Today’s Games
By New Orleans (+3) at Chicago: Like all decent people with no a priori rooting interest, I’ll be rooting for the Saints, so take my pick with a grain of salt. But Chicago’s defense is monumentally overrated (as the game they should have lost last week made clear)–given how a nowhere-near-100% Alexander ran last week, McAllister and Bush will break some big runs, and Brees should shred their secondary. You can move the ball on the Saints, but Grossman will turn the ball over. You hate to take a dome team playing in Chicago in January, but…I think Cinderella’s going to the ball.
New England (+3) at Indianapolis: Indy could win, and at even odds I would pick them. The Pats are become a little like the last Yankee dynasty. The Yankees won in 1998 with a historically great team, got complacent, but continued to win with teams that eked out increasingly threadbare wins against better teams, which were evidence not of catching some breaks but of their incredible Character and Knowing How To Wintiude and Jeterology. And then the breaks started going against them and the Character mysteriously vanished although the teams got better again. The analogy isn’t perfect–the Pats’ dynasty started with a Super Bowl win against a much better team, but became great–but because of their success their win last week is being discussed more as evidence of some incredible force of their team’s karma rather than more accurately as a stone fluke. Part of me thinks that today is when the gig will finally be up. Still…the Pats are better coached, have a better defense, and Manning has been awful the last two weeks. I can’t justify leaving points on the table to pick against them.