We Should All Watch the Game on Sunday

Okay, it is getting cray-cray around here. My esteemed cohort is predicting blowouts and people I don’t even know are vociferously defending this guy’s hairdo.

Look, I get it, everybody loves Eric Weddle. I’m in. I’m with you guys. He’s been real good. He made the Pro Bowl. He’s an undersized white guy and that is national media bait. And somehow that is not at all racist! Shit is off the hook. On Inside the NFL, they mic'd up Weddle and spent the whole Chargers-Bengals segment pretending we are a defensive team and it was actually pretty convincing. We are Cinderella. We are wildcard darlings. This is playoff football. And not Norv Turner Playoff football, but pre-Turner “This Could be Real” Playoff football.

Nick Canepa is seething, Kevin Acee is begging and the real sports jerks are actually talking about us. Of course, no one out there on the national landscape really believes we have a chance. Sure, they’ll pay lip service to our “nothing to lose” status and whacky Superbowl trends like the Philadelphia Prophecy, but in actuality, no one is putting their money where their mouths are. And why is that? Because, as I said a million times before so it must be true, people who get paid to talk about sports have no cajones. There’s no skin in picking the Chargers. If you pick us, and we lose, you look stupid. If you pick Denver, and they lose, well who could have seen that coming? They like who they like and it almost always coincides with the public sentiment as it’s reflected by Vegas. Allow me to illustrate. Most people are picking the beloved Seahawks to clobber the Saints this weekend. As evidence of this, they recall the regular season loss to the Seahawks that the Saints suffered already. Conversely, the same people treat San Diego’s regular season win in Denver as a complete anomaly.

The truth is, no one knows who’s going to win. But if I were to pick us, here’s why. Peyton Manning cannot put the game in any other person’s hands. Never has been able to. We will get after him and we will rattle him and he will continue to go out of his way to prove that it’s him and his stat sheet and his lousy playoff record against the world. If they want to counter our ball control, time of possession offense they would need to apply a healthy dose of Knowshon Moreno and Montee Ball.  Peyton just can’t help himself, though. He’ll throw the ball inside the five and he’ll try to convert everything through the air. That’s the Peyton way, and that’s why he usually falls short in the post.

If I were to pick the Broncos, here’s why. Ryan Mathews will not be 100%. Mathews has become the bread and butter over the last 5 weeks. Moving the chains and making plays. When he went out against the Bengals it severely hampered our ability to convert the short downs. We need to be able to grind clock. We need to score TDs in the red zone. Mathews is an essential part of this. Can we beat Manning in a shootout? Maybe. But we’ve been better when we can keep it in the trenches as well.

Given those two options, I like us Sunday (of course I do). Peyton’s ego is a certainty, but Mathews is expected to play. Look for him to finally earn that second “T” for his last name.

As for Weddle’s grooming situation, maybe my problem is that he appears to have modeled his look after this guy.

One of the worst characters in one of the worst movies ever that I cannot stop watching. Seriously, if they had a channel that just played Prometheus and Point Break back to back 24/7 I’d quit my job and in a year they’d have to remove the wall to my house and surgically remove me from my couch before taking me to the hospital in a forklift. But hey, Weddle can do whatever the hell he wants if he helps us get a championship here in San Diego.

Go Weddle! Go Bolts!!!