The Birds Of The NFL
Lets take a status check on the Birds of the league through week 8!
SEATTLE SEAHAWKS
Pretty much as good as usual. The Hawks will likely reach the playoffs and will be a threat once they are there. They may even wrestle the division away from the 49ers if the 9ers hit a bit of a slump at some point.
BALTIMORE RAVENS
The Ravens are better than expected! Lamar Jackson has taken that next step and become a quality passer as well as a runner. He’s incredibly fun to watch and is possibly an MVP candidate. They’ve had one tough close loss to the Chiefs (no shame there) and one random embarrassment against the Browns (every team has them from time to time). The Ravens are clear front-runners for the division and possibly for a 1st round bye. Harbaugh has done a great job re-tooling the team around Jackson.
PHILADELPHIA EAGLES
Not quite as good as we’d expected, that’s for sure. Just two years removed from a SB win and still retaining most of that talent, I don’t think anyone expected the Eagles to be this mediocre. I’m not sure what’s wrong. It seems like everything that used to be amazing is just…worse?
ARIZONA CARDINALS
They got off to a bad start but maybe there is something to this Murray kid. The Cards are still a bad team but it feels like maybe they have a future if they play their…cards…right. I’m sorry.
ATLANTA FALCONS
Man what the hell happened? This team is 3 years removed from an MVP caliber season and an almost SB win. The defense is complete ass. Matt Ryan looks like poop, and now he’s hurt because Aaron Donald ate him. Julio is still good. This team has fought fairly hard in a few of their losses but they are legitimately a dropped Nelson Algholor pass from being winless. Dan Quinn has no chance of survival after this season unless they suddenly turn on god-mode and roll through the rest of the schedule.
I will say that the first couple games Matt Ryan looked like poop but since then he was on pace for career bests on yards and close on TDs. Injuries hurt and at this point I say don’t fire Quinn because we are shitty for a reason and may as well stay shitty and get a great early pick and a new coach because the pieces are still there. Never should have let Shanahan go.
That’s the biggest reasons the Falcons are bad I think. The defense wasn’t great before, but the offense was certainly good. It still is. The wheels have just come off this season. Quinn is all but gone.
That’s pretty much what I think is going on in Philly. Their offense is really inconsistent. Wentz has been up and down. And really, since Reich left, they haven’t been the same. The Colts, however, seem to keep doing more with less. That should tell you something.
I’ve been impressed with Lamar and I totally like my crow however you want to cook but I shouldn’t get a choice on how to eat it. Dude has been solid at his worst this year. And that’s saying a lot.
The Ravens are really lucky Harbaugh decided not to phone it in and walk away or whatever.
The Cards are a really interesting team. Kingsbury seems to be attempting to adapt his coaching style to fit the NFL in a way that will work. It’s giving the offensive more of an identity than it had last year for sure. But it’s putting the building blocks in place for something better long term. With Kirk at WR and a healthy Johnson (maybe) at RB, a few pickups in the offseason (this assuming that Fitz retires) could make them a sleeper pick next year maybe. The defense is actually not bad.
The Seahawks are the Seahawks. Russ is a magician who can pull football shaped rabbits out of his helmet. If he had a true workhorse RB that didn’t fumble, and a top flight WR, they would be a terror. As is, they’re pretty close to that. The 49ers seem to be legit though. That defense is crazy. I look forward to them playing.
Not having a great RB or a great WR is pretty damning for most teams. I don’t claim to follow them too closely, but seeing their performance these past few years I kinda feel like Wilson might be the new Peyton Manning in the sense that he’s a top tier quarterback inflating the performance a mid-tier team. Very easy to perform well in the regular season like that, very difficult to win a Super Bowl.
That’s actually a great description of them. We’ll see if they can buck that trend. But it never worked for Manning. He wasn’t exactly known for his playoff exploits though.
Chris Carson had some fumbles early on in the year but he’s been reliable since then. It’s the defense that’s holding the Seahawks back right now. We have no pass rush and our secondary is pretty bad outside of Shaguill Griffin.
and 28-3 lmao. i will never stop making 28-3 jokes!!!!!!!
Technically the Falcon should be on two different phase comductors or a phase conductor and ground in order to get shocked, but getting shocked when there’s no way they should be able to does fit this year’s team pretty well.
I actually had hope before the season started. Should have known better. At least the Atlanta Hawks are entertaining so far?
Please keep doing these I find them amusing.
I think you still have miscellaneous animals (Bears, Broncos, Dolphins, etc) and then people (Vikings, Redskins, Cowboys etc). I guess you could do a mythology theme with the Chargers, Giants, and Titans and whatnot. I don’t know what the hell the Browns would be. Dawg Pound? Possum maybe? A helmet? Who knows at this point.
If you continue to make these I will love you forever Dave.
Okay then, here’s a ranking of (non-bird) animal teams:
Colts, Lions, Rams, Panthers, and Jaguars: Grinning as they look down upon the…
Broncos and Bears: who are slowly bleeding to death, but hey, at least they aren’t the…
Bengals and Dolphins: who are corpses. Bloody murdered corpses.
How about the Foul-Cons? Cause we’re second in penalties and we are apparently not as skilled as we led everyone to believe?
My read on the Falcons is that they’re not a bad team so much as they’re really poorly coached. It’s almost certainly mostly hindsight bias here, but since Kyle Shanahan left, their offense hasn’t been quite as good (although Matt Ryan has continued to put up MVP-caliber numbers both last year and this year, even if he had a shaky first two games), and their defense hasn’t had the large leads they had in 2016 that allowed them to key in on the pass (and still often give up the lead). On top of that, the most galling thing to me has been the continued ineptitude of their defense; Dan Quinn was hired because he was supposed to be the “architect” of the Legion of Boom. The Falcons have never put together a strong defense under Quinn, and I doubt that it’s all on talent. Long story short: I’m putting this year on Quinn.
Moving on to the Eagles: I CANNOT figure this team out. (Same goes for the Bills.) They have a weak first half against the Redskins to start only to storm back and win, then drop a couple of close ones against the Falcons and Lions. Then they win a close one against the Packers, blow out the Jets, and GET blown out by the Vikings and Cowboys before blowing out the Bills. Is this a good team that loses to random teams, or a bad team that gets up against good teams, or just a mediocre team with high variance? I can’t tell! (With the Bills, I can’t tell if they’re a good team with a couple of losses, or a mediocre team facing an easy schedule and taking advantage of it.)
Cardinals: I expected them to suck. They do not. Kyler might be the real deal, and Kliff might actually be a decent hire if he stops kicking field goals from inside the ten so often.
Seahawks/Ravens: These teams look good. I trust the Seahawks more than the Ravens, but that’s more because of Russell Wilson, who is the best QB in the NFL today.
(Side note at the end of this rant: how did the Seahawks win a Super Bowl with that coaching staff? Dan Quinn at Defensive Coordinator, Tom Cable on the O-line and as an assistant head coach? Looking back, it seems insane that those two didn’t sink that team.)
Some guys are just really, really good position coached or coordinators. Guys like Freddie “The Thumb” Kitchens, didn’t get the memo. Also, he must’ve missed the one about how players from Alabama don’t usually do all that great in the NFL, especially when you go to bad teams.
I could buy that, but usually the good coordinators are decent at their side of the ball when they become head coaches, it’s just the other side that they don’t do well with. The Falcons have a decent offense, but their defense is…actively horrid.
Plus, Tom Cable has been confirmed to be not good at coaching the o-line; after leaving Seattle (where even in their prime years the line was absolutely horrid), he went to Oakland, where their offensive line went from approximately 17th in adjusted sack rate to 31st.
I’ll tell you what happened to the Eagles. Big Dick Nick Foles took his back up QB super magic to the Jags, giving Minshew Back up QB superpowers, and now the Jaguars are the 2017 Eagles.
This is legit. Jaguars will win the Super Bowl this year CONFIRMED!
Foles > Whatz his name
What about the Funhouse Kawalimii?
I have to defend Ryan here. Outside of the first two games he has been playing well. When you lead the league in penalties, only have 7 sacks in 8 games, and allowed scoring drives in 9 straight possessions across two games how can you ever expect to win. Look up the video of Brian baldinger reviewing our defense and listen as he legitimately gets angry trying to figure out what we were doing. Not to mention our special teams has let us down tremendously costing us In two separate games that were close. With that being said the current coaching staff is ruing Ryan and Jones last few prime years.