Chill Sports

When analysts are asked to talk about the qualities that make Jimmy Garoppolo a good starting quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, they often resort to the same subset of talking points: accuracy , leadership , poise under pressure , and intelligence . This is, however, in spite of the fact that Garoppolo as a quarterback does not actually possess many of these qualities. He’s frustratingly jumpy in the pocket with spotty footwork, has trouble deciphering blitzes and making smart decisions when they do arrive, and is accurate only when the system around him simplifies the game down for him to near-rookie levels. His abilities as a leader of men has, for the most part, never been in question, but in truth he has quietly shown a consistent pattern of an unwillingness to take accountability in losses -- including after his disastrous performance in a Sunday Night Football loss to an equally disastrous Broncos team -- and reportedly has a habit of “ van...

It’s that time of year again. You’re starting to see those end-of-summer rains, you feel cautiously optimistic about your fantasy football team that will end up missing the playoffs, and folding tables in the city of Buffalo are already beginning to scream for mercy . The NFL is finally back after almost seven full months, and ‘tis the season for awful, irresponsible, almost certainly doomed predictions. Football is a notoriously volatile sport, and while every individual game is ripe for in-depth analysis of tactical chess matches, trying to predict the league’s results well in advance is a fool’s errand. Only those who are grossly overconfident in their limited knowledge of the sport and who have absolutely no shame whatsoever will do something like try to prophesize exactly who will win each division this season. So without further ado, here are my predictions about who will win each division this season. AFC East: Buffalo Bills The Bills went into the offseason with...

Imagine a cold, snowy Sunday in late January. The wind is whipping around so wildly it makes the ginormous yellow goalposts look like they could fall down at any moment. The cold cuts all the way to the bone and you can barely move your fingers, much less grip a football. The snow is dumping so hard that you can hardly even see what's in front of you. In these conditions, it seems like a tall order to fire a cannonball in a straight line-- how could you possibly hope to throw an oddly-shaped ball of leather with any sort of consistency? “Football weather”, as it’s so lovingly called, is really anything but. Cold nights like these, typical of the winter seasons in the cities of perennial contenders such as the New England Patriots and Green Bay Packers, turn the game we know into an unrecognizable and sometimes nonsensical affair.  And yet, games like these have the power to decide who advances to the Super Bowl, and who has a long plane ride home to think about how their months of...