Chris Holmes Online

Week 3 and already a lot of interesting story lines. Time to dive in…

Owens Tries Suicide

Reading about this story this morning did not surprise me. I knew this was coming. I knew Owens was a troubled individual. He exhibits signs of serious mental problems, and I wrote about that almost a year ago:

Terrell Owens has classic signs of a person in need of help. Mental help. He desperately needs to see a therapist and get to the root of his problems. He needs someone who can guide him and put him on the path to mental health. And unfortunatley, it doesn’t appear that anyone close to him is willing to tell him that.

I’m mostly disappointed in the sports media for not addressing this angle of the story. Even today they aren’t addressing it. I listend to Colin Cowherd’s show on the way to work this morning and he was saying that more than 50% of the people calling or e-mailing the show think T.O’s. suicide attempt was a publicity stunt.

This is not a publicity stunt people. Don’t be morons.

Terrell Owens has serious psychiatric problems. He has a mental health issue and he needs professional help. This was a cry for help. I just hope that he gets it. I hope that the national media quits spinning this as a non-mental-health story and starts addressing it as what it is. Mental illness is real and T.O. needs help.

The Madden Curse Is Alive!

I don’t believe in curses, but if you do then you would be one of the people who was not surprised when it was announced that Shaun Alexander has a broken foot. It’s a small break – a hairline fracture that optimistic persons are saying may only cost the reigning MVP two weeks – but it’s enough of a break to qualify for the Madden Curse.

What will be interesting to watch now is, do future NFL stars begin to take the curse seriously, and will we see anyone decline the cover of Madden 2008 for fear of the curse? My guess is yes, since many atheletes are superstitious. I think it would be really funny if someone like LaDanian Tomlinson comes out next year after being offer the Madden cover and publicly says something like, “Hey, I’m not doing the Madden cover. Sorry, but the curse worries me and I need to be healthy for my team.” Then some hotrod like Chad Johnson will take the cover and subsequently break his leg.

As for Seattle, I don’t think this hurts them terribly. They’ve been getting by without much production from the running game. Morrice Morris will give them some yards, probably enough to keep defenses honest. Seattle just needs to survive this. That’s part of the NFL: surviving injuries. The Steelers did it last season, losing Big Ben for a few games midway through the year, and Seattle survived the losses of Darrell Jackson and Bobby Engram. Both teams eventually got healthy and ended up in the Super Bowl. As long as Alexander’s injury doesn’t linger into a two month ordeal, the ‘Hawks should be able to weather this storm.

Is Carson Palmer’s Return Miraculous, Or Was It hGH?

Here’s something no one is talking about, but after the Floyd Landis scandal at this year’s Tour De France, you’d think they would be. If you will recall, Landis was the American cyclist who made a “miraculous” charge on the second-to-last day of the event, eliminating an 8-minute deficit that he had created the previous day. At the time, people said it was the single greatest comeback anyone had ever witnessed in the cycling world, and maybe in all of sports.

Then the allegations of doping came, with Landis’ “A” sample testing positive for high levels of testosterone. Later, he “B” sample also tested positive, and everyone in the sports world realized that Landis had cheated his way to victory.

Sports reporters looked at the event with their perfect 20/20 hindsight glasses and proclaimed that we all should have known better, that such a miraculous come-from-behind victory had to be tainted in some way.

Yet here we are, only a few months later, lauding the miraculous recover that Carson Palmer has made from a devastating knee injury. Everyone – and I mean everyone – says this sort of injury requires a 16-month recovery and rehabilitation period. Yet all anyone can talk about is how miraculous Palmer’s recover has been at a little over seven months.

Does anyone in their right mind believe that Carson Palmer reduced his recovery time by over 50% without the aid of an undetectable medical agent like Human Growth Hormone? How come no one is asking this question?

I’ll tell you why: because no one wants to even consider the most logical and reasonable answer. That Palmer used hGH to speed his recovery. And in our current climate in regards to steriods, the press would have a field day with it, and that would destroy not only Palmer’s reputation, but the NFL’s as well.

But here’s what I think. First, I do think Palmer used hGH to speed his recovery because it is the only thing that makes logical sense.

Second, I say good for him.

Fans want to see their players on the field playing the games. We especially want to see our superstars on the field, not in training facilities nursing broken and injured body parts. The best athelets playing at the highest level – that’s what we pay to see. That’s what we want to see.

I am not for cheating of any kind, especially steriod use, because it gives atheletes who cheat an unfair advantage over atheletes who choose to play by the rules. Plus, more importantly, there can be health problems.

But an athelete speeding recovery from a devastating injury, under the supervision of a medical professional, I do not consider cheating. Injuries are a part of the NFL, moreso that any other sport in the world, due to the violent nature of the game. It makes absolutely no sense to me not to take advantage of medical science in a prescribed and medically accepted way to speed the recover of these atheletes. Playing the game is their job. If you or I were injured in a way that prevented us from doing our job, our employers would have no problems with whatever medical advice and medicines were deemed necessary to speed our recovery and get us back to work.

The NFL, and all major league sports, need to take a different approach in regards to substances like hGH. They need to blood test for this stuff, to make sure players aren’t using it while healthy and thus cheating during the season, but also to allow them to use these substances at the behest of medical personnel to assist in the recovery from injury.

Get the injured players back on the field. If medical personnel say it’s ok, then it should be. Regulate the usage of this stuff, don’t just ban in outright.

Of course this will never become reality because it makes too much sense.

Eagles Mimic Seahawks Circa 2004

If you live on the East Coast then you may have already forgotten about the meltdown that Seattle endured two years ago at the hands of the St. Louis Rams. In case you can’t recall, early in the 2004 campaign Seattle lead the Rams 27-7 at the half in Seattle at Quest field, and 27-10 late in the 3rd quarter. But the ‘Hawks played too conservatively, the offense failed to generate any first downs, and the Rams rallied behind Marc Bulger to tie the game. Then they won it in overtime, 33-27, when Bulger hit a streaking Shaun McDonald down the middle of the field for the game winning touchdown.

I mention this because Philly fans probably don’t remember the game, but their team duplicated the feat this past Sunday when they blew a 24-7 lead in the 4th quarter that allowed the visiting Giants to steal a victory in a crucial division rivalry. The G-men rallied behind Eli Manning to tie the game late in the 4th quarter, and then Manning hit Plaxico Burress on a streak pattern that was very reminiscent of the Bulger-McDonald connection in Seattle two years ago.

Philly fans probably don’t want to hear this, but that sort of loss haunts a team. It haunted Seattle. They would later face the Rams in the playoffs, again in Seattle, but the homefield advantage did not help the ‘Hawks. Instead, the memories of that meltdown, which plagued them all season, manifested again in that playoff game and the Rams emerged the victors.

There’s a really good chance that the Eagles and Giants will meet in the playoffs, and if Philadelpha can’t get over this loss – a game that they gave away – it will come back to haunt them.

Womack Out 6 Weeks, But It’s A Good Thing

Floyd “Porkchop” Womack went down in the Seattle-Arizona game Sunday, but unlike other serious injuries that occured this weekend, this is actually a good thing. Womack has been horrible so far this season in pass protection, and his run blocking hasn’t been much better, forcing head coach Mike Holmgren to call the majority of the running plays to the right side, away from the normal strength of the Seattle line.

After Womack went down against the Cardinals, he was replaced by Chris Spencer, the first round draft pick (normally a center) from two years ago. Spencer played really well, and the rest of the offensive line picked up their game, giving Hasselbeck time to find some very wide open receivers. If Seattle intends to duplicate their success from a year ago they must have a top-5 offensive line. Womack doesn’t give them that, but Spencer looks like he might be just the ticket.

Did You Buy Miami As A Playoff Team?

So far the Miami Dolphins have looked exactly like I thought they would: bad. And most of it can be blamed on the play of Dante Culpepper, who is showing everyone that he’s (a) not fully recovered from knee surgery and (b) can’t read defenses. But then again, any Minnesota Vikings fan could have told you the latter part. Culpepper looked pathetic last season after Randy Moss was traded away, and he hasn’t looked any better for the Dolphins. If you picked this team to make the playoffs you might want to start lobbying for a quarterback change now, because there’s no way Culpepper is taking this team anywhere but the cellar.

Greg Knapp Deserves Some Credit, But The Falcons Still Can’t Score

No one is talking about this yet, but Greg Knapp deserves some serious credit for the way he’s utilizing Michael Vick this season. I’ve long thought that Vick would never be a good quarterback in the NFL, and I still think that. I think he’s the most overhyped, overblown player since Brian Bosworth. He simply isn’t accurate as a passer, nor is he a good game manager or decision maker. But Vick’s strengths do not lie in those areas. His best asset is his atheleticism, and until now no offensive coordinator at the NFL has had the courage to use Vick the way he needs to be used in order for the team to win.

Vick is a rare athelete, and he brings a completely unique skillset to the quarterback position. Justfiably NFL head coaches and coordinators have been wary to unleash Vick’s atheleticism for fear that he would get hurt (as he did in 2004) and spend the rest of the season in rehab. After all, defenders in the NFL are faster, more talented, and hit a lot harder than they did in college.

But the only way to truly take advantage of Vick’s talent is to build an offense to his strengths.

I heard an interesting tidbit from a Doug Flutie interview this summer. He was being asked why he had so much success in the Candadian Football league. His reply was this: In the CFL he was allowed to call his own plays, so he simply stayed away from plays that didn’t suit his strengths. In other words, he called the plays he knew he was going to succeed with, and then executed them perfectly.

Until now, Atlanta’s head coaches and coordinators have tried to stuff a round peg in a square hole. They’ve tried to get Vick to do things their way, and that hasn’t played to Vick’s strengths. It hasn’t put him in a position to be successful executing the plays he believes in. But Knapp has come out this season and changed the playbook. He’s running plays that are tailored to Vick’s abilities, and that has got Atlanta to a 2-0 start. I watched a good portion of the Falcons-Bucs game Sunday and I didn’t see a whole lot of drop-back passing from Atlanta. They weren’t asking Vick to do the things he’s not good at. The three and five-step drops that they were forcing Vick to make last season were mostly gone. Instead, there was a lot of running, bootlegs, called quarterback runs and play-action passing. The gameplan played to Vick’s strength, and it had the Bucs defenders on their heels all game long.

If Knapp keeps this up, and Vick stays healthy, Atlanta will challenge for the NFC Championship game. And Knapp deserves credit here. He’s the first guy to step up and see what Vick is good at, and go with that. Yeah, Vick’s chance to get hurt goes up dramatically with this style of offense, but this is who he is. At this point in time you have to live or die by his talent. I like the choice Knapp is making.

Have You Seen The NFL Network’s Commercial?

Maybe you’ve seen it: Brian Gumbel and Chris Collinsworth pitching for the NFL Network, about the live games that they will be broadcasting later this season on the NFL Network, starting with the 3rd game on Thanksgiving night. The pitch line to the ad is: A broadcast made by NFL Fans, for NFL fans.

I like Gumbel on HBO’s RealSports, and I like Collinsworth just about everywhere except when he’s teamed with Bob Costas. But if the NFL Network is serious about a broadcast “for NFL fans” then they need to take a hard look at ESPN’s second team of Ron Jaworsky and Dick Vermeil. As I said last week, they were the best broadcast team I’ve seen ever, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Paul Zimmerman and Peter King thought so too.

I know it’s not fair to criticize Gumbel and Collinsworth before they’ve broadcast their first game, but after the Jaworsky/Vermeil telecast I just can’t imagine Gumbel and Collinsworth topping it. That was great insight and analysis.

Final Observations

• Chad Pennington would be a Pro Bowl quarterback if he played on a playoff calibur team.
• The Seahawks’ defense is better than people realize.
• The Baltimore Ravens’ offense is not.
• Michael Turner, the backup runningback in San Diego behind LaDanian Tomlinson (arguably the best runningback in the NFL), could be a Top-10 runningback if he were on a different team.
• The New England Patriots are in real trouble. It’s a good thing it’s a long season, because they’re going to need the next 15 weeks to come together.
• The Denver Broncos are in real trouble, and it’s not all Jake Plummer’s fault.
• Yep, that’s the Washington Redskins team I thought we’d see this season. Inept.
• It’s only the 2nd week of the season, but Mario Williams is already living up to the hype… as a first round bust. The Houston Texans are proving to be a franchise full of bafoons.

Test Driven Development is something that is both old and new to me. It’s old in the sense that I’ve been writing code in a test-first fashion since I was an undergraduate CS major. Although, back then my tests were more like Console.WriteLine, to make sure something I expected to happen would happen. I always started with an expectation of what the code should do and wrote the code to fit the expectation. But those little console outputs always got deleted once I was through with them. They were useless as regression tests and they did nothing to help document the code’s behavior, let alone give me confidence to refactor later on during development.

Today, TDD is a mainstream technique. It has grown up and matured. I’m sure that what I used to do for “test first” development would be laughed at by developers in the TDD sphere today. That’s fine. But what I did then helped shape how I write code, and made it very easy for me to see the logic and usefulness of TDD. I’ve long had the mindset of expectation first, write code to meet it.

Today, TDD is an automated practice. Unit Tests are now real code that gets compiled and run, and those tests hang around for as long a the application does. They’re great regression tools, documentation, and confidence builders for refactoring. They are as important to the development of the code as the code itself.

But if you’re new to this “automated” way of testing, like I am, you may find the whole thing difficult to manage. There are serious questions that arise when you’re building a non-trival application, particularly a data-driven application. How do I test complex classes and objects that have a lot of interaction between each other? What should I mock and how do I mock properly? How do I test private methods, or should I even try? How much abstraction is necessary? Maybe most important: Am I actually testing the code properly? Am I exercising it fully?

For the past year or so I’ve been using, sporadically, NUnit as my testing framework. It’s nice, easy to use, clean code, and I dig the GUI. Seeing green and knowing my tests are passing is fun work. But even with a good test framework, and even using good design principles like Dependency Injection, making use of Interfaces and judicious use of design patterns, one eventually runs into cases where you just have to wonder if this testing business is worth the effort. Classes get complicated – not because they’re big or doing a lot of stuff (if they’re elephants then that’s probably a code smell anyway) but because they’re interacting with so many moving pieces. If you’re like me, you may find yourself sitting at your monitor able to quickly realize how you would code the solution to a particular problem, but unable to figure how you would write the tests for that solution – and write those tests first. This can lead to a lot of head scratching and doubt, wondering about the usefulness of Test Driven Development.

And even if you do manage to forge ahead and code a solution, you can feel overwhelmed at how to properly test it. Then you’re not doing TDD anyway, you’re just trying to keep your head above water and write tests after the fact.

That is the situation I’ve found myself in for quite some time. Until now. The solution to this particular problem, at least for me, has come in the form of a test coverage device called NCover.

NCover lets you know how much of your code is being tested by your unit tests. With the help of a GUI editor called NCoverExplorer, it will show you, line by line, how much of your code is being exercised by your tests. More importantly, however, it may make you rethink how you’re testing, and this can be invaluable for a newbie like me.

When I started trying TDD the hardest part was figuring out how to test complex code, especially data-driven code. It becomes really complicated when you have some class with several private methods that are manipulating a large domain object and utilizing a few injected classes and services to help. It becomes a very complex piece of code, and it can be difficult to break it down mentally into the simplest of terms. What one has to ask is, “What is really happening here, and how can I write code to exercise and test that behavior?”

You can wrack your brain silly trying to figure out if you should expose private methods for testing, or refactor your class into smaller parts, or whatever. There’s a gaggle of blogposts and articles about these sorts of subjects, and it all gets very religious very fast. For a newbie, that can make it all the more confusing, because all we really care about is: “Am I testing this correctly?” Because once we can figure out how to actually test correctly, then we can start to figure out how to test first. And that drives the design. That’s where we want to be.

The trick is learning the difference between just testing lines of code and testing a behavior. With a code coverage tool like NCover, it becomes a lot easier to start thinking in the latter form. I’m finding that the code coverage tool helps me think about things I didn’t think about before. It’s made me qestion if I’m overdesigning something (because I have to write test code to cover the solution, and maybe there’s a simpler way), or if I’m testing the behavior correctly – getting after edge scenarios and making sure misbehavior is as predictable as the desired behavior.

The biggest thing, however, is that I no longer worry so much about private methods. As some TDD gurus have said in other blogs, private methods can be tested through public interfaces. That sounds logical, but in practice it can be a bit more difficult to accomplish. Until you have code coverage, that is. When you can actually see the lines of code in the private methods being exercised, yet realize that your public methods are what you’re really testing and it is their behavior that you’re really interested in, then the process finally seems to work in a realistic fashion.

I don’t worry about private methods now – I just make sure that the code in them is being exercised completely through the public interfaces. Or more precisely – through the behavior that I am expecting the object to exhibit. Writing test cases through the public methods to exercise private methods makes me think about the behavior of the class as a whole, and what I’m really trying to accomplish. And that has made writing tests a lot easier.

And a lot more fun.

When I finished college I thought I had pretty much taken my last test. And thank goodness, because after several years of school I was really tired and burned out on the whole acedemic lifecycle: attend lecture, do homework, study, test, rinse & repeat. Doing my work in the real world – coding, testing, and designing software systems – is much more intellectually challenging, dynamic and interesting. It’s just flat out more fun. I learn more every day doing this line of work than I ever did in a semester of school (not to say school wasn’t valuable – it was – but at times I felt like we spent way too much time on things that weren’t really important).

But two Sundays ago I found myself in a classroom on the 3rd floor of an engineering building at Gonzaga University. And for the first time in my life I was actually excited to take a test; I was actually looking forward to it.

The test was the Mensa admission test.

The start of this journey dates back, oddly enough, to Donald Trump’s television show, The Apprentice. Tarek Saab was one of the contestants, and when he introduced himself to Trump and the other contestants he added, “I’m also a member of Mensa.” That got me interested. I’d heard of Mensa, but only vaguely knew what it was. So I checked it out online, and it turns out it’s a society – a club if you will – for folks whose IQ’s fall into the top 2%. I thought that was interesting, because I value intelligence a lot. Like honor and trust, it’s something I think is pretty important.

A few months later I stumbled across an online IQ test and scored pretty well. But I knew a lot of online tests are bogus and report inflated results. Their goal is to get you to spend money on some other bogus test, or to earn ad revenue through clicks. So I didn’t consider it an accurate borometer – but it did prod me to take further action. The next step was to order the Mensa Home test. The results were encouraging, so I opted to try for the real thing.

Yesterday the results were in, and I made the cut.

I post this mostly for friends and family, who had no idea I was doing this. Mostly, this is just my thanks to my mom and dad, who always encouraged me to think. Some parents encourage their kids to be superstar atheletes. Others encourage a particular profession, like doctor or lawyer. My parents encouraged me to think creatively in general, and to focus on the things that interested me.

Some people, like Tarek Saab, are wunderkinds; smart from birth. Tarek, it says in the Wiki, was testing at the collegiate level at grade seven. That wasn’t me. I did O.K. in school, but I was no valedictorian. Scholorships did not reign down on me upon graduation, and even college was tough (although I did choose Computer Science, which is not exactly basket weaving).

Apparently, like a wine or ale, my intelligence required aging. And that aging process happened because my parents encouraged me to think, to use my brain to figure things out, and to be curious about subjects I found interesting. They made it ok to be smart.

And I think that’s pretty cool.

Peter King has his Monday Morning Quarterback. It’s usually full of great information, but tainted with King’s East Coast Bias which makes it hard to stomache, especially when you’re a Seahawks fan. So, to counterbalance the East Coast Bias, bring harmony to the universe, and to give myself an excuse to write about football (as if I needed one), I present to you the Armchair Quarterback, a weekly rundown of all things NFL – from the fan’s perspective with a West Coast Bias. Call it the Peter King 180. Besides, the talking heads on TV and the sports columnists of America always chase down the same stories. You might get a different angle here.

Deion Branch

First thing’s first: the Deion Branch trade. I think it’s great for the ‘Hawks, because it gives them a proven playmaker at wide reciever. Not that they aren’t already loaded at that position, but as we saw last year, injuries can deplete that unit rather quickly. I like the trade because if the Seahawks are as good as a lot of people think that draft pick will be around pick #30 next year, which is a lot closer to round #2 than round #1. I’d rather have Deion Branch on my roster – a young, proven receiver witha Superbowl MVP award and three rings to his name – than a late first round draft choice that may take two years before he can make a contribution.

But what Seattle really needed was offensive line help. If you watched the game yesterday you saw a unit that got beat consistently, play after play. I know people are going to try and pin that performance on Floyd Womack, Steve Hutchinson’s replacement at LG, but if you watched the line closely what you saw was OC Robby Tobeck and RG Chris Gray getting beat up the middle by Shaun Rogers. Those are the two elder statesmen of the offensive line and they looked every bit the 36 years of age that they are. It may be time for Chris Spencer to helm that line sooner rather than later. The simple fact was the ‘Hawks offensive line got out-muscled by stronger, more physical players, and their age showed.

Bob Costas Stinks When It Comes To The NFL

You won’t read this from anyone on ESPN.com or SI.com. They love Bob too much to tell him he sucks. I like Bob Costas too. As a centerpiece for the Olympics and as a guy who holds a great appreciation for baseball, Bob is great. Bob approaches those two events with a certain amount of professionalism and respect, and it comes across when he does broadcasts for those sports. He does not do that with football, however, and it stinks.

Costas treats the NFL, and his job as host – either on HBO’s Inside the NFL and now on NBC’s Football Night in America – as a joke. He pokes fun at the awards that both networks manufacture for the NFL players (which begs the question – why have them in the first place?), makes nonstop goofy banter with his co-hosts and doesn’t take the recap segment seriously. When it comes to the NFL, Costas treats every moment like a chance to earn fame as a stand-up comedian. His clear irreverence for the game oozes with every word he utters.

It’s disgusting. As an NFL fan, it drives me nuts. This is my sport. This is the one sport I care about. As a fan, I deserve a network’s best man. Guys who care about the game and their delivery of the news. I deserve a Chris Berman and Tom Jackson. Instead, I get Bob Costas, who seems like he’d rather be anywhere else on Sunday night besides an NBC set talking about football.

I hope NBC considers changing the lineup next year. I know it’s just a pre-game show to them, but to us fans it’s one of the best hours of football coverage in the week. The hour following the afternoon games has always been ESPN’s territory. NBC took that away from us, at least they could give us a guy who cares about the sport. Costas doesn’t care about the NFL, and that lack of enthusiasm is an insult to the fans.

Ron Jaworsky And Dick Vermeil Are Fantastic

If you watched the Raiders-Chargers matchup last night you saw a terrible football team in Oakland and a lopsided 27-0 win for the ‘Bolts. But in the midst of that one-sided game you may have noticed the best trio of announcers the NFL has had in the past decade. Brad Nessler, Ron Jaworski and coach Dick Vermeil called the game, and they were the best announcing team I’ve heard – ever.

Jaworsky and Vermiel bring a depth of knowledge to the game that most other announcing teams do not. But it wasn’t just their insight (on nearly every play) that made the broadcast so enjoyable, they also avoided all of the wild exaggerations and over-the-top statements that plague other broadcasts (you Theismann haters know what I’m talking about). For some odd reason most commentators have taken to making absurd proclamations whenever a player makes a good play. They start comparing those players to all-time greats, or worse: they start ordaining them as “the best” at their position – when most fans can immediately name 10 other players who are better. The absurdity of these sorts of announcers sucks all of the credibitliy right out of the booth and degrades the broadcast. I know some fans who actually turn off the TV volume while watching their favorite local team and turn up their radios instead, because usually the local radio guys are a lot better.

Jaworsky and Vermeil belong in the Monday Night booth.

The Cowboys Cannot Win The Superbowl With Drew Bledsoe

I see someone named Arash Markazi just posted a similiar article on SI.com. I haven’t read it yet, but I watched the Dallas-Jacksonville game yesterday. A lot of folks picked the ‘Boys to reach (and win) the Superbowl. I was not among them. I do think they’re a playoff team, mainly because I was sold on their defense (which didn’t look all that great Sunday). But offensively this team is… offensive. After the first drive, where the ‘Boys marched down the field with authority and scored a touchdown immediately, I was actually concerned. “These guys could take my ‘Hawks” I thought. But then Drew Bledsoe’s clock struck midnight and he reverted back to his normal, interception-prone self. They gave that game away and Bledsoe is a big reason why.

If Dallas wants to be a legitimate Super Bowl contender they have to get better play from the quarterback position.

The AFC North Is The Toughest Division In Football

Experts like to keep pointing to the NFC East as the toughest division in the NFL, but they’re not paying attention. If you saw the Baltimore Ravens, Pittsburgh Steelers and Cincinnatti Bengals this weekend, then you saw a stacked division. Forget that the Browns are the weak link for a minute; neither the Washington Redskins or the Dallas Cowboys looked very impressive and the Giants lost their opener as well. Collectively the NFC East went 1-3 while the AFC North went 3-1; and the North didn’t play patsies either. Baltimore shutout a Tampa Bay team many picked to make the playoffs, the Steelers beat a Miami team that Sports Illustrated picked to win the Superbowl, and Cincinnatti went on the road to Kansas City – one of the toughest places to play on the road – and emerged victorious.

I picked those three teams from the AFC North to make the playoffs. I know it’s only week 1, but I like what I saw.

Tough Outs

Pundits like paint things in black and white. Fewer colors, less thinking required. But watchout for these supposedly bad teams: Detroit, St. Louis, New York Jets, San Fransico. They’re going to be tough outs for every team they face. Don’t be surprised when these clubs knockout a few contenders along the way. All four teams covered the spread this weekend, and two of them won outright.