Last Week: 2-2-1
Season: 49-27-3
Doldrums, in the tall ship-era maritime sense, were bummers. Couldn’t get going! Those old sailors needed strong, sustained, dynamic winds with powerful gusts to get the ship moving. Those weak doldrums didn’t cut the mustard so they just drifted about, sometimes going mad. Those are some bad doldrums! Doldrums need a small PR campaign because there’s a class of doldrum that gets short shrift at best. Often they’re ignored altogether: good doldrums. I’m here to talk about the good doldrums, people. The Good Doldrums occur in the week between C-Sweet and N-Bash (New Year’s Eve/Day). If you’re a lucky person and you haven’t proactively made between-holiday travel arrangements, there’s a few days this time of year where it’s just a whole heap o’ nothing. Kitchen is really clean from hosting Christmas. Leaving the decorations up for a while, so taking it easy there. Leftovers abound, so minimal cooking effort required. Bowl games so early and a slate so full of teams I don’t care about it’s like ESPN is playing chicken over ratings… with themselves. Why? I dunno, just for kicks? Maybe this is their response to the Good Doldrums: needless professional gambits to make a larger artistic point about how bowl games have become mostly meaningless save for a small percentage of each participating school’s respective alumni bases and then this small sliver of college football freaks who’d watch William & Mary play Minny State-Mankato in a spring scrimmage. Not disparaging either group, I’m sometimes a member of one, the other or both. Just saying: they’re part of the doldrums, and the doldrums have profound effects on everything they smother in their doldrumity.
I’ve been trying to transmogrify my habitually thorough embrace of the doldrums into good football thinking. I should’ve had a better record last week but I let the cheeriness of what I hoped for shine brighter than the subtle glow of luck. Still managed to eke out a .500 but we know that’s not good enough if you’re getting squeezed 10-11%.
Which brings us — after 300 words of what could generously be described as “cuttable” — to the Detroit Lions. I submit that this is the most difficult Lion week to understand and try to foresee so far this season. I’m utterly perplexed. My expectations vary wildly from hour to hour. I think of all possible outcomes from blowout to barnburner from both teams’s perspectives and I sincerely feel like all scenarios are at least plausible. Somehow, several contradictory outcomes simultaneously feel likely. It’s a wacky game, k?
(Short aside: I wonder if a gambler was ever so into their gambling they their brain developed dissociative identity disorder so they could avoid decision making and opportunity cost. That’s a mildly amusing premise. “That’s a mildly amusing premise,” is what I’m gonna be saying instead of stuff like, “that’d be a funny T.V. show,” or “that’d be a funny sketch”. I want my groove-worn figures of speech to reflect the self-awareness that I’m probably not a great judge of what should and should not be developed for television. Having said all that, my agent is shopping “Balanced Bet” to the major studes (what industry types call studios 100% of the time) and we’re hoping to secure… some sort of sale of the idea for money. I’ve forgotten the specifics. There’s so many specifics.)
Back to the Lions and this game against Dallas. Before we delve into the football, it merits mentioning that there’s a battle of conceptually similar city nicknames in the offing as well. The D versus Big D. You’d think Detroit being “The” D would give it a small psychological edge, with “the” being a definite article and implying some uniquely positive characteristics that put us above all other Ds. But “Big” D is kind of a good counter to that. Especially, I’m sure, in the eyes Texans and their well-established fetishization of big. It’s like Dallas is saying, “Yeah, there’s other Ds. There’s even The D. But there’s only one Big D. Out of all the Ds, we’re the big one.” They knew what they were doing there. Another small aside but I don’t think worth a whole parenthetical paragraph: on Christmas Day one of my particularly illustrious cousins and I looked up the etymology of Dallas. You’d think it’d be an easy solve. Not even close. Tons of competing stories, all equally plausible yet thin beyond “named after one of eight prominent persons in whose three names was a Dallas somewhere”. I think not having a concrete city etymology is a bad thing when facing a city that has its name down pat. Detroit’s an easy one. It’s French for, basically, straits. Pittsburgh’s easy. Pitt’s Town, little Deutsche on it. Even Native American town names, like Tampa, we can kinda nail down to a general idea. (Fwiw, Tampa loosely translates to “wood/sticks for fire; gather here”). I’ve decided I’m not even gonna dissect the football of this game. Dallas feels a little more desperate, but maybe Danny Soup’s gonna have us fired up like maniacs at the ~15% chance we realistically have at the top seed and bye. I see Dallas as a little bit more aggressive and loose than us early, and I see us having to make a comeback, and I think it falls short. But I like the cover. Gimme those points. I’m not gonna bet against my boys when I start the game up 6. Give me my Lions, and let’s see out 2023 as the best calendar year in my lifetime of Lion fandom.
WEEK SEVENTEEN TIMES SQUARE PARTY SIZE GAMES
Dolphins (+3) @ Ravens — I’m blessed to have a pretty large amount of extended family. One group of whom I’m particularly fond are my young cousins I’ve got to watch grow from birth and are now terrific young men, with great football acumen to boot. One such cousin espoused his belief in the Ravens as the real deal of the moment, and he’s obviously not wrong. I had no rebuttal, but it also made me realize I’m really anti-Ravens this year because they thrashed my boys. Also, they’re rife with Harbaughness which.. ugh. Whatever. This is a “buy the W” on behalf of the Dolphins. Either a big “you’re welcome” to Miami, or a begrudging and small-money “mwuahaha” to Fell’s Point and Inner Harbor because I’m picking the Ravens. I hope they lose. But kinda not.
Panthers (+6) @ Jaguars — I’ll admit that I had a preseason bias for Jacksonville that I haven’t been able to shake and has bottom-line cost me. I don’t know what informs it, maybe it’s how cool I thought their uniforms were when they debuted in the mid-‘90s. Maybe it’s last year’s playoff run, which in hindsight might’ve been a bit smoke/mirror-y because it was over Staley and Herbert. I’m stuck on the Jags, I think they haven’t come close to their ceiling. They’ve burned me because of it. But this bird you cannot change, and he likes the lighter cat in this feline scrap. Taking the Jags! The division is suddenly breathing down their neck. But when the race is neck-and-neck coming down the stretch, more often than not it pays if you’ve bet the pedigree.
Niners (-13) @ Commanders — My season record is net positive even when you subtract whatever vig. This late in the season, that’s a sizable lead. I could play it safe, ensure the year ends in the ebony. But I’m not letting a lead change my betting style. Cuz dig this: is there anything more frustrating than a D-Coord who goes into prevent Deef like 5 minutes into the second quarter when he’s up 28? It’s too early, bro. I’m not gonna make the analogous gambling mistake. No prevent picks. I’m still blitzing from weird spots, sometimes bringing 6-8, making it insane i.e. Narduzzi-with-talent-style. This is that pick. Niners — and more importantly, Purdy — get right before the playoffs. Important note: Washington did Shanny’s dad dirty, in Shanny’s mind. That counts for something. He seems to have the same Irish prickliness as his old man. The ruthless and unrelenting focus I foresee from them makes me pick the Niners. They’ll have great execution in one of the more lopsided ones of the day.
Steelers (+3.5) @ Seahawks — I trusted the Hawks to get the gritty W last week. The game folded out as I foresaw but we came away with a push. Still though, I like that they got a road W (even if it was in Nashville) with Lock. I think I was right about their chemistry reeeeally peaking at the right moment. I expect that to come into play here. The Steelers have their moments, Tomlin is a true maestro with a roster that plays so inconsistently it has weirdly been an entertaining part of the season; true wild cards. But I think most of the Steelers will show their true colors in what will be a very raucous Seattle crowd. Which is to say they’ll turtle up for 56 minutes and play like the ’07 Pats for 4 minutes. I like the Hawks to stack enough sandbags for the inevitable short deluge and get a comfortable win behind a Walker and Charbonnet-bled clock.
That’s all for the Week Seventeen Preview and Picks! I hope you all can reflect on the nice parts of 2023 and take positive steps toward a rewarding a fulfilling 2024! It’s gonna be a challenging year for us ear-to-the-ground keepers. Election year, and probably an all-time crazy one at that. Perhaps a difficultly hot summer. Troubling trends in global politics, to say nothing of finance. There will be challenging times. But keep your spirit refreshed and renewed and we’ll make it through this next one like we always do. Thanks very much for reading this. It means a lot to me that you do. I’m looking forward to the home stretch here and hopefully I get to opine about the Lions for a considerable amount of time after the regular season ends. Next year! Auf Wiedersehen!
