Week 8 Overreactions

What a fun weekend of football in the AFC East. We had a divisional matchup, an in-state pillow fight and a beat down of epic proportions. It doesn’t get much better than this. Now, we all know that the Patriots are the #1 team in the division, the Bills and Fins are mashed together in some kind of hybrid, not quite good enough blob of silly putty at #2 and the Jets are in 6^th. With this in mind, we’re going to take a different track and rank the teams in order of how badly they beat the Chicago Bears.

In last place (as usual), we find the New York Jets. The Jets didn’t even beat the Bears, so that shows you how good this team that John “Rambling Man” Idzik has put together is. The Jets welcomed the Buffalo Bills to town on Sunday and along with Geno welcoming his guests politely by offering them the football whenever he got his hands on it, I’m fairly sure that he left out an English Style Tea service in the visitors’ locker room. I really can’t believe that we sat here discussing whether or not this clown could succeed in the NFL, I mean he completed more passes to the Bills defense than he did his own receivers. Pathetic, absolutely pathetic. On the plus side, Jet fans get to experience the Mike Vick project this weekend. Let’s just hope he ties his shoes for the game. Rex Ryan is better than anyone in the world at devising a defense to stop elite QBs, unfortunately for him, Kyle Orton is not elite.

Now, we move on to the teams that actually beat the Bears.

First up (in third place) we find the Buffalo Bills. It took a week one thriller for the Bills to topple Cutler and Co., and once upon a time that was considered a quality win; but none the less, the Bills did win and they have done so on a fairly consistent basis this year. The Bills have played two teams that are considered “quality teams” this season and the scores of those games add up to 59-32. Closer than in recent years; but in reality not good enough to get it done… To the game, we talked about the Jets’ ineptitude already, so let’s just talk about how the Bills never really needed to show up for this game and the most eventful thing to happen to a Bills player was young Sammy Watkins going all Clemson on us and humiliating himself in front of the entire nation. Orton was serviceable and the defense caught the passes that Geno threw to them, all in all it was a nice trip to Jersey for the team. (This is notable, because it is very rare that someone can say that they had a nice trip to Jersey.) The Bills need to win at least four more games to have a shot at breaking that pesky streak and of their 8 remaining games three are as close to “sure losses” as one may find so let’s hope Dougie Marrone can keep the Bills from being the Bills in the other 5.

Next up we have the Dolphins who just one week ago smacked around the Bears pretty good. That game left the Phinatics reaching for their blowhole grease, navel oranges and hot glue guns in preparation for a parade around Sunlife Stadium (due to traffic regulations they had to find somewhere where there would be no pedestrians). Then they rolled up the coast to do battle with the mighty Fighting Kahns. The Fins were wholly unimpressive in the game, with the newly appointed “best QB in the division” managing to complete only 55% of his passes for a measly 196 yards and Lamar “LM3K” Miller searching in vain for the endzone, the Fins should count themselves lucky that they were matched up against such an inept opponent. Blake Bortles did his best Geno Smith impression and threw not one, but two TD passes to Dolphin defenders and really looked like the bust that he projects to be. The Fins have an impressive win against the Pats under their belt, but it’s been a steady downhill progression since then. If someone doesn’t hide the Joe-Bot in a dark closet soon (I read somewhere that they switched him to solar power so Ross can still pay all the free agents he’s overpaid for the last couple of years) then he could wreak havoc all over another promising season.

And with the greatest destruction of the Bears to date, I present the New England Patriots and their declining QB, Tom Brady. The Pats really rolled out the red carpet for the Bears this weekend and treated them like they were another hapless franchise from the Windy City named after a member of the Ursidae family…The Pats taped and glued a defensive line together and thanks to Marc Trestman and Jay Cutler’s combined football IQ of 6.3 they were able to look like a unit capable of playing in the NFL. And then there was the aforementioned Declining QB…It looks like one of our requests to give his testicles a weekend pass on the weeks when the Pats play was granted as he was absolutely surgical in the way he toyed with the Bears’ secondary. He did throw five incompletions out of the 35 passes he attempted, so there is still room for improvement. And last, but most certainly not least we have to discuss Rob Gronkowski’s complete emasculation of the entire Bears defense. Gronk looked like the guy that he was a couple of years ago, tossing puny defenders aside on his way to 149 yards and three TDs. Oh yeah, the Bears were so awful that even Domenique Easley got himself a couple of “Chandler Jones Specials” when he fell on top of Cutler after guys like Hightower and Vince did all the work on two separate plays.

The Pats face their first real opponent of the 2014 season this week, let’s see if they really have turned the corner or if they’re just getting fat on bad opponents like usual.