffering laughingstocks), and Stafford is a good guy who never got the national recognition he deserves while in Detroit.
Yep, this describes me perfectly as well. I’ll be rooting for Stafford and the Rams.
For AFC, I don’t know. I suppose I should be rooting for the Bengals, another perennial Midwestern underdog without much postseason success like the Lions, but I ain’t feelin it.
