The Sunday Evening Post: Week 5

Today was a day of strong stances and missed chances.

The undefeated upper echelon maintained their place in the penthouse with beatdowns. The Giants crushed the Raiders with a 483-to-124 domination in total yards, the Vikings kept the Rams winless with ease, and the Broncos held the Patriots scoreless in the second half and drove down the field in overtime to maintain their unblemished mark.

The Bengals, Eagles, and Falcons kept knocking on that penthouse door, too. Cardiac Cincy came back on Baltimore thanks to Andre Caldwell’s second game-winning touchdown in three weeks, Philly kept beating up on bad teams by spanking the Bucs, and Atlanta smacked San Fran back to a less positive place with a 45-10 road win.

Their seizures of the day were also missed opportunities for the Ravens and 49ers to establish themselves as top-line contenders in their conferences. And now, those two teams will be in divisional races, with Sunday winners Cincinnati, Seattle, Arizona, and Pittsburgh. (Cincy’s the only team in the league with wins over all its divisional foes.)The missed chances for the Texas teams had to do with righting the ship: Dallas was unimpressive against Kansas City, and Houston lost to Arizona. For the Redskins and Bills, who gave the Panthers and Browns their first wins, respectively, even their faintest hopes of a playoff berth are probably gone.

The elite teams are definitely the elite: The Giants, bruising and increasingly deadly through the air; the Vikings, menacing on defense and balanced on offense; the Saints, always a big-play threat; the Colts, helmed by the magisterial Peyton Manning; the Broncos, capable of winning close and late and in Patriotic ways under Josh McDaniels. They’ve all made multiple statements.

The teams in the upper middle have signature wins to their credit and more flaws to find: The Ravens outgunned the Chargers but could not clamp down on the Patriots or Bengals when necessary; the Bengals have yet to win a game by more than a touchdown, but they’ve won four of them; the Jets were impressive until the Saints baptized Mark Sanchez; the 49ers have been defensively stout except in losses to the Vikings and Falcons; the Falcons have been excellent except against the Patriots; the Patriots have been good despite Tom Brady looking more like Brady Quinn; the Bears had one awful game followed by three good ones.

Squarely in the middle, you find Green Bay, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Arizona, Seattle, and Dallas, fatally flawed teams that have either failed to find a stride or simply don’t have them, despite copious talent. Behind them are the moribund dregs of the league, Kansas City and Buffalo and Cleveland and Tennessee, teams that cannot find ways to win and must rely on others to find ways to lose.

And with these showings, strong and disappointing, piling up, the separation of the wheat and the chaff will only become clearer.

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