Sporting Madness

Despite my CFL duties , I’ve been following the NFL perhaps even more closely than usual this year thanks to writing a weekly picks column over at The Good Point . It’s been a pretty solid season so far, with lots of exciting games, great storylines and terrific playoff races, and there isn’t any shortage of things to write about on any front. However, there’s one lingering blot on the season that’s overshadowing many of the positive developments, and that’s the atrociousness of the NFC West. As Jon Bois wrote over at SB Nation a while back, the division has been terrible for almost its entire existence in its current 2002-on form, with its teams only recording a combined positive point differential once in that span (in 2003, and that wasn’t by much). This year might be a new low for the division, though, as all four of its teams are around the same degree of awful. With the San Francisco 49ers getting blown out 34-7 by the San Diego Chargers on Thursday Night Football tonigh...

So, I went 1-3 last weekend , which certainly isn't promising. However, it was a rather bizarre weekend of games, and I did beat ESPN's Bill Simmons , who makes about a kajillion dollars more for his writing than I do, so I'm okay with that. The thing is, the NFL is a league of parity; as we often recite, anything can happen on any given Sunday. This becomes even more evident in the playoffs because only decent teams make it this far; the gap between a 14-2 team like the Colts and a 9-7 team like the Ravens is far closer than the gap between the Ravens and the 1-15 St. Louis Rams, so it's much harder to figure out who's going to win.With that in mind, I do have a few thoughts about this weekend's slate of games. As always, these predictions are nowhere near guaranteed and are intended for recreational purposes only. Cardinals at Saints: (4:30 p.m. Eastern Saturday, FOX) This should be one of the most entertaining games of the weekend, featuring two high-po...

Today was Remembrance Day (Veterans' Day in the U.S.), so I've been doing a lot of reflecting on soldiers, wars and history. Ryan Gallivan has a good round-up of some excellent reading for the day, including this tremendous piece from Matt Ufford of Kissing Suzy Kolber fame on his experiences in Iraq, so I encourage you to check that out. However, there's one other story that always comes to my mind around now, and it's one that truly deserves to be remembered. If you haven't yet, I urge you to read Gary Smith 's excellent stories on former Arizona Cardinals safety Pat Tillman . If you have read them, go back and look at them again; they're well worth it. Tillman gave up a lucrative career in the NFL to go serve his country in the wake of the September 11 attacks and tragically lost his life doing so. What impressed me even more than his decision, though, was the outstanding person he was from all accounts. I love these pieces because Smith doesn...

And here's my piece on why Pittsburgh will win today: If life was a Hollywood story, there's no question that the Arizona Cardinals would take today's game. Their unlikely playoff run feels like it should be on the silver screen, and the revitalization of Kurt Warner could be turned into any number of movies. This is reality, though, and the Cardinals are long past due for turning into pumpkins. That's not to underestimate Arizona. They've proven to be a very capable team in these playoffs, and much more dangerous than their regular-season performance would indicate. They have the great quarterback play from Warner and the tremendous ability of Larry Fitzgerald at wide receiver, and they'll certainly be in this game. They won't win it, though, and that's because they're a one-dimensional team. The Steelers can hurt you in a variety of different ways. Their defence is terrific against the run and the pass, and their zone blitz means that you never k...

Here's Mike's piece on why he thinks Arizona will win today's game: According to today’s New York Times, Kurt Warner wears number 13 to show that his spirituality overrides any need to be superstitious. If that isn’t enough to convince anyone of the Cardinals’ impending victory tonight, then it’s tough to know what else to say. In last year’s Super Bowl, Andrew wrote in the Journal that if the New York Giants played their best possible game and the Patriots faltered as they hadn’t before, the Giants had a chance to win. I countered that the game wasn’t even worth watching, since the 18-0 Patriots would run roughshod all over them. We all know what happened next, and I’ve been eating my words ever since. Even though analysis of every statistic and match-up flew in the face of a New York victory, the Giants managed to pull it out. This year’s Cardinals increasingly remind me of last year’s Giants. They’ve shown that with a quarterback who’s on his game (Manning or Warner), a...

In just a few hours, the Pittsburgh Steelers will take to the field in Tampa Bay to try and win a record sixth Super Bowl title against the Arizona Cardinals. I’ve long been a Steelers fan, and these past couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I support the team. There are plenty of great reasons including the history of success, the focus on coaching continuity and smashmouth defence and the tremendous players who have worn the black and gold over the years. However, sometimes you’re defined as much by what you’re not as what you are. The brilliant Joe Posnanski wrote one of the quintessential pieces on the Steelers for the Kansas City Star after their win over the Ravens. Here’s the first paragraph, which really cuts to the core of this franchise. Football is violence. It’s easy to forget that sometimes, easy to start believing that football is about other more pleasant things, that it is about coaching and strategy and star quarterbacks and fabulous catches and touch...

Photo: The cover of Bob Ackles' memoirs . It came as quite a shock last week to hear the news [Neate Sager, Out of Left Field ] of Bob Ackles' death at 69 [Ian Austin and Marc Weber, The Vancouver Province ]. Ackles was such an integral part of the B.C. Lions, the CFL and Canadian football as a whole that it seems weird to consider a future landscape of the game he loved so much without him in his prominent role. It's been a bad year for CFL icons: remember, we lost J.I. Albrecht [Stephen Brunt, The Globe and Mail ] back [Neate Sager, Out of Left Field ] in March [my piece], so Ackles' death takes away yet another of the characters who made this league great. Today, as an appropriate intro to the Lions-Blue Bombers game, TSN spent a half-hour of their pre-game show relating the tributes [a collection of them from TSN.ca ] to Ackles, a man who thoroughly deserved all of them. The collection of tributes they were able to put together on short notice was very impres...