Halfway Home

This is not a story about a halfway house. It is half way into the pro football season and we like to keep track of the teams in the National Football League and their progress eight games in. Where do they stand right now? Where have they come from? Where are they going? Trends have definitely started to take shape.

Remember the Bengals and the Cardinals? They were unbeaten at the quarter pole. The Cardinals are looking more like the powerhouse team of the league right now, while the Bengals look like one of many contenders still out there lurking.

The NFC looks like it will be Arizona, Seattle, The Niners, Philly, Dallas, Detroit, The Pack and the winner of the South conference (probably The Aints, as Carolina QB Cam Newton has seemingly lost the ability to complete passes to wide open receivers) fighting for the six playoff spots. Will some team not mentioned in the above sentence be there when the playoff teams are announced? I doubt it. All of the rest (Rams, Vikes, Bears, Falcons, Tampa Bay, the Red Skins, NY Giants and the previously mentioned Panthers) just don’t seem to have the right stuff to win enough of a chunk of their remaining games to get them into either a wild card or their division championship. You can’t win a division championship in the first eight games, but you sure can lose it that early.

The AFC has the Pats, the Donks and the Indy Dolts who all look really strong. The ENTIRE North Division, the Steelers, Ravens, Bengals and Browns (special props to the Browns who have gone from nowhere at the quarter pole to right there in the race at the halfway point) are still contending for the playoffs, the only division with all four teams holding winning records. The KC Chiefs have powered their way back into relevance. The Bills and the Dolphins are above .500 this late into the year, which means they can dream of maybe playing a game on Wild Card Weekend (The Pats appear to be too good to not again win their division. The Chargers seemed strong earlier and have now lost three in a row to fall into danger of being passed up by others who seem to want it more.

So, what was a whole lot of teams hovering around .500 at the quarter pole has now separated out into a whole bunch of stiffs and the above mentioned contenders. By now, most football fans know who is good and who stinks, and who falls into the pack of near .500 teams that are good enough to win about half their games and bad enough to lose about half their games.

Certain teams are sitting there with losing records and little to no chance of having a winning season. It is funny how the fans can know their teams aren’t going anywhere, but those fans still go to games anyway. They wear their team’s jerseys, they get excited for every game they play on Sundays. Football truly is this country’s National Pastime.

But the most fun is to talk about the REALLY bad teams. Summer is over now and the fall is here. That means that the Autumn Wind is an 0 – 8 Raiders team. Hats off to the fine job Al Davis’s kid has done turning a once proud organization into an absolute joke. The one-win Jacksonville Jags, Tampa Bay Bucs and New York Jets deserve to be the butt of jokes for comedians everywhere, as they battle week in and week out with the Raiders for the first couple of picks in next year’s draft.

What do you do when your team is that bad? What do you do when you are hoping for your team to be relevant and all you get is a whole bunch of losses and just one win? You get a sense of humor and you go to games with a paper bag over your head. The countdown is on for WHO becomes that first team to don the shopping bags.

Luckily, the fantasy football season is still on, and the stats of the players on the losing teams count just as much (and sometimes more) than those of the winning teams.

And, you can still bet on football games, whether teams are in a playoff race or not.

And that’s why the NFL season still rocks