Take it from someone who spent more than three decades covering sports, the NFL vintage 2021 is a team full of flawed teams.
Even the teams with the best records are suspect. Consider the Green Bay Packers, runaway leaders of the NFC North Division and possessors of the league’s best record at 12-3.
Playing at home Saturday, the Packers held on to win by a thin two-point margin. This was despite Cleveland quarterback Baker Mayfield throwing FOUR interceptions, Cleveland missing one PAT and later sacrificing further PAT attempts by going for two-point conversions, and the Browns generally showing their ability to mess up a one-car funeral.
If Cleveland (7-8) had played with any sort of acceptable execution, the Browns would have beaten the league’s supposed top team at historic Lambeau.
Cleveland also was playing with a short preparation week, having had its previous game moved to Monday due to COVID 19 hysteria.
Just a week earlier, the largely pathetic Detroit Lions had laid one on the fading Arizona Cardinals. The Arizona collapse continued yesterday with an uninspired performance against Indianapolis. This is a Cardinals team that has lost its division lead to the similarly uneven Los Angeles Rams.
Look around the rest of the NFL and you see similar tales. The Dallas Cowboys can’t score with any kind of consistency.
The entire AFC North standings are compacted by mass mediocrity. Baltimore can’t keep a quarterback healthy and has had other injuries decimate its lineup.
The Steelers have problems on both sides of the football, where once it was only the offense that was laughable.
Cincinnati has lost two of its past three games to “ascend” into a share of the division lead with Baltimore.
Defending Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay still leads its division, but is stumbling mightily, having been blanked in its last outing.
New England, another long-running success story, holds a division lead despite obvious shortcomings offensively.
Tennessee soldiers on with its division lead despite not having its best offensive player, among other shortcomings.
A common theme to this NFL season has been key injuries, augmented by routine COVID absences.
Currently it seems the Omicron variant, which various reports indicate shares symptoms and overall danger with the common cold, is putting players on the sidelines until they can test free of the virus.
Once this sort of overkill would have been mocked. One of the highlights in the lore of the Pittsburgh Steelers is how defensive end Dwight White crawled out a New Orleans hospital bed to play and star in the Steelers’ Super Bowl IX victory.
White, who had spent the week leading up to the game hospitalized with pneumonia, lost 20 pounds, but still played.
He sacked Minnesota quarterback Fran Tarkenton in the end zone for a safety to account for the only first-half points scored in the game.
In the NFL of this era, White would have been sidelined because pneumonia can be a contagious ailment.
History fails to record any outbreak of pneumonia due to White’s presence in that Super Bowl.
Sam Ross Jr's site 