UPDATE: The lines wiggled a little bit before I placed my bets, so I updated the lines and the bet amounts to reflect my wagers. The only major change was the line in the Jets game dropping from +5 to +3.5. Smells like a trap to me. Here’s a summary sheet of the computer’s picks if you want to follow along at home.

Wow! For those of you who decided to blindly trust some guy on the Internet in his first week of making football predictions, congratulations! The computer hit the ground running, nailing its top three picks and five of its top six en route to a dazzling weighted win percentage of 77.5% (tabulated results are here)! I hope this isn’t the finest week the computer has this season, though it has set the bar awfully high for itself. Overall, the computer pulled in a profit of $156. My own personal predictions were much less impressive; I was 7-9 for the week. Some of my assessments were dead-on (Philadelphia, Atlanta, Minnesota, Green Bay), I was wrong about the particulars but ultimately prevailed on a couple (Buffalo, San Francisco), and on some I just flat-out missed the mark by a mile (Seattle, Oakland). And there were a pair of games where I was tantalizingly close to being correct. The first was my weeklong dream that Detroit would sneak in a backdoor cover against the Saints — which almost came true. They made it all the way to New Orleans’ 36 yard line with 5:00 left before Stafford tossed his third pick of the day and New Orleans put together a long drive to finish killing the clock. The second brings me to my feature for this week:

The Top 5 Indescribably Idiotic Decisions of Week 1.

Is there anything more satisfying than second-guessing the decisions that players and coaches and referees make while they are in the midst of intense pressure, deafening crowds, and hurtling bodies that collide with such force that it’s a wonder fission doesn’t take place? Monday morning quarterbacking is one of the guiltiest delights of the game of football. The tactical nature of the game enables us to pick through every play in slow motion and critique every missed block, every mistimed route, every blown coverage that occurs during the course of a single play. There’s no sport that gives us a better chance to say “…if only” and be absolutely certain that if that receiver had just thought to lateral the ball before getting laid out by the safety while he was six inches short of the first down marker, the outcome of the game if not the ENTIRE SEASON would been totally different.

Of course, it’s not always tactical mistakes that raise our ire. Sometimes players can do things that are so mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly stupid that you want to reach into your television set, take off their helmet, and beat them about the ears with it. Players will call for a fair catch at the one-yard line, try to scoop up fumbles they should have just pounced on, spike the ball in the middle of a play, and casually run out of the back of the end zone as though the field were ten yards longer. Blooper reels are filled with players displaying magnificent lapses in judgment. Leon Lett’s entire legacy is built on a pair of these plays. It sometimes makes you wonder whether suffering a coma-inducing concussion would actually make some of these guys smarter. Here are my nominees for what I think are the most boneheaded decisions of the first week of NFL football:

5. Hines Ward, Tennessee vs. Pittsburgh. Once he’s inside the ten, all he’s got to do is protect the ball, let them kill a bit of clock, and then Jeff Reed would handle the rest. Instead, by trying to fight his way through for a touchdown, Ward fumbled away a sure victory and put the game in jeopardy. Without the good fortune of winning the coin toss, Pittsburgh could easily have lost this game.

4. NFL Officials, San Diego vs. Oakland. Absolute horseshit, and I’d say this even if I hadn’t been a Raiders fan since the age of seven. If a player has two feet down and has control of the football in the end zone, it’s a touchdown. End of story. Anything that happens afterwards is irrelevant. I don’t remember the league contorting themselves into sixteen different positions to explain why this was ruled as a touchdown. According to their own assessment of what the completely undefined term “going to ground” means, they applied the rule correctly. Except just like the “tuck rule,” it’s a terribly defined rule that whose inadequacies should have been blatantly obvious to them the instant it was committed to paper.

3. John Harbaugh, Kansas City Chiefs vs. Baltimore Ravens. With thirty-one seconds left on the clock, the ball on the Kansas City goal line, and a seven point lead, Baltimore coach John Harbaugh decides to try to run it into the end zone to build a fourteen point lead, cover the spread, and earn the eternal enmity of all the bookies in Las Vegas. What are the odds of getting a touchdown on fourth and goal from the 2 yard line? About 43%. From this distance, a field goal is essentially an extra point, and what are your chances of connecting on that? 98%. I know Harbaugh’s kicker is effectively a rookie and this ended up being irrelevant when they scored the touchdown, but this is an incredibly bad decision by an otherwise intelligent coach.

2. Patrick Mannelly, Chicago Bears vs. Green Bay Packers. This was a disastrous decision, but at least there was a certain logic to it. Mannelly correctly noted that Green Bay had twelve men on the field and tried to take advantage of it, snapping the ball directly to running back Garrett Wolfe with the prospect of getting a free play; either Wolfe runs for the first down and the penalty is declined, or Wolfe fails and the Bears punt from five yards further forward. Unfortunately for Mannelly, by the time he snapped the ball the Packers had cleared their twelfth man and there was no penalty – giving Green Bay the ball deep in Chicago territory with just twelve minutes left in the game.

1. Leodis McKelvin, Buffalo Bills vs. New England Patriots. Wow. Leodis managed to fuck up this play in just about every possible way. Instead of taking a knee in the end zone, he runs it upfield. Possibly in a quest for late-game glory, possibly in an ill-advised attempt to run the clock down to the two-minute warning, either way it’s a bad idea. And then, rather than finding his way towards the relative safety of the sideline, he darts up the center of the field and plunges into a crowd of tacklers (who have undoubtedly been properly coached by Beilichick to STRIP THE BALL in this situation). And then, rather than go down at the first sign of contact, he tries to stay on his feet and muscle through, prolonging the play until the Patriots gleefully strip him of the ball and the kicker – the kicker – recovers the fumble. I’m not sure we’ll be able to top this level of ineptitude this season, but if we do, it’s going to have to be something special.

Without further ado, here are your picks for Week 2!

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