Joist's Pick: A Generally Well-Respected Columnist Named "Peter" Will Write Something That Will Piss Him Off

Football prognosticating is, generally speaking, a pretty foolish endeavor. TMQ, over on ESPN, has run all kinds of data showing that the most accurate football game forecasts involve generic predictions, such as Better Team Wins or Home Team Wins, which obviously don't even require one to know what teams are playing. And even these systems will only produce a winner around 60% of the time or so.

Peter King, however, ignores the innate futility of accurate football prognosticating. Not only does he pick games, he picks exact final scores of games, and he'll even occasionally predict something dopey and specific to happen in the game, like, "Willie Parker rushes for 124 yards and 2 TDs as the Steelers run all over the Bengals." (By the way, apropos exact final scores of games, TMQ used to have a hilarious running item about "the august New York Times' quixotic attempt to pick an exact final score" - scroll down here almost to the end of the column for an example - and give a running tally of its successes.)

What's also especially amusing about King's picks is that Sports Illustrated decided to run some sort of contest pitting readers against King's weekly picks, and if you beat him in a given week you get entered in a drawing to win a truck or something. At that point, why not just have a "taking candy from a baby" contest?

Ok, enough chitchat. On to this week's Peter King Challenge! (Note: link will only be relevant to this post for the next few days, and I can't figure out how to access the archives. Basically, if you're reading this after Sunday, you'll just have to trust me that he actually said these things.)

I say Bill Belichick gets Tom Brady his two touchdown passes to set the NFL record and plays hard for 16-0. Remember the one thing I've been harping on all season when it comes to the Patriots and how they approach these games. It's something you heard the NFL Films mikes capture on HBO's Inside the NFL show in November, when Belichick, late in the Pats' win at Indianapolis, exhorted his defense by saying over and over, "Sixty minutes! Sixty minutes!" That's why I think Brady will be playing well into the second half.

Patriots 29, Giants 13

Peter King is some kind of savant. After fifteen weeks of watching the Patriots running up the score on everybody, he has determined that the Patriots play hard all 60 minutes. In case we have forgotten, though, he's "been harping on [it] all season." By the way, I inferred the thing that King has been harping on, because he doesn't actually explicitly mention it, just a bunch of vague pronouns and an NFL Films quote. Also, how cute is it that he predicted the Pats to score 29 points? How is that even possible? Does he think they'll go for 2 after a TD for no reason? Or will it be three TDs, three field goals, and a safety? Does he just pick a number from 10 to 40 out of his ass? I'm loaded with questions here.

Talk about a waste of of jet fuel, with an awful infusion of greenhouse gases in the environment. I mean, wouldn't the crowd at the Georgia Dome prefer to see a nice scrimmage between the Falcons and the Sugar Bowl-bound Georgia Bulldogs?

Seahawks 17, Falcons 13

Up until two years ago, when King started doing the NBC show that he yammers about incessantly, SI flew him out to a different game every week so that he could "cover" it for his MMQB column. Now he sits on his fat ass in New Jersey to write his column, and it's exactly the same. Conclusion? He is a giant waste of jet fuel. He is also an arrogant son of a bitch.

The Saints win a wintry game in Chicago 11 months too late, then get eliminated from the playoffs while their charter is somewhere over Missouri on the way home. Through no fault of Drew Brees, by the way.

Saints 33, Bears 16

This is what I mean by specific, dopey predictions. The charter will be "over Missouri"? Do people really like reading this arbitrary shit?

Let me go on record as saying the Bengals going 6-10 does not surprise me, and I never bought into the Bengals before the season. Cincinnati is paying for having a bottom-10 defense in four of Marvin Lewis' five seasons.

Dolphins 20, Bengals 17

What he means: "Ha ha! I got a prediction right! I predicted the Bengals' downfall, after they went 8-8 with more arrests than wins last year! I am a genius! Hahahaha!"

Did you know that any of eight teams could be tied for the 13th pick in the NFL draft by the end of play Sunday, and these are two of them?

Eagles 30, Bills 17

After poring this little tidbit over for entirely too long, I think what King means to say is that it's possible that as many as eight teams will finish 7-9 (or possibly 8-8), which would qualify them for the 13th pick in the draft. The reason this statement is particularly stupid, in addition to the incredibly vague wording, is that "two of them" (i.e. the Eagles and the Bills) will not finish with identical records, since they have the same record now and they're playing each other. They could tie, yes, but then they would each be 7-8-1, which would not tie them with six other teams. It's also stupid because, needless to say, you can't "tie" for a specific pick in the draft - the NFL uses tie-breaking formulas to determine which teams pick ahead of others with identical records. Basically, in trying to present a meaningless and uninteresting fact (is it even remotely surprising that a whole lot of mediocre teams in a mediocre league would finish with equally mediocre records?), King has managed to confused the hell out of his readers. Well played, sir.

In what is believed to be a sportsbook record, not a single wager is placed on this game by any man, woman or gecko in the state of Nevada.

Buccaneers 13, Panthers 12

This is funny not because of King's line about geckos not wagering on this game in Nevada, but because this is yet another retarded final score prediction. 13-12? How many 13-12 games have there been in NFL history? (Hint: not many.)

Finishing .500 is a lot more important to Houston than entering the playoffs with some phony momentum is for the Jags.

Texans 20, Jaguars 9

This sentence is an absolute contradiction. The only way finishing .500 would help the Texans is if it gave them some sort of psychological lift for next year. (I refuse to use the word "momentum".) If you really buy into this whole psychological edge thing, which team is more likely to benefit from a win in this game: a team playing its next game in seven days, or a team playing its next game in seven months?

If I'm a Broncos fan, I like the fact that Jay Cutler's jawing with Philip Rivers. Shows me the guy's got a little chippiness to him. Reminds me of the time Phil Simms and former teammate Jim Burt jawed at each other when Burt defected to the Niners in the late 1980s. I want that feistiness and fervor in my quarterback. Oh, the game? The Vikes' balloon got deflated for me when they looked the Toledo Mud Hens last Sunday

Broncos 27, Vikings 24

If you've read this blog before, you know why the last sentence in this paragraph is a classic example of how fickle football commentators. In my previous Peter King post, I quoted King thusly:

j. I'm no ratings maven, but I'll bet a dime that a Dallas-New England or Green Bay-New England Super Bowl would draw the biggest audience in American television history.

k. Why do I think the Vikings might have something to say about that?

On which I commented that King's an idiot (actually, I used the word "fool") for thinking that the Vikings are suddenly amazing just because they beat a few bad teams in a row. Now, less than three weeks later, King jumps off the bandwagon even more quickly than he got on. By the way, he gets paid an exorbitant sum of money to "analyze" football, while I've yet to receive a dime for my football analysis.

I say Rams coach Scott Linehan stays, in part because the ailing owner who hired him, Georgia Frontiere still loves him, and in part because team president John Shaw can't find anyone he likes more. It's a decision I support. Simple reason: The more you change coaches without a better alternative in mind, the more your team stays in turmoil.

Cardinals 33, Rams 27

More King arrogance. He supports their decision not to fire a coach who's been there one year. People in the Rams' front office just breathed a sigh of relief. Thank God we have Peter King's support!

The Steelers still have a prayer to win the third seed, so they've got to play this game hard. Re: Baltimore: If you could have predicted a nine-win decline in 2007, you're a better prognosticator than I. (I'm sure you are anyway.) By the way, a big Ravens fan friend of mine asked the other day, "Sometimes, when Brian Billick has that quizzical look of his on the sidelines, doesn't he remind you of Dwight Schrute?''

Steelers 23, Ravens 10

Don't let his sudden self-deprecating statement fool you. He's still arrogant; he's just reeling you in. In fact, I'll just take what he says at face value: Yes, I am a better prognosticator than he is.

So Tony Dungy figures he owes the Browns nothing, which is his right -- a right I support wholeheartedly. But he thinks: two years ago, we sat Peyton Manning all but one quarter in Game 15 against Seattle, and for all but one series in Game 16 against Arizona, and the Colts went out in their first playoff game and stunk it up against the Steelers at home and lost.

Colts 23, Titans 20

It took two paragraphs for the arrogance to come shooting back. Peter King "wholeheartedly" supports Tony Dungy's right to owe the Browns nothing. This statement is nonsense, Peter. Also, nobody cares what you think. They just want to outpick you and win the truck.

I should point out, in all fairness, that I actually agree with him. People have bitched that the Colts owe it to the integrity of the game to play their hardest to beat Tennessee, since the game has a direct effect on whether the Titans or Browns end up as the number 6 seed in the AFC. It's an indefensible position, but it's been claimed before. I remember two years ago, the White Sox had wrapped up their division heading into the final weekend, and the Yankees, Red Sox, and Indians were all fighting for two playoff spots. Ozzie Guillen announced he'd be resting a slew of starters for Chicago's weekend series against the Indians, and Yankees and Red Sox fans alike were skewering Guillen and the Sox for ruining the integrity of baseball by not playing their hardest. Guillen, of course, shot back with a response like, "If your team had just played better you wouldn't need our help," or some such thing. Of course, it ended up being very much irrelevant, as the White Sox's scrubs swept the Indians out of the playoff hunt. Sorry, Foist.

What was I talking about again? Oh, yeah. Peter King is retarded and annoying, and he started that last paragraph with the word "so". What a douche. The end.