Believe it or not, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers spent the past 3½ months trying to win football games. According to coach Lovie Smith, his team will be playing to win on the regular season’s final Sunday, too. And that could be a costly mistake, if the Buccaneers actually do win.
Almost everything about this Chicago Bears’ season has been bad news, especially for the optimists who banked on their regular-season win total going over 8½. It’s a bet that has no shot.
Dazed and confused, picked off once and sacked four times, Tom Brady finally went to a knee to run out the clock as the New England Patriots escaped from New York.
Some hard-working people never get the recognition or respect that is truly deserved. It might be a maid, a mailman or a mechanic. It also could be a blue-collar quarterback such as Ben Roethlisberger.
Thirty-eight bowl games are on the schedule, and picking winners might be tougher than making Nick Saban smile. The Alabama coach is absolutely great at what he does, which is frown all the time and win a lot of football games.
On any given Sunday, there is a quarterback who flops so miserably that he gets mocked by everyone on Monday. But never is Aaron Rodgers that guy.
The Atlanta Falcons are in position to win the NFC South, one of the most pathetic division races in NFL history. The Falcons, 5-8 overall and 4-0 within the division, sit atop the pile and stink a little less than the other three teams.
All sorts of problems have surfaced for the Seattle Seahawks this season, but quarterback Russell Wilson never has been one. Even when the team was fraying around the edges, Wilson was smooth.
It’s appropriate Marcus Mariota wears green, because the Oregon quarterback is a money player. He will earn a lot of it in the NFL, where he could start for about 10 teams this weekend.
It was tough to take the Kansas City Chiefs too seriously last season, even when they kept devouring opponents as quickly as Andy Reid could make a stack of cheeseburgers disappear. But if Reid’s second season as coach has proven something, it’s that his team is a serious contender in the AFC.
Finally, the clumsy and dreadful version of the Dallas Cowboys we expected to see all along showed its ugly face. It was a Thanksgiving Day massacre.
On the rare occasions when the sun peeks through the clouds here, it never seems to shine on Eli Manning these days. The forecast for this weekend calls for cold temperatures with about a 60 percent chance of another New York Giants loss.
Winds of change could be gusting in Honolulu on Saturday night, when Bobby Hauck, a beleaguered football coach on the hot seat, guides UNLV into one of his biggest games of the season.
A passing of the torch might be occurring with the NFL’s elite quarterbacks as Tom Brady fades into the background and the New England Patriots become yesterday’s news. That was the story in late September, anyway.
What was built by Jim Harbaugh seemingly overnight is now crumbling almost as quickly. By all appearances, the San Francisco 49ers are falling apart, and Harbaugh is on the way out.
