NFL Picks, 2012 Season Week 2

When we were talking about ways to make the weekly pick segment more interesting we decided to add a team blogger to the mix. I think we’re going to change the segment up on the fly and try to see if we can make sure that whoever we contact for “celebrity blogger” status is covering a team that had something interesting happen the previous week.

This week we have two: Kevin Ewoldt, managing editor of Hogs Haven, and Steven Mullenax, editor of The Landry Hat. The Landry Hat got to watch its underdog Dallas Cowboys convincingly put it to the New York Giants in the season opener last Wednesday.

Mullenax celebrated his team’s win with a series of A-Team awards, singling out the performances of a number of Cowboys’ players from the win.

One of the most exciting parts of week one was watching the performance of Robert Griffin III, or RGIII, or as Ewoldt calls him, RG!!!. While the Redskins have a way to go, the team appears to finally have a franchise quarterback for the first time in 20 years, much to the delight of Ewoldt, managing editor of Hogs Haven.

He acknowledges the advantages Washington had in preparing for the game, which included distractions from bounty-gate, the absence of head coach Sean Payton and the lack of any ability to game-plan against the Redskins’ rookie quarterback. But Ewoldt also expressed excitement at how Griffin was able to live up to — and perhaps exceed – an almost insurmountable amount of hype leading up to the opener.

“It’ll be very interesting to see how RGIII plays against the Rams,” he says. “He took a lot of hits despite that great performance and how the secret is out on our personnel. If he’s going to play 16 weeks, the Redskins need to protect him better. But it’s clear Washington D.C. finally has a franchise-worthy QB again. … It only took us 20 years and three extra draft picks.”

Last week’s guest, Neal Coolong from Behind the Steel Curtain, beat us both with his Minnesota, NY Jets and Tampa Bay picks. For purposes of keeping score, we’ll use the score from whichever of the two guests gets the most games correct.

Without further ado, here are all four of our thoughts on who will win in week two:

Game of the Week: There are some good ones this week, with Denver @ Atlanta, Detroit @ San Francisco, and Baltimore @ Philadelphia in particular being games that can start to show the true colors of some teams that were supposed to be good. But, for our Game of the Week, we’ve got to give the nod to the NFL Network’s cherry picked Chicago @ Green Bay matchup. Although it pains us to put the Packers on the pedestal two weeks running, this early divisional matchup has a lot of intrigue. Somewhat surprisingly, three of the four of us actually are picking the Bears to win.

The Packers frankly didn’t look that good opening against a tough San Francisco team, and the Bears looked surprisingly dynamic on offense against a rebuilding Colts franchise. With the Jay Cutler/Brandon Marshall connection, the Bears have a downfield threat that can cause the Packers secondary continued problems, and with the Forte/Bush combo in the backfield, they can also grind out the clock. Add in a usually tough defense against the usually high scoring Packers offense, and the Bears might have what it takes to push the Pack to 0-2 at Lambeau, forcing them to play catch up all year.

Game of the Weak: There are a couple of stinkers to choose from this week, with Oakland @ Miami getting the slight edge over Kansas City @ Buffalo. Miami appears to be in an early race with Cleveland to see which franchise gets the first crack at replacing their first-round rookie quarterback with Matt Barkley–there are still a couple of other teams that could make it a race, but Miami appears to have the perfect storm of a weak GM, questionable coach, lack of talent on both sides of the ball, and media clusterf**k from appearing on Hard Knocks to take the crown.