While commenting on the last post, I started thinking about how parity took over the NFC last weekend. After three losing weeks, it felt like the Packers season was slipping away in a sea of losses and injuries. It feels real good to end the losing and get a win, even if it came against a Seattle team that didn't start an actual NFL QB. But while the Packers were winning, a lot of bad things were taking shape around the NFC.
In the NFC East, every non-Philadelphia team lost. Washington should be the biggest story for an embarrassing home loss to the awful St. Louis Rams, and then following it up by thinking RB Shaun Alexander might be able to help them. But the biggest stories happened elsewhere. Dallas lost in Arizona in a way that's never been done before and then lost their franchise QB for the next three games ("We are one big hit away from Brooks Bollinger"). Then the NY Giants lost on the road to the Browns who had been struggling. The real scary part of loss for the Giants was the return of interception prone QB Eli Manning which might end the "Eli is better than Peyton" stuff.
Packer sidenote to QB Tony Romo's broken finger. Even after he returns, it should be a problem for him. When QB Brett Favre broke his right thumb during the 1999 preseason, he went on to have an awful (for him) 1999 season and he wasn't right again until mid-2000. During that stretch of time, he had two of his three worst seasons in terms of completion percentage.
In the NFC South, the beating Tampa put on Carolina, along with Atlanta's win, means there are now three 4-2 teams in that division, with high powered New Orleans lurking behind at 3-3. It's anyone's guess who wins that division.
Only the NFC West seems settled where Arizona is emerging as the only good team in a lousy division.
Now the NFC North features three 3-3 teams and the division could be won by any of them. Obviously Detroit's only good for a punchline. I was surprised how down Bears fans were after they narrowly lost to Atlanta:
Bottom line is that we shouldn’t have been in this game. We didn’t deserve to. Our defense played without emotion, there was absolutely no offensive creativity, and we constantly put ourselves in positions we shouldn’t have.
We can question whether or not we should have squib-kicked, why we played such a soft defense the last drive, etc. etc. We can blame the loss on Lovie, Bob, Ron, Ditka, Jesus, injuries, and whoever/whatever else we want to, but WE DID NOT DESERVE TO WIN. We played like crap today, and the score should have been a lot to a little in favor of the Falcons.
It's true Detroit didn't do anything to deserve to beat Minnesota on Sunday, but it wasn't an inspiring win in Minnesota either:
I'll admit that after watching today's game between the Vikings and the Detroit Lions, my immediate reaction was a bit of embarassment. . .almost guilt. . .over the fact that the Vikings, for the second week in a row, had "won ugly." I even went so far as to go visit our friends at Pride of Detroit to tell them that they had gotten screwed over and probably deserved to win today's game. Don't get me wrong. . .statistically, the Vikings were the superior team. But, for some reason, it just didn't feel right to me that the Vikings came out on top this afternoon.