The final week of the NFL season is upon us. Do you know what that means? Next week marks the blissful return of … wait for it … Saturday afternoon NFL games! In the playoffs, no less! Probably not featuring your favorite team. Oh. But hey, we do have some great news: Marvin Harrison fantasy football owners, perk up because the WR might play this week after missing 10 games. What’s that? Your league title game was last weekend and he already ruined your season? Oh. Well, here are a couple of other things to keep you occupied before we get to the picks.

*Fans not turned off by the Mitchell Report, reads the headline over at the FanHaus. On the contrary, we are turned ON by it. We tell the RandBall Better Half that we only read it for the circumstantial evidence, but she doesn’t believe us. Apparently ticket sales are up across the board in MLB, which leads the FH to the conclusion that fans don’t really care about steroids and, secondly, that fans believe their teams have a legitimate shot of winning under baseball’s current economic model (parity has leveled the playing field). While that first point is perhaps (and sadly) true, we could not agree less with the second premise. On the contrary, while the number of “haves” might be increasing by a little, the gap between haves and have-nots is widening. (Wow, baseball sounds a lot like the U.S. economy under conservative leadership). The have-nots know they might be able to compete in certain years if all their prospects produce before they’re scheduled to get paid, but the 4 year, $48 million deals for the Carlos Silvas of the world make it clear that teams with low-to-midrange payrolls cannot compete on a consistent basis.

*We are pleased to note we have made our way onto an e-mail list of a man named Joe V., who is leading a crusade to get Isiah Thomas fired (he also sent it to David Stern, which makes us quite certain that aside from the Chuck E. Cheese updates we get electronically, this is our only shared e-mail list with the NBA commish). There will be a protest outside Madison Square Garden at 11 a.m. Sunday, and he is encouraging fans at the game to leave at the end of the third quarter in a show of solidarity. We have inquired with Joe V. about the possibility of a Q&A, whereupon we would ask if he has a similarly passionate brother or friend living in the Twin Cities area.
*Stu sent us a link about Erin Andrews and hair products that we’re going to have to hang on to for a separate post. Now: The picks!

New England at New York Giants
Buffalo at Philadelphia
Carolina at Tampa Bay
Cincinnati at Miami
Dallas at Washington
Detroit at Green Bay
Jacksonville at Houston
New Orleans at Chicago
Pittsburgh at Baltimore
Seattle at Atlanta
San Francisco at Cleveland
Tennessee at Indianapolis
Minnesota at Denver
San Diego at Oakland
St. Louis at Arizona
Kansas City at New York Jets

Fasola-link! A day in the life of (insert any RandBall commenter name here).

This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 9:02 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.