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No Given Sunday

Something very odd isn't happening in the National Football League this season. Normality is so much the norm as to seriously weird me out.

The missing phenomenon can best be described by example. Yours truly participates in a survivor pool with hundreds of contestants. (For the benefit of non-gamblers, a survivor pool is a contest where each entrant must pick the winner of one NFL game each week. Point spreads do not apply, but you can't pick any team more than once). There were over 300 plungers still alive before last week's games. The same number are still alive today. EVERYONE picked a winner.

Our shared success ran counter to NFL probabilities established over decades of league history. Since the whole point of survivor picks is the search for mismatches, week five of the pro football season was an upset-free zone. Upon further review, so were the preceding four weeks of the schedule, too.

Think back, pro football fans. Can you point to ANY game this year where the form chart was upended in spectacular or even noteworthy fashion? I couldn't without studying the week-by-week record of all 32 teams, and the best I could come up with was pretty small beer, the Redskins' 36-30 overtime win at home over the Jaguars on October 1. In truth, the most startling part of that game was its total score, not which team one. In the same vein, the Giants' comeback against the Eagles was a surprise because of the way Philly blew a big lead. Beforehand, the contest was viewed as a toss-up.

Otherwise, nothing. Oh, favorites have failed to COVER on a steady enough basis to keep Las Vegas one of our fastest-growing cities, but they haven't actually LOST. The Colts were pressed to the limit by two decided underdogs, the Jets and Titans, but Indy is as undefeated as it's been unimpressive. The Patriots have been in-and-out on offense, but're 4-1, which is about where one suspected they'd be going into their bye week. Those two teams were supposed to be good, and they are. The Raiders and Lions were expected to suck, and they do. The league to date has been an overwhelming triumph of the conventional wisdom.

We won't go into the whys and wherefores of this pattern because a) the answer is probably "who knows?" and b) this former reporter no longer has the authority to ask players, coaches, and executives what they think. It is obvious, however, that should this extreme degree of predictability continue for the final two-thirds of the season, the NFL would confront a dire threat to its primary marketing message. "Any Given Sunday" means "upsets are always in play, so keep watching!" The less that's true, the less reason to watch. At this point, anyone living in a Bay Area, be it San Francisco, Tampa, or Green, has no further reason to follow their teams except hoping for an upset. If that hope seems futile, it'll be time to turn off the tube and start scouring draft guru web sites.

Ever alert to market trends, old-fashioned bookies catering to point-spread gamblers have responded by escalating point-spreads to Big 12 levels. The Broncos at home are giving 15 to the Raiders this Sunday night, which is simply absurd. The longer the upset drought goes on, the more spreads of that magnitude there will be. When the trend ends, as all trends do, some bookies will get crushed on a very black Sunday indeed.

But not this Sunday, I hope. The Broncos are my survivor pick.

posted by Michael Gee @ 11:32 AM