Week Eleven in Review

1.  A Jets/Patriots game is best watched with the sound off.

The Tin Can is the only place you can intertwine cans of Schlitz and Guiness in a single sitting

Normally, I wouldn’t have given two flying you-know-whats about the primetime Thursday night game.  You see, I, like a majority of the blue-collar population in this country, don’t see the need to put a dish on my roof for the sake of watching a weekly game on a channel I really don’t need.

The snow and scrambled adult features on my spliced cable is just fine.

So it only made sense that when I stumbled into St. Louis’ Tin Can Tavern, I was greeted simultaneously by an abnormally large bouncer that reminded me of Pats DT Vince Wilfork and a plethora of flat-panel television sets fixated on the NFL Network. 

Not particularly worried about the outcome until Randy Moss caught the game-tying touchdown with a second left, I quickly became vested in what was taking place in overtime.  What followed was a terrific ending to an engaging football game, casual conversation with a close friend of mine, and Pink Floyd karaoke sung by a young woman whose canary voice was outdone only by her liberal dress code—all without the nagging, annoyingly pretentious play-by-play of Bob Papa and the Network’s redundant postgame coverage.

Of course, the $1.75 cans of Milwaukee’s Best Ice didn’t hurt. [Photo Credit]

2.  Vegas oddsmakers will take Week 12 off.

Try as they may, the fact remains:  Bookies can’t account for unlikely scenarios that tend to happen once every six years—or never.

With the hermetic seal having been broken off the Jack Daniels bottle shortly after the Eagles tied their way to humiliation in Cincinnati, the gambling types barely had time to wash down their Xanax before a historical display of boredom got underway in Pittsburgh.

The exercise in paint drying was nearly complete when the game began to open up on its final play.  With the “under” safely intact, the 4.5-point spread that favored the Steelers seemed well in jeopardy; that is until safety Troy Palamalu scooped an attempted San Diego lateral and scored with double zeroes on the clock, making a lot of prognosticators very happy.

But, alas, the NFL record books would interject.

After a lengthy review, officials ruled that Palamalu had advanced an illegal forward pass.  The score was taken off the board, the league’s first-ever 11-10 game was complete and bodies were immediately spotted leaping off the top floor of the Bellagio.

3.  ESPN’s Chris Berman has a reason to annoy us with another disgusting pet name.

In his spare time, Giants tailback Derrick "Fire" Ward smokes fools on the rhythm guitar

And you have the Giants’ dominant running game to thank.

In dissecting Baltimore’s top-ranked run defense for a 200-yard day on the ground, New York featured a three-back rotation that Berman subsequently designated as a band that helped lead the frontier of American funk music in the 1970s.

Say hello to Earth, Wind and Fire.  Or Brandon Jacobs, Ahmad Bradshaw and Derrick Ward.

It really doesn’t matter who’s who. 

But that’s not to say we’re not curious as to why Berman decidedly picked on Ward.  It’s pretty cut-and-dried when it comes to labeling the monstrous Jacobs and the speedy Bradshaw Earth and Wind, respectively.

So what reasoning goes into saving the “Fire” tag for the 5’11”, 228 lb. Ward? 

[Photo Credit]