So much of winning in the NFL is outside of a specific team’s hands. Teams can be good—the cream does rise to the top—but the built-for-parity league makes it easy to sneak into a positive season or wind up battling for .500 despite being among the league’s ten best teams. In a number of divisions, enough teams vacate competitive territory that a playoff home game is given, not earned, while in others, it’s possible to play a schedule featuring 13 games against playoff competition.
The NFC North is not one of the latter divisions, unless our eyes have deceived us thus far. I’m not as concerned as most seem to be about the Vikings after last night. They appear to have one heck of a passing game, and I would like to point out that only rushing the ball nine times might have had a little to do with trailing the whole game, not just a lack of confidence in Alexander Mattison. But, the Vikings don’t look great, the Bears are a cesspool, and the Packers are as rebuilding a team as they might be in any season this decade (though plenty can of course go wrong). If the Lions can be a solid team, they should be able to win eleven or twelve games, and if the Lions can win eleven or twelve games, they should win the NFC North. Given the Lions appear to be a solid team—even an aggressively critical assessment of their game last week would say they hung with the defending Super Bowl champions, meaning the Lions have now played well, on aggregate, over their last eleven games—the expectation is a division title. After that, though, it gets interesting.
It isn’t only the NFC North that’s lacking competition this year. The NFC South is even worse. The NFC West has one team, possibly the NFC’s best team, and after that has the Cardinals and a Rams/Seahawks pair each hoping they’re a full standard deviation away from expectations. The NFC East seems to feature two good teams, but the Giants looked so bad on Sunday that the jury’s still out on the Cowboys. Atop the NFC, it’s the Niners, the Eagles, the Lions, and maybe the Cowboys, and then the gulf gets very wide.
It’s early to be making this sort of an assessment, and it’s eminently possible and would be very NFL if the Seahawks went into Detroit in a game kicking at 10 AM Pacific Time and beat the NFC North favorites. But the Lions have a lot of wind in their sails, and they don’t have to supply much of it themselves. It seems meeting a low competitive baseline, in the NFC this year, might mean being one of the four best teams in the conference.
How Hurt Is Aaron Jones?
Speaking of the NFC North, the Packers look to get to 2–0 on Sunday, and they do so in Atlanta against a team that looked perfectly fine in Week 1. The Falcons have a lot of trendy names at offensive skill positions, with Bijan Robinson and Tyler Allgeier well-praised and Kyle Pitts looking to live up to his early-career hype and Cordarrelle Patterson back this weekend in his official “Joker” position, which is the kind of thing that will be cool of Arthur Smith if the Falcons make the playoffs and very easy to make fun of if the team goes 4–13.
The big question for the Packers is Aaron Jones’s hamstring, especially after AJ Dillon looked like he was actively seeking out tacklers on Sunday at Soldier Field. (The human body craves contact.) Christian Watson did practice in a limited fashion today, but Jones did not, while Quay Walker remains in concussion protocol and there’s some speculation that David Bakhtiari might not play a full game on the Atlanta turf.
Where does this leave the Packers? The instinct is to say that Jones is the lynchpin, and he’s obviously extremely important, doing a whole lot of things for Matt LaFleur’s offense. But we just got through a summer where the main story was that running backs don’t matter as much as their star power suggests. There’s a little bit of WAR’s specific replacement problem here—in WAR in baseball, the specific replacement player in question can change a player’s value to his team relative to his WAR, which is measured against an average replacement player—in that Dillon is so different from Jones that Jones’s absence would shift the identity of the full offense. But, it’s also fair to guess that LaFleur has some ideas up his sleeve.
Ultimately, Jones is an important thing, and maybe the needle-moving thing, but not the most important thing this weekend. The Falcons don’t have enough firepower on offense for this to be anything but a game that’ll be won by winning in the trenches and receiving more mistakes than the Packers give away. If the Packers play a good game, they should be able to beat the Falcons on the road.
A Pair of Returns
The Cubs return to Arizona tonight for the first time since spring training, and what a ride it’s been. When they left camp, my personal assumption was that they’d have a season much like last year’s, but smoother in its composition. I thought they’d win around 75 games. Instead, they could lock up a .500 record with a sweep this weekend, and they may only need to win six more games or so to qualify for the playoffs. It’s a triumphant return, then, and one that instead of closing the book on the season feels more like a reinvigoration. They’ve had an off day, they’re back in Arizona, it’s time to win some baseball games.
In a surprise (to me, at least), Marcus Stroman is coming off the IL tonight, and the assumption is that he’ll be available for the Cubs out of the bullpen in a limited role. There’s a lot of upside here—Stroman is one of the Cubs’ best pitchers—and if he can build back to even being able to throw three productive innings an outing, that would be difference-making in the playoffs. The risks are that he’s not fully recovered from his injuries or that he doesn’t take well to the bullpen role, having never entered a game in relief since 2014, his rookie year. The risk which stems from those risks is that it could be very hard to then leave him off a playoff roster even if it would help the Cubs to roster somebody else in his place. But, that’s a bridge the Cubs can cross if they come to it. Right now, he’s back, and this is the time to try things out, and the more options the better in this case. If he makes the bullpen even 0.01 runs better per nine, that’s a difference, and it could be the difference the Cubs eventually need.
Is Ohio This Good?
Everybody around Iowa State seems to be taking Ohio seriously, and that’s good. It’s good to take opponents seriously, especially on the road, especially playing an early kickoff the week after an emotional game.
I’m not sure Iowa State will ultimately need to have taken Ohio this seriously.
Movelor has the line at 7.6. SP+ has the line at 11.2. The last I saw, betting markets had the line at 2.5.
I can obviously put my money where my mouth is with this, and we intend to do that, but markets are either disrespecting the Cyclones or making a lot out of the Bobcats, and given what happened with the Iowa State–UNI line, I’m guessing it’s the former. Yes, there are things to be scared about, I’m sure Kurtis Rourke is good. But Kurtis Rourke is more a CFL prospect than an NFL prospect, and Iowa State is going to play against and be expected to cause problems for a number of NFL prospects this season. Ohio would comfortably be the worst team on paper in the Big 12. Iowa State should handle this game just fine.
Elimination Time
It’s the Bristol night race this weekend, and NASCAR maybe hasn’t figured out short tracks just yet with this car (though they’ve decided short tracks won’t include dirt, returning what would have been next year’s Bristol dirt race and to pavement), but it’s hard not to get a little excited about the Bristol night race with playoff elimination on the line. Kyle Larson and Tyler Reddick have locked in advancement to the Round of 12, while Denny Hamlin only needs seven points, meaning he needs to finish 30th or better in the absolute worst-case scenario for him. After that, it gets into dangerous territory. No one is really safe. Here’s the overall picture, with points above 13th place or behind 12th place:
- Kyle Larson: Advanced via win
- Tyler Reddick: Advanced via win
- Denny Hamlin: +49 points
- William Byron: +41 points
- Brad Keselowski: +33 points
- Ryan Blaney: +25 points
- Kyle Busch: +24 points
- Ross Chastain: +18 points
- Chris Buescher: +13 points
- Christopher Bell: +13 points
- Joey Logano: +12 points
- Kevin Harvick: +7 points
- Martin Truex Jr.: –7 points
- Bubba Wallace: –19 points
- Ricky Stenhouse Jr.: –22 points
- Michael McDowell: –40 points
The surest technically unsettled thing, aside from Hamlin and Byron’s safety, is that Michael McDowell needs to win this race if he’s going to advance. Wallace and Stenhouse could each get through with strong finishes and a lot of stage points and two bad races from guys currently in the top twelve, but McDowell needs to win. That’s what we’ve got heading into tomorrow night.
Taj Gibson to the Wizards
Finally, an old Bulls favorite is remaining in the NBA for at least the start of another season: Taj Gibson agreed on a one-year deal to return to the Wizards today. It’s nice to not have to say goodbye just yet.
