Monday Update: Like A Boss

Gentlemen,

I know everyone's favorite part of the Update each week is when I break the news as to whether or not I will be in attendance at Sally's... Let me just skip ahead and and confirm that I will not be there this evening.

Instead, I will be in downtown Saint Paul, attending what I believe is my 15th or 16th time seeing The Boss. No, not George Steinbrenner. Nor my wife.

THE BOSS.

I missed him last night, and heard be absolutely killed it. Can. Not. Wait.

The Usual Pep Talk
What is there to say? We have 3 weeks left.

The trade deadlines came and went last week with nary a peep. Ok... I guess that means you're all completely satisfied with your rosters at this point. Even though some of you are starting 2 Rams RB's...

Gents, we'll get to the projected standings further on down, but things are tightening up quite a bit. There are ZERO teams that have been eliminated up to this point, which means there is going to be that much more disappointment and/or elation come Week 13.

You can not afford to get complacent. You can not afford to be lazy. The next 3 weeks will define your season. Three wins means you make the playoffs. Three losses means you're dicking around in the consolation bracket. And something in between leaves you in a very precarious position of hoping the right teams around you win and lose.

Do not leave your fate to scoreboard watching. You control your destiny. You can write the remainder of this season's script. But it will not come easy. These will be the most competitive and hard-fought games you'll have this season. Because everyone is fighting for the same thing.

Who wants it more?

The "Sorry, My Bad" PSA
So, I sat down to watch last night's game, flipped open the laptop, and immediately realized I never put up a Gameday Thread for yesterday. Oops.

Truth be told, I don't have a great story about it. We were at my folks for brunch in the morning and watched most of the early games there. Went back to our house in the afternoon, played with the kiddo, got him down for a nap, dozed a little myself... nothing really interesting.

Yahoo! was having major server issues yesterday which contributed to my lack of logging on and realizing this sooner.

Anyway, for those of you that were sitting around wanting to talk smack and felt you were unable to do so... Sorry, my bad.

The Vikings
Well, that was predictable. Let's look horrible for a couple of weeks to get everyone off the bandwagon and then we'll roll over the Lions without Harvin just to mess with people.

This team is 6-4. That should be good enough for fans to get their hopes up of a possible playoff spot. But that upcoming schedule is BRUTAL, boys.

You're probably going to need a 10-6 record to make the playoffs, especially since we lost the tiebreaker with SEA. Can you find 4 wins in there? Can you even find 3?

If it set the over under at 2.5 Wins for those 6 games, which side are you taking?

The Gophers
We're going bowling!

I did 30 seconds of research and discovered that we're projected to make something called the Meineke Car Care of Texas Bowl. And our projected opponent would be West Virginia. While it seems cool that we'd be good enough to make the same bowl game as WV, holy hell we'd get housed in that game.

Still, the team won 6 games and considering how we looked last season, I'll take it. Well done, Jerry.

Not a good looking man

Cracker's College Football Corner
1. Bowl Bound! Tell us about the potential bowl games we could make, considering we still have 2 games left. What are the best & worse case scenarios for bowls?

With OSU, PSU, Illinois, Indiana, Purdue, and Iowa not going to bowl games and MSU still in need of one more win to become eligible (remaining games Northwestern & @ Minnesota) the B1G has a lot more bowl tie-ins than they have bowl eligible teams.  That means we are likely looking at the Meineke Car Care Bowl (Houston) or the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl (Tempe--formerly Insight.com bowl).  The BWW bowl is the higher of the two and it will probably require us to beat MSU to go there.  The absolute best case scenario would be to win the last two, jump Northwestern, and play in the Gator Bowl in Orlando but my money right now would be on Houston.

2. What are the strengths of this Gopher team? I watched on Saturday, and I've seen plenty of games this season, but I can't seem to figure out what we consistently do well.

The defense is stronger than the offense and the strongest part of the team is the pass defense.  Nationally, our defense ranks #25 in the country allowing 336 yards per game (last year we gave up 403 yards per game).  The pass defense ranks 7th nationally in yards allowed (168.8 yds/game) and 16th in pass efficiency.  We aren't necessarily a great defense but we can be great when we play from ahead and our defensive line can rush the passer.  Our rush defense ranks 74th in the country so if the other team can get their running game going and get a lead it neutralizes our strength.  The other thing our coaches have tried to do is shorten most of the games by running the ball a lot on offense to keep our defense off the field.  When we can't get a push on the OL it puts the defense out there and puts pressure on them.  That is what Iowa and Wisconsin did to us and why we got gashed in those two games.

3. Bucky is playing in the Big Ten championship game (because OSU and PSU can't stay out of trouble). Looks like their opponent will either be Michigan or Nebraska. Who should we be rooting for? In other words, who is more likely to beat Wisconsin and prevent them from going to a 3rd consecutive Rose Bowl?

I personally think Nebraska is better than Michigan and has already beat Wisconsin so I guess I'll go with the Huskers.  That being said, we play Nebraska this week and you won't see me cheering for them.  If Michigan ends up in the game I think they're good enough to beat Bucky too.  Michigan actually has the better run defense between the two of them so they would match up pretty well against Wisconsin.

4. We'll get into this more after all the games are played, but as a Gopher rube, what about this team gets you excited for next season and beyond?

I think the encouraging thing is that we're so young on offense and still seeing success.  The offensive line that we've used most of the season consists entirely of freshman and sophomores because the only two upperclassmen on the OL (both juniors) have been injured for most of the season.  Kirkwood (soph) seems likely to hit 1000 yards (819 currently with 3 games remaining) and that will be our first 1000 yard rusher since 2006 when Mason was coach.  We actually started 9 underclassmen, 1 junior and 1 senior on offense when we hung 40+ on Purdue and that includes a true freshman QB.  I think that this team is going to get a lot better as the offense gets more experience.

Team Names
Well, two of you failed at life this week. I know one of you protects very important people, and this was an Election Week, not to mention your entire city was underwater a couple days ago... so we give you a pass, Crapswell.

Crabs on the other hand... He texted me at Noon yesterday to try and switch McFadden out of his lineup. So, it appears he really was busy or just completely mailed it in this week. Or both.

You two degenerates don't make the board this week. Remember, the topic was A Sign You're Getting Old.

Who had the Best Team Name in Week 10?

***VOTE IN SIDEBAR***

I'm going with Gowser. Coupons&BuyingInBulk. It's just nice to finally have confirmation that Gow is indeed, a Jew.

I will say that I did like NPR & PBS, but Dallus, this is really a sign that you're becoming a liberal hipster stoner.

Also, I enjoyed hearing about JoJo's hair loss nightmares.

Who had the Worst Team Name in Week 10?

***VOTE IN SIDEBAR***

Gotta go with Ruptured Achilles. First of all, that happened like 2-3 years ago, which means you're like middle-aged now. Second, the topic wasn't "A Sign That You're Terrible At Football" or "A Sign That You Suck At Running Out The Clock When We're Up With Like 10 Seconds Left And They Don't Have Any Timeouts".

Team Name Topic
Hey Dickheads... Does anyone read these? If you want to continue with the Team Name shenanigans, and 2 of you seemed to not really care this week, I need some new material. PLEASE GIVE IT SOME THOUGHT AND SEND ME IDEAS.

I think we may have done this before, but it came up as a discussion at MNF last week, so we'll roll with it again: Biggest Pet Peeve.

I'm going to put a caveat in here that none of these can be driving/traffic/car related. I'm pretty sure those dominated the list last time around, and they're an easy answer. Dig a little deeper...

And by the way, if it's simply a pet peeve, and not your BIGGEST pet peeve, that's fine. The goal is to be original, funny, and try to win the Best Team Name vote. You will earn it by people reading your team name as saying "Yeah that really IS annoying. I hate that too!"

Tell us what pisses you off.

The Games
Going to run through these quickly...

Gow vs. Kenny

• Welcome back, Jimmy Graham. We all now hate you even more, except for Gow.
• Just want to again point it out... TWO Rams RB's in the same starting lineup.
• Decker, Reg Bush, Lloyd, Rashad Jennings: combined 9.6 points.
• Gow leads 118-42. Kenny still has Wallace and Heath Miller and who cares? Gow wins.

Coconuts vs. Crabs

• Eli started: 2.7 points. Dalton benched: 24 points. #ClassicCoconuts
• Turner started: 1.5 points. FJax benched: 22 points. #ClassicCoconuts
• Coconuts' optimal lineup would have net him 153. He ended up with 89. #ClassicCoconuts
• Big days from Gonzo and AP for Crabs.
• Despite not checking his team this week, Crabs gets the win. #ClassicCoconuts

Jerks vs. Crapswell

• Honestly, nothing really fun about my team to discuss. Matt Ryan had a great day. Everyone else was somewhere between ok and good. I'll take it.
• The Ravens scored 55, yet Boldin scored all of 3.8 pts for Andy.
• In fact, other than Doug Martin (who was mortal yesterday) and Russell Wilson continuing with his golden horseshoe routine, Crapswell's team REALLY sucked yesterday. 
• Thus our score is 104-60. Andy still has everyone's favorite Hebrew Ike Redman going this evening.

Whitebread vs. Dallus

• Weird game for Peyton Manning. Very efficient and well played, but the DEN defense and special teams both scored keeping him off the field and not scoring. 
• No one played horrible for Whitebread, but no one jumped off the page either. Sort of a non-descript week for his team.
• Dallus, on the other hand, is headed towards his 2nd consecutive Points Bonus. Read that again.
• Basically, everyone played well or scored or both for Dallus. Lucky bastard.
• Whitebread trails 122-84 and has a stupid kicker going tonight. Both teams to 4-6.

Ned vs. JoJo

• What a plug & play for Ned: Broncos defense. You can look up their stat line, but they net him 28 points!
• Throw in Blair Walsh with 15 and Ned got 43 points from his Kicker and Defense alone. That score is beating Kenny right now.
• JoJo finally got a big game from Calvin yesterday. I'm sure he forgave him for the rest of the season...
• This is really the only close game going tonight. JoJo trails by 9 with Jamaal Charles, while Ned counters with Bowe. Ned still fighting to stay alive...feel like I've been on repeat with that line.

Projected Standings

I'm going to assume all the current teams leading (including Ned) maintain their lead after tonight. That would mean the standings would like as such tomorrow, not including tonight's points:

	Team	Record	Points
1st	Jerks	8-2	1066
2nd	Coconuts	6-4	1006
3rd	Crabs	6-4	941
4th	Crapswell	5-5	946
5th	K. Hana	5-5	939
6th	Gow	5-5	912
7th	Dallus	4-6	964
8th	JoJo	4-6	962
9th	Whitebread	4-6	874
10th	Titwarmer	3-7	888

There could be some movement based on points. For example, Kenny could overtake Andy for 4th. And JoJo could certainly pass Dallus for 7th. But overall, this is probably close to what you'll see in the morning.

Not to repeat the earlier peptalk, but those final playoffs spots are there for the taking for anyone who steps up.

Next Week's Matchups

• Jerks vs. Coconuts (1st vs. 2nd place)
• Andy vs. Kenny (4th vs. 5th place)
• Crabs vs. JoJo 
• Whitebread vs. Titwarmer (HUGE game for survival)
• Gow vs. Dallus (HUGE playoff implications here)

I'm already looking forward to these games. Going to be a lot of fun next week.

Tonight
Sorry...no exciting diarrhea stories this week.

As I mentioned, I'm out tonight to rock like a boss, with The Boss. Looks like I'm missing a real exciting game... 

The real drama will be the Ned vs. JoJo Battle of Which Chief Can Suck Least. Hopefully, you all find some excitement there.

And maybe the 1st Quarter will be amazing. Since I'm not there, it's likely.

Enjoy the game, boys.

Three more weeks...