Week 5 - I Hate the Cowboys at 12:53 PM

Let’s get this out of the way.  I’m devastated.  Hurt.  Horrified.  Bleeding internally.  And I only watched the first quarter and part of the second quarter.  This is the first time I’ve thought about the Eagles-Cowboys game in-depth since Sunday, and it’s bringing back the nagging pit in my stomach.  It’s not that the Eagles lost.  It’s not that they got blown out.  It’s that it was the Cowboys.  I don’t care how good the Cowboys are.  I hate losing to them.  Hate. It.  It’s the same feeling all Eagles fans have.  Back when Philly was awful and had mediocre season after mediocre season, the fans would say, “I know we won’t make the playoffs this year or anything, but can we just take one from the Cowboys?”  And keep in mind that this was during their dynasty era.  It hurt just as much then as it does now, when the Birds are (yes, still) decidedly better than Dallas.  I make no excuses for what happened on Sunday.  It’s a fact of life that every team has a throwaway game once a year.  Last year it was getting blown out in Pittsburgh.  You move on.  I don’t mind that.  It’s just that it was Dallas.  But now there’s the bye week and then the Chargers, who have to be pretty upset after their last-minute defeat at home to the Steelers.  Anyway, on to week 5 thoughts.

• Admittedly, the Falcons cut the Pats game closer than I thought, especially without Vick under center.  Impressive, but I still think they’re not that good.  Of course, in the NFC, that’s pretty relative.  I don’t think they’d come close in a game with any of the AFC’s top contenders, this week notwithstanding.


• I watched a lot of the Detroit-Baltimore game, and it was hilarious.  I’ve never seen so many penalties in my life.  People talk about teams imploding—that’s exactly what happened to the Ravens.  They looked like a bunch of idiots out there.  There were 21 penalties, which is one short of the NFL record.  Quote of the week from my wife:  we were watching the game, and she watched Joey Harrington get hurried a couple of times by the Ravens and said, “How long has he been starting?”  And that’s exactly the problem.  This is his fourth year as a starter and he still looks like a rookie when he’s under pressure.  He threw for a whopping 97 yards this week in the win.  I would be absolutely shocked if Jeff Garcia didn’t start immediately when he’s healthy.  I’ve never been a huge fan of Garcia, but he’s going to be backing up Harrington with the offensive weapons on that team?  No way.  


• Congratulations to the Packers, who won their first game by absolutely dismantling the Saints.  I hope they enjoyed it, because it won’t be happening often this year.  I like Favre, but he can only do so much.  They lost Najeh Davenport for the year this week, which is another man down on a team that wasn’t even that good with a healthy roster.


• I’m not surprised that Seattle beat the Rams in principle, because they’re the better team.  I’m surprised they didn’t kill themselves on the road, because as Shannon Sharpe said on one of the halftime shows this past week, “I wouldn’t bet on Seattle against my high school on the road”.  Hilarious.  They’ll probably end up winning the awful NFC West, even though the Cards finally have a QB in the mix that can actually win (almost 400 yards against the Panthers D is impressive, even in a loss).  I think they exorcised a lot of demons and gained confidence with this win.  The question now is whether they’ll keep it up or continue to be haunted by inconsistency.


• If the Cardinals had any idea how to play with a lead, they may have pulled that one out against the Panthers.  Maybe they just got too excited with a 10-point lead and figured they could screw around or something.  You can’t give up 14 points in the 4th quarter with a 10-point lead.  Because that’s a four point loss.  Remember?  (That just reminded me of this week’s My Name is Earl.)


• Vinny and the Jets will win a few games this year and keep themselves out of the bottom of the barrel, but if Pennington can’t come back 100% next year, they could be in trouble long-term.


• The Colts beat up on yet another hapless team.  Allowing 5.9 points per game is very impressive, but let’s keep this in perspective, shall we?  As for scoring offenses, they’ve faced teams ranked 31, 22, 23, 15 and 25 in points scored.  And the Titans are only ranked 15th because they hung 34 points on the bad Texans defense.  This week they face the Rams, ranked 4th.  Now we’ll see what the defense is really made of.


• From what I saw of Broncos-Redskins, it was a pretty good game.  I always have to wait until the NFC East teams play the Eagles to gauge accurately, though.  I know they aren’t going to steamroll the division like they have been over the last four years, and that’s a good thing.  I just want to see how good the ‘Skins really are.


• Speaking of the NFC East, it looks like the division is back to being a powerhouse in the league.  It’s the only division in the NFL with four winning teams.


• Bengals-Jags was another good one.  Every now and then the Jags pull out a good offensive effort, and when they do, they’re very tough to beat.  Kudos to Cincy for almost pulling it out.


• I touched on the San Diego-Pittsburgh game in the beginning, and that was a great game.  Too bad for the Chargers, who were a 2-pt conversion away from overtime.  Of course it would’ve helped if they could stop the Steelers from scoring the game-winning field goal too.  Ben Roethlisberger is just a stud.  He was solid last year, but didn’t do anything really spectacular (outside of winning every game he played, of course).  This year he does everything.  He’s a spot-on passer when he needs to be, and just does everything they need him to do.  He’ll be a star for a lot of years.  And that shot he took to the knee had to hurt.  I have two bad knees, and I’ve had that same thing happen to me a couple of times (not in the same context, of course—I’ve just had things do that same thing to my knees—I’ve never actually had a defensive lineman run into them).

So that’s it for now.  Stay tuned for this week’s preview in a day or two.