A Week 17 schedule that shaped up as potentially explosive on paper surpassed all expectations. Thirteen of the 16 games had playoff implications. From Chicago to San Diego to Dallas, it was as great as it gets.
Matt Youmans
In no way is Aaron Rodgers a clown, but when the Green Bay Packers quarterback was trotted out to meet with the media Thursday, circus music should have been playing in the background.
It’s not easy to change a person with a losing attitude, and the same goes for turning around a terrible team. With that thought in mind, what coach Bruce Arians is doing in Arizona is just short of amazing.
At this point, there’s not much left to like about the Dallas Cowboys, who are riding a broken-down donkey of a coach and following a quarterback, Tony Romo, who can’t shoot straight under pressure.
A sense of impending doom surrounded the Chicago Bears when Jay Cutler, who might or might not be the franchise’s future quarterback, limped off the field with a groin injury. With Cutler, it often appears to be loser’s limp, but this injury was legit.
Even when the odds are against Tom Brady, we expect him to succeed. He captains comebacks like no other quarterback in the NFL. So we expect him to succeed especially when the odds are against him.
On and off the field, the Washington Redskins are a mess. Full responsibility for that falls on the narrow shoulders of coach Mike Shanahan, a manipulator not to be taken at face value.
In the final football game of the year, Johnny Manziel will quarterback what is almost certain to be the last game of his college career when he leads Texas A&M against Duke. He’s going out with a bang, in a way.
It was not quite a blizzard, but it was bizarre. A thick white blanket covered the field in Philadelphia, and in elements better suited for a sled dog race in Alaska, LeSean McCoy seemed to run from Anchorage to Nome.
It will be a cold day in hell — also known as New Jersey — when a team shows up and beats the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl. That’s the common narrative this week.
Truth is stranger than fiction, especially in college football. The first half of that sentence is a Mark Twain quote. The best coach in the nation, Nick Saban, probably would agree with both halves after failing to take Auburn to overtime and looking like a jackass in the process.
No hole is too grave a situation for Tom Brady. It’s almost as if the New England Patriots are digging deficits just to make things interesting, just to give Brady a chance to bring them back from the dead.