Today’s Early NFL Games Make Compelling Arguments for Going Outside, Baseball

As American sports fans, we all love and cherish the seventeen NFL Sundays like seventeen different birthdays, full of magic and violence and JaMarcus Russell playing his brand of football. But, early this afternoon, the games may be more like childbirth for mothers.The slate is stocked with awful teams: Five of the six winless teams are in action early, and it takes two unbeaten teams (the Giants and Vikings) and a tussle for the AFC North lead between the Bengals and Ravens to get the combined record of teams playing in those early games to 25-34. USA Today’s lines have no early game closer than 3.5 points, and cast six of the eight tilts as games with a team favored by more than a touchdown.

To make matters worse, that Ravens-Bengals game, the one with two above .500 teams and a compelling human storyline after the tragic death this Thursday of Bengals defensive coordinator Mike Zimmer’s wife, is sparingly distributed, according to The 506’s coverage maps, and most of the country will suffer through Raiders at Giants or Steelers at Lions. If watching a Russell-Eli Manning or Roethlisberger-Culpepper duel isn’t your speed, you might try enjoying some crisp autumn weather.

If you want to spare yourself the pain of poorly played football, it’s either that or baseball. And who watches baseball anymore? (Wait, plenty of people do? What is this, 1998?)

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