Both.
They held Cedric Benson out, but everyone else played as if it were a real game. The Jets beat the ever living shit out of the starters in the first half. A couple fluky wildcat plays padded the stats, but even ignoring those, the best way to describe it is a callback to Training Day: they pushed their shit in, BIG TIME, bro.
I love how the Jets are playing. Ball control with an unstoppable rushing attack and an avalanche of defense. Completely shut down anything and everything the Bengals wanted to do. I seriously doubt Benson would have had any imapct on the game tonight. Next week is a whole 'nother story, of course, but I don’t hate Gang Green’s chances.
Their formula for success is a definite throwback, but I’m a fan of the classics. Go Jets!
EDIT: It sure is nice having a local fallback team. The Jets gave as good a sendoff to Giants Stadium as the Giants’ sendoff was bad.
3 rematches next week…that’s gonna be odd. I liked how Tony Dungy picked the Cardinals to win next week because they treated today’s game like it was the 4th exhibition game, that strategy almost always worked when he ran the Colts…
Yeah, three of the four games next week are rematches from the last week of the regular season. I wonder if that’s ever happened before.
The Jets did look great in the part of the game I saw. I don’t know how hard Cincinnati was trying, but they got steamrolled, and if I were them I sure as hell wouldn’t want to see that team, that line, or Brad Smith again.
I hope all three games finish the same way they did this week. Teams that lay down and play that crappy deserve to get ass fucked on national TV not once but twice.
Incidentally, did it seem like there were way more meaningless and surrendered games at the end of this season than ever before? I know there’s always one or two teams that run away with things and usually one might rest a couple key guys in week 17, but I can’t remember this many teams quitting and benching their entire teams for so many games in my life. I’m disgusted.
Regular Season Winning %
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Dallas Cowboys…434-314-6, 0.5802%
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Chicago Bears…686-498-43, 0.5794%
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Miami Dolphins…387-281-4, 0.5792%
Guess who Welker was trying to evade when he made that fateful cut in which his knee exploded? Yup…Bernard fucking Pollard! This weeks NFL podcast is going to be priceless!
It did seem that way, but I think it might just be a fluke. In the AFC, all the divisions were clinched early, plus there were a bunch of teams still alive for the wild cards, so the scheduling just happened to work out that there were a bunch of games between teams that had clinched and teams on the bubble.
Teams sitting players bugs me too, but I’m not sure there’s a good way to force them not to. In any case this feels like something that is discussed now but will be mainly forgotten by next year. This year had the 16-0 thing with the Colts as well as all the games I mentioned, and that’s not likely to repeat very often.
I was complaining last week about Indy throwing the game. I forgot how few teams actually bother to play the last week. It’s probably a combination of complete obsession with the play offs, as if nothing else matters (which the NFL encourages) and a long season (a lot of guys are just tired and sore).
Well I know Indy stands out way, way more than any other team since they had a chance to do something hugely significant and threw it away, whereas the other teams are just being more routinely unsporting. Indy not going for 16-0 pissed me off more than the tanking a game part, although I disapprove of that strongly too.
It’s not just the NFL. Other sports are even worse. MLB teams who are out of any post-season contention routinely start bringing up farm players and walking through the last few weeks of the season. The NHL too. The NBA walks through late season games too. I would say that the NFL has the least number of blow-off games of all the major sports.
Yeah, but the outcome of any one game is usually much larger than the games of other sports. Do you run into situations a lot in other sports where one team gets to go to the playoffs and others stayed home based on the way a third team throws the game? Not saying there isn’t, just wondering.
Based on one individual game? No. Like you said, the other leagues play more games, so there aren’t as many ties and single games don’t mean as much.
It happens with tight pennant races in baseball. I remember Tommy Lasorda being livid in '91 because the Giants (I think it was) brought their A game against the Dodgers on the final weekend while whoever was playing the Braves played a bunch of minor leaguers.
Has a team that has rested it’s starters ever won the Super Bowl? That is more rhetorical than anything, but it there seems to be little or even negative correlation with resting players. Except for avoidinig injuries I don’t buy the need to rest players and would argue the opposite, resting players does more harm than good. So the question is this: Does the risk of injury outweigh the need to keep the team playing and active.
Off the top of my head, I know the 49ers rested their starters in their last regular season game (a monday night game against the Vikings, which is why I remember it) before they cruised through the post season to their last Superbowl.
I think the Rams did it too in the year that they won. I’m sure there are other examples.
Yeah, most of the teams who lock a bye week early are likely to rest a little. Some win Super Bowls. However, the practice seems to have gotten more annoying lately, with teams taking 2-3 games off.
In baseball it is considered poor form to play the bench if it’s against a team in a pennant race. I’ve seen some VERY good baseball between teams in contention and teams playing spoiler.
So no discussion so far of Josh McDaniels holding Brandon Marshall and Tony Scheffler out of Denver’s final regular season game, which turned out to be an embarassing loss to the Chiefs that eliminated any chance the Broncos would make the playoffs? I’m curious as to the general consensus on this move.
The Broncos’ defense gave up 44 points, 259 yards rushing, 524 yards total, and didn’t get a single sack. The Broncos’ offense put up 512 yards of total offense, had one wide receiver get 213 yards himself and another had 95, and had 46% third down efficiency rating.
Not having Brandon Marshall or Tony Scheffler didn’t even come close to costing the Broncos the game. It was an pathetic run defense and 3 picks by Orton (2 of which were returned for touchdowns) that cos them the game.
I had no problem with McDaniels’ decision. Even though I think he’s a complete douche.