It’s Championship Game day, which means it’s time for our picks. Last week, my picks were significantly better than in Wildcard Week, as I picked up 13 points in our format. Unfortunately, Andy picked up 13 points as well, so he still has a 24-20 lead. To keep things interesting (and to give me a shot at catching up), we’re going to up the ante with fewer games this week, and make regular picks worth 2 points, and best bets worth three.
After a week of rather lackluster Wildcard games, the NFL playoffs are back at it today with a slate of games that at least appears to be a lot more appealing. In our new pick format last week, Andy kicked my butt, going only 7-5 with his picks, but getting two best bets for 11 total points. I went 5-7, and finished with 7 points.
Assuming Ray Lewis follows through on his plans to retire, the only likely hurdle between him and a first-ballot Hall of Fame induction in five years would be the memory of legal issues he faced in 2001 after two individuals were killed in a fight with Lewis and his companions after the Super Bowl.
While the most serious of the charges we’re dropped in exchange for his testimony against others, he pled guilty to obstruction of justice, avoiding prison time and ensuring that he’d be able to continue what ended up being one of the best careers a linebacker has had in NFL history.
That career included 13 pro bowls, seven first-team All-Pros, a Super Bowl MVP award, two NFL Defensive Player of the Year awards, three AFC Defensive Player of the Year awards, being named to the 2000’s All-Decade team, and a host of other awards and records (see the sidebar here). So while his legal troubles may be a discussion point in the Hall of Fame conversation (even if they’re not supposed to be), the debate isn’t whether or not he will get in, it’s only a possible debate about when.
And the bigger debate, in many people’s eyes, is where exactly he falls in the list of “Greatest of all-time” for Linebackers (realistically, probably inside or outside ‘backers).
Personally, while I’ve always thought he was great, I also thought he also was greatly aided by usually playing on teams that had a system (and the players up front) to funnel traffic his way and keep blockers off of him–so I would be hesitant to put him ahead of guys like Lawrence Taylor, Dick Butkus and possibly even a few more (Ray Nitschke? Mike Singletary? Jack Lambert or Jack Ham?).
So we put the word out to you (especially our regular Hall of Fame commenters)–we’ve got the poll going, is Lewis the greatest of all time, or who would you rank ahead of him? Let us know in the comments.
As we’ve mentioned time and time again, our bets have sucked all season. We maybe had a two or three week stretch where it looked like things were coming around, but for the most part it’s a good thing our time in Vegas this season was limited to one three night stretch for Andy.
That said, we both did pretty well last week, recovering if only briefly from terrible stretches, posting 3-1 marks in week 16. That improves Andy’s record to 29-34-1. Tony rebounds from back-to-back 0-4 weeks, improving his season record to 27-37.
As we wrap up the regular season, here are our bets for week 17. Use these at your own risk:
With our NFL Bets being so terribly this season, I thought we should take a stab at something different this season, and place some bets on some of the top college games. So we pulled up some of the college bowl game lines, and away we go.
To make things a little more interesting:
We each get to make 9 bets from a select list of Bowl games
We have a theoretical budget of $2,500 to spend
We have to place a minimum bet of $100 on any game we choose to bet on
We must spend the full budget
We must bet on the Alabama/ND game, the Kansas St/Oregon game, the Texas A&M/Oklahoma game, the Wisconsin/Stanford game, the Nebraska/Georgia game, and the Minnesota/Texas Tech game.
Loading ...
Brian Wolf: I love your optimism, but I’m not so sure. Philly is a deeply flawed team, but I’m not…
Good playoff games this weekend, with the Bills getting another chance to beat the Chiefs in postseason. I predict they…
Good call Justin ... yeah, Gibbs was dominating but Goff lost the game. Once Robertson went down, this secondary never…
Brian Wolf: totally disagree about Ben Johnson and the Lions. They didn’t overlook anyone. They just don’t have an NFL…
Wow ... and the divisional playoffs have begun. The Texans decide to leave Travis Kelce wide open for much of…