i was working late one night in my office, when a man i had recently killed ..(he had the same obsequious manner that was the reason i had him killed)

SPECIAL NOTE: There is another Thursday game this week, with our Men of Steel hosting ZE CLEVELAND BROWNZZ!!! Of course I'm going with Pittsburgh, picking it up of late. They have no chance of playoffs, but they can still eke out respectability and build for next year.

PIT over CLE

(remember, it starts thursday)

I couldn't fit all the lyrics to Turn Around, but it's maybe the only song that's got the right mood for me.

I think I'm a combined 12-358 picking games this year involving the Eagles, Panthers, Cowboys, Broncos, Saints, and Bengals. You might think that's an exaggeration, but it sure doesn't feel like that right now.

I can't even begin to think of words to describe what the hell has happened in the past few weeks for the NFL, and more specifically, the Eagles. Has there even been a more up-and-down season than this? I think of last year and also the last season of the Dreaded Failure Rich Kotite era (when they started 7-2, and finished 7-9). But even in those seasons, it was just matter of starting out well enough and things going sour quickly. Here, it's been up and down. At halftime of that Giants game in week two I was thinking Super Bowl.... then they choked that away in one of their worst collapses ever, and I had to calm down. They did good again, and even a loss to the Saints wasn't terrible, as both teams played well and the Saints are indeed good. Then they lost a heartbreaker to Tampa, with no reason. Then they lost at home to a depleted Jacksonville game.

At the halfway point, I wrote a long piece about the playoff picture and how they still had a shot. They came out the next week and trashed Washington, so maybe they were back on track. Things going good again... until the worst possible outcome: McNabb hurt for the season. Without him, they lost to the Titans, the worst team on their schedule. At that point, I said that they were done - might not win another game, no chance of making the playoffs.

Note that I've been backing them every game this season, despite their woes. I still predicted them to win, until this week. So, of course, they won. Carolina, my preseason favorite, keeps looking like crap and knocked me down a few more pegs on the chart. The Eagles won tonight, in a game I didn't even watch because I was certain they were going down so hard, and now they're back somewhat alive at 6-6. I didn't want to get any hope out of this, but Garcia played well, so I thought maybe they'd still have an outside shot.

Now....

Here's the fun part....

If the playoffs started this week, they'd be in.

What the f? But it's true. The other playoff contenders in the NFC have all been sucking as well. The divisions are now mostly sewn up, with Chicago, Dallas, Seattle, and New Orleans looking pretty solid. But the wild card race is still wide open, and the Eagles are in it as much as anyone. They have the tiebreakers over Carolina and Atlanta right now, and they play the Falcons in the last week of the season. Those three teams plus the struggling Giants are all at 6-6. Minnesota, St. Louis, and the East Pennsuaken John Talyor Ford Dealerships are at 5-7. None of these teams are playing great of late. All of them have a shot. And right now, the Eagles have the tiebreakers.

Of course, they still have a tough schedule, and I already gave them bad karma (swiftly returned) by picking against them. Well, I'm not getting my hopes up, but who knows anymore? Nothing is making sense in the NFC this year. Why not them? Can I take back the two previous state-of-the-team columns I made and issue a blank one? As in, I don't really fecking know.

I'm just riding the wave for now.

Anecdote #1: This reminds me of that zany 1999 season in the NFC. This is when the salary cap really started to take its toll and the league became nearly unpredictable. The Rams came out of nowhere to win the conference, the Redskins didn't choke for the first time ever, and the Buccaneers won 11 games with Shaun King as their QB and almost made the Super Bowl (he's in the Arena Leauge now). Besides those few good teams, there was a convulted race for the wild card. Dallas, Green Bay, Detroit, and Carolina all finished 8-8 and tied for the last two spots. Dallas and Detroit made it on multiple tiebreakers that went all the way down to points scored. In fact, on the last day of the season, all of those teams were trying to run up the score so they could make it in while watching everyone else on the scoreboard and trying to match them. It was absolute chaos, and it was beautiful.

I should add that Detroit had the weirdest year in a year of weirdness: they had Barry Sanders abruptly retire before the season, and were supposed to be terrible, but they started out 8-2. Then they lost six straight games to end the year at 8-8, a terrible meltdown... but they still made the playoffs. Amazing.

Ancedote # 2: I should also note that during that insane Eagles season, Dreaded Failure Rich Kotite's last stand, they managed to somehow take down the 49ers in the early part of the season, and lose to the Bengals on the last day. The 49ers only lost twice more, and they weren't nearly as bad as the Eagles had them, and they crusied in the playoffs to the title. The Bengals won that last game (with the Eagles benching Runnigham for Bubby Brister) for only their third win of the season. They still had the worst record in the league.

So, in summary, all in one season, the Eagles destroyed the best team in the leage (with 13 wins) and were destroyed by the worst team in the league (with 13 losses). I still don't know what to make of this. I think my brother starting losing it during games around then. He couldn't punch Kotite hard enough if he ever saw him. Perhaps this year is just many in a line of wacky years, all part of some mysterious force's greater plan to drive all the people in the Philadelphia area compeltely and udderly insane.