How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
Sometimes in the NFL, the planets align just right. Take Brett Favre on Monday night. Facing his old team. In a division game. On national television.
Topics
And then, sometimes, the exact opposite happens.
Sometimes you have an NFL week which holds next to no appeal. I don't know how it worked out this way, or why, but a quick glance through this year's Week 5 slate doesn't exactly whet my appetite for football. It's the perfect storm of bad matchups.
Cleveland at Buffalo? Washington at Carolina? Vikings at Rams? How did this week come to be filled with such an assortment of garbage games?
Some of it is the interconference scheduling. The NFL always has a few division games lined up each week, but it seems that the league is saving its "better" rivalries for another week. Perhaps it's because the MLB playoffs are starting. Regardless, there are only three division games this week: the Bengals visit division-leading Baltimore, the 0-4 Titans host the 4-0 Colts on Sunday night, and the Jets play in Miami for MNF action. Decent games, to be sure, but nothing quite like Packers-Vikings or Cowboys-Eagles.
The rest of this week consists of intraconference action. There are two games to keep an eye on: The Patriots and Broncos renew their rivalry from the early part of the decade from new Mile High, and San Francisco hosts Atlanta — a team fresh off its bye week.
Aside from those two decent matchups, this week leaves me as unenthused as I can remember for any NFL regular season week. In trying to figure out why this week turned out to have such an unappealing schedule, I came up with three factors.
First, most of a team's matchups for a given season are set years in advance. An NFC East squad, for example, plays each AFC West and each NFC South once this season, in addition to six division games (home and away with the three other division teams). That's 14 of the 16 predetermined, with the remaining two based on division finish in the previous year. So the NFL in some ways has its hands tied. Though it doesn't explain how this week turned into a throwaway week.
Second, there was no way of knowing which teams would be good and which would be bad heading into Week 5. For all we knew, the Browns and Bills might've been a matchup of 4-0 heavyweights. But since it's impossible to know, I would have liked the NFL to hedge its bets a little with a guaranteed rivalry.
And third, bad luck plays a part. Bad luck on the part of the teams, which don't look good heading into some of these matchups, and bad luck for the schedule-makers. Last week we had the Favre-Packers game, and next week has some beauties such as the Ravens-Vikings, the Giants-Saints and the Broncos-Chargers. It looks like Week 5 was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Be aware this is all merely forecasting. Though I think these games will be duds, they may turn out to be classics, perhaps even the highlight of the season. Who knows, maybe we'll look back on a glorious Week Five and say, "Remember when Seneca Wallace lit up the Jags for 450 yards and five TDs? Or when JaMarcus Russell figured it all out and helped the Raiders rout the Giants in the Meadowlands? Or when Daniel Snyder fired Jim Zorn at half-time and replaced him with the third coming of Joe Gibbs?"
That's why they play the games.
But that's not why I'll be watching them.
