For the Birds

If you are familiar with the annual NFL forecasts of my crystal balls over the years, you're probably thinking that the title of this post is fitting for those forecasts every year and not just this year. Used as an idiom, "for the birds" means - nicely put - something than can and should be discarded as useless. Well, my forecasts haven't always been useless. My original crystal ball (CB, for short) correctly picked the Super Bowl winner twice in 8 years. After CB went into retirement, my second crystal ball (CB2) took over the forecasts starting last year - and mostly whiffed on its first try. But CB2 is rarin' to go with its 2017 forecast, eager to make up for the 2016 forecast that left a lot to be desired. But, I'll tell you, it'll take a leap of faith - or, in this case, a flight of faith - for anyone to trust this forecast, because CB2 thinks you'll be wasting your money if you bet on any of the usual suspects.

CB2 ain't talking about "for the birds" as an idiom. It means it literally; that is, CB2 is for the birds. And not those dirty birds down south either. Or those birds way out on the west coast or the ones in the desert. According to CB2, when Super Bowl 52 kicks off next February in Minneapolis, the two teams playing in it will be the Philadelphia Eagles and the Baltimore Ravens.

Aching Throbbing Lamenting

I chose those three words for the title of this post because I wanted words that begin with A, T, and L. But I can think of a lot of other words - some of which aren't very nice - that don't begin with those letters that would be more appropriate to describe the feelings of fans of the Atlanta Falcons in the aftermath of Super Bowl 51.

A, T, and L together, of course, form the familiar and widely accepted abbreviation for Atlanta. Not exactly known as the city of sports champions, Atlanta ended calendar 2016 having celebrated only one championship in 170 seasons in the four major North American sports leagues. That came in 1995, when the Braves won the World Series 4 games to 2 over Cleveland (another city that knows a thing or two about failure in sports). Topping the list of futility? That would be the Falcons, titleless in all 50 of their seasons (during the last 30 or so of which I have been a fan) in the NFL as of the start of the 2016 season. But on the final day of the 2016 season there were the Falcons, flying high and poised to finally fill their empty trophy case.

2016 NFL House Calls

192 times during the 2016 NFL regular season a player with dreads took one to the house - a small increase over the total of 190 house calls in 2015. The 192 TD accounted for 14.7% (roughly one out of every 7) of the 1,307 touchdowns scored by everybody during the season. There were 5 players with dreads who scored at least 10 TD - a small increase of one over the 4 who reached double figures in 2015. RB LeGarrette Blount, who previously had never scored more than 7 TD in any regular season, took individual honors, finishing with 18 TD. Blount scored in 13 of the New England Patriots' 16 games - scoring one TD 9 times; two TD 3 times; and scoring all three of the Patriots' touchdowns in their 31-24 home loss to the Seattle Seahawks in Week 10, including a 13-yard run around left end (photo above) for a 21-19 New England lead in the 3rd quarter. Blount's 18 TD were second only to the 20 scored by Arizona Cardinals RB David Johnson among all players.