Things I made while offline: Jenny McCarthy

Because this blog will be dominated by football-related content for the next five months, your author has decided to make an effort to regularly post pictures his lovely and talented sister took of some of his artwork. These posts will include a brief thought or two about when the piece was made. 

This week: An ink & color pencil drawing of 1994 Playboy Playmate of the Year
Jenny McCarthy 

Week 14 Picks: Fun in the snow?

After a day of rain here in the Chicago suburbs, it's currently snowing as I type this. The weather this weekend has already been hyped up as being a factor in a number of games, so if you're like me and enjoy seeing football played in this kind of inclement conditions, tomorrow could be a real treat.

I would suppose that some crazy amounts of snow, slush and sleet might lead to some equally crazy bounces, fumbles and assorted other wackiness that might result in a few upsets, but here in Week 14 with only a few weeks to go in the respective confidence pools, where would I dare venture a guess as to which team would benefit?

It seems like a good weekend to sit back and enjoy the action for what it is, keeping my fingers crossed that the way I'm submitting my order of picks in happens to be the safest.

And perhaps if things don't go my way, I can whitewash a Vikings fan or something.

Thursday Night Pick: Could be ugly

Peyton Manning is in the midst of a highly uncharacteristic stretch that has seen him throw more interceptions in three weeks than rookie Sam Bradford has thrown all season. It's so bad that it even caused the bro-in-law to update his blog.

But tonight Manning's Colts get to continue fighting through this miserable Super Bowl runner-up hangover of a season with a Tennessee team that's in their own funk having lost five in a row. Maybe Randy Moss will actually, you know, do something tonight.

I'm not counting on it though:

3 points
Indianapolis Colts (6-6) over Tennessee Titans (5-7)

+27/+5 : +20/19/+1 : -4/-7

The rest of the Week 14 picks will be posted Saturday night, now that the "rolling deadline" appears to be working for both pools.

The Bears' Third Quarter: So much for that 8-8 talk

At the end of the last quarter of the Bears' season, I feared that there was still the possibility the team could finish 8-8. And now with four games left to go, we already know that won't be the case. Thanks to four more wins over the course of the four games since that last update, the Bears have secured a winning season and are leading the NFC North as the team enters its final four games of the year.

I'm not entirely sold that we should begin planning a Super Bowl party quite yet, but at the same time, I can't deny that the Bears certainly deserve to be in the conversation for favorites to come out of the NFC when the playoffs begin. The final four games to close out the year will be perhaps the toughest stretch of the schedule this year (visits to Minnesota and Green Bay while two of the AFC's best teams come to Soldier Field), but Chicago has set themselves up rather nicely by taking care of business in the third quarter.

If nothing else, it appears for the time being that Lovie Smith has saved his job.

Week 13 Power Rankings: A third time is not a charm

Alas, it appears that my strategy of using "my numbers" to determine my picks for Week 13 finally proved unsuccessful after back-to-back triumphs in the first two attempts. While the San Diego loss to Oakland was indeed a swing that worked in my favor, a number of other upsets around the league (with the most notable and costly being Indianapolis falling to Dallas) did not and I ended up with 104 points for the week.

So does this mean an end to using Week 13 for the numbers experiment in future seasons?

Hardly. This particular NFL season has had more upsets on any given week than the previous two (which probably played havoc with a number of the figures used in my math), and besides, I already swore I'd be following the Week 13 tradition until the logic has a losing record. Right now, it's still 2-1 in three attempts, which ain't half bad.

And if nothing else, at least this happened.

Things I made while offline: Janet Jackson

Because this blog will be dominated by football-related content for the next five months, your author has decided to make an effort to regularly post pictures his lovely and talented sister took of some of his artwork. These posts will include a brief thought or two about when the piece was made. 

This week: A pencil sketch of recording artist Janet Jackson 

The Other Week 13 Picks: Sure hope there's an upset or three

In case you didn't want to scroll down to the post where I put up my picks before Thursday's game kicked off (and I earned four measly points), this is the week that I've submitted "My Numbers" for my own sheet. So the column to the far right represents my own picks as well this weekend (fingers crossed real tight), but here's how the rest of the crowd's picks look as of 11:30 P.M. CST on Saturday night:

Week 13 Picks: Keeping the tradition alive

I tried explaining that line of numbers that appears under each one of my picks every week way back in Week Nine of the 2008 season, but I don't think the explanation was quite as clear as it could have been. So hopefully the little graphic to the left here, based upon the most recent Power Rankings, is somewhat more helpful in explaining how "the numbers" work for me.

It's relevant this week because Week 13 has officially become the one time of the season in which I crunch my numbers and go with with whatever they say, regardless of what my gut might be telling me. The result was first-place finishes in both 2008 and 2009.

So I'm including tonight's matchup for my example of how this formula works.

You couldn't care less: Another fantasy update

Your author is hard-pressed to think of something that can cause an immediate loss of interest quite like hearing about someone's fantasy team. Having friends and co-workers recite their rosters with no real purpose other than to gloat about conquering leagues you're not involved in seems quite banal and pointless, no?

That said, the author knows full well that you the dear reader probably also couldn't give two shits about whatever fantasy team he's gone and created after so many years of taking that road less traveled where non-participation seemed cooler. Now the author has multiple fantasy teams, and while he tries mightily not to bring those into the other posts here on BMC that you might actually read, every once in a while, if for no other purpose than to help him remember who he had on such teams in a given year, he likes to keep a recorded entry of how he's done.

This is one of those times. Your non-interest in the remainder of this post is understood.

Week 12 Power Rankings: Checkin' these twice

There were certainly a number of photo/video moments I could have used to accompany this post as it related to Week 12 in the NFL. The unfortunate dropped would-be game-winning touchdown in Buffalo was certainly a candidate, although a late missed field goal in Cleveland was another near-disaster in terms of possible points lost. Cortland Finnegan and Andre Johnson's entertaining little scrum was also considered, but I just used a punch being thrown yesterday "last week." In the end though, I think that this lovely image sort of relates to how my confidence pool luck has been going as of late, with myself hoping to creep back up into the lead like a warm fart. Sure, it'll cause some people to wince, but right now, nobody really notices.

My picks for the week earned me another 107 points, so they didn't stink too bad. But there were unfortunately some other folks who came out smelling like roses.