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So, this is supposed to be bedtime, but I couldn't not post my annual guesses about what names are going to be read tomorrow morning when Oscar nominations get announced. I'll likely be limiting my thoughts in the picks only to explaining my omissions or expressing who I'll be saying I was going to/wanted to pick instead. Still, I made the graphics on Sunday while watching football, and while I was tempted to change some of those picks in reading the predictions of others, I'll just stick with what I already had.
As has been the case in recent years, I feel like I'm falling further and further out of the movie loop. I've seen a few of the potential nominees, but I'm guessing that it's highly unlikely I'll have viewed all the of the films by the time the awards are handed out. Of course, seeing the movies can have just as much negative impact on guessing as not seeing them (there's no real sentimental favorite thus far that I'm plugging in here despite odds being against him/her/it). Anyway, I'll probably return to this post again on Sunday to add reaction, regrets, and all that good stuff.
(UPDATE: While I typically make my nomination reactions a separate post, I've simply added my thoughts in blue to these initial predictions on a category-by-category basis.)
This weekend offers more than a few scenarios that we've seen before in recent years. Over in the AFC, both the Broncos and the Patriots are once again hosting Divisional Playoff games. The same two teams were widely expected to meet in the AFC Championship last season, but the "Mile High Miracle" of blown coverage helped Baltimore stun Denver and go on to New England. I had picked an upset last year in that conference, but unfortunately, I went with Houston knocking off the Pats. Once again this year, both the Broncos and the Patriots are considerable favorites to meet for an opportunity to go to the Super Bowl.
Meanwhile, the top seed in the NFC involves a rematch of a lopsided rout from earlier this season when the Seahawks thrashed the Saints in Seattle. Of course, the Seahawks are again considered to be the favorites not only to win this weekend, but represent the NFC in the Super Bowl. However, it was only three years ago that New Orleans was presumed to be far superior to the 7-9 Seahawks in a Wild Card playoff game in Seattle. As it turned out, Marshawn Lynch went full-on "Beast Mode" and gave us the legendary crotch grab on the way into the end zone as the Seahawks stunned the Saints. So while Seattle won both of those meetings with New Orleans up in the Great Northwest, we know all too well that there's a real danger to reading too much into regular season meetings. Surely Sean Payton, Drew Brees, and the rest of the Saints learned some lessons and put up a better fight this time around, no?
There were certainly a few surprises last week as road teams took three of the four games, so it seems reasonable to assume we'll very well get an upset or two or three this week.
Well, that didn't take long. After an entire season of wondering and debating whether the Bears would bring back Jay Cutler, it turns out that the best quarterback in team history will still be wearing a Chicago uniform for the foreseeable future. Make no mistake, this is great news. Under Marc Trestman and now working with weapons like Matt Forte, Brandon Marshall, Alshon Jeffery, and Martellus Bennett—not to mention doing so behind an offensive line that was significantly improved from years past—there appears to be more than enough reason to be optimistic about this Bears offense going forward.
Now, that defense on the other hand ... Well, there's a lot of work to be done this off-season on that side of the ball. And the Cutler deal, while costly, doesn't completely prevent moves from being made. Rather, there's a number of other players on this year's team that Bears management will need to evaluate and decide whether it is really in the organization's best interest to bring back. Julius Peppers is probably one of the most expensive question marks on defense, and his virtual disappearance this season in terms of impact is not likely to have many fans shedding tears if indeed Chicago decides to part ways with the defensive end. Charles "Peanut" Tillman, who didn't finish the year after sustaining a triceps injury, would not be as easy to say goodbye to. Still, if he's unwilling to accept a hometown discount. And then there's just a variety of other positions on defense that need upgrades, possibly through free agency but more likely through the draft.
Again, a lot of work to be done this off-season.
Last year, the fourth-seeded Baltimore Ravens team began a Super Bowl run in the Wild Card round. The year before that, the fourth-seeded New York Giants once again went on to upset the New England Patriots. And in 2011, the Green Bay Packers were hoisting the Vince Lombardi trophy despite being a sixth seed.
So while the consensus right now seems to be favoring top-seeded Denver and Seattle to emerge from these playoffs, there's good reason to believe that it will in fact be one of the teams playing this weekend that ends this season as champions. Now I'm not quite ready to declare make any bold predictions this far in advance (I'm the guy who had the Lions winning it all this year, after all), but I'm not ruling out that there could very well be a team that emerges from this weekend as an attractive underdog to go with in the Divisional Playoffs.
While my initial seeds were a bit off (aside from Kansas City) in my pre-season predictions, I did have five of the six AFC playoff teams right and four of the six NFC teams. So there's still some hope that I can add a little more green to that page by year's end, but it seems like this season is sort of doomed to be a case of "I was close."
Hopefully my predictions are a little more right on now that I've got a better sampling of what these teams can do. We're preparing to head out of town this weekend, so at least posting my picks now will spare me the semi-annual attempts to post these picks from my phone or some other difficult situation caused by a combination of internet troubles and too much delay on my part. It also means that I'm likely to miss at least one game, but hopefully I can catch the best of the weekend action.
I suppose that I am perhaps entitled to feel somewhat disappointed by the Bears closing out the season with consecutive losses when a win in either one of the two final games would have resulted in this year's team winning the NFC North and going to the playoffs in Marc Trestman's first year. The fact that the defense was so abysmal on a legendary level probably spared fans the additional embarrassment of a nationally televised playoff loss. Of course, I'm the guy who picked the Lions to win this year's Super Bowl, so I'm still more saddened that after having such a golden opportunity this season, Detroit somehow found a way to screw it up.
And so yet another year ends with Green Bay heading to the playoffs while Chicago stays home. There was certainly a lot to like about the improvements that Trestman made to the Bears offense this season, but there is going to be a lot of much-deserved focus on improvements to the other side of the ball this off-season. The Sunday night blowout loss in Philadelphia was incredibly humbling, but the game-winning Aaron Rodgers TD toss in the season finale was again the result of a defensive lapse. We could sit here and marvel on how very close the Bears to winning the division this season, but truth be told, we should feel fortunate that the team was able to hang around in post-season discussion for as long as they did because of the lackluster competition. In any other year, the division should have been wrapped up in Week 14.
There's some people who will ask why we should be commending Trestman for going 8-8 when Lovie Smith was fired after finishing 10-6, but I'd still feel like the needle is pointing up for Chicago going forward despite the win-loss record.
It certainly appears that this year's defense of the Stanley Cup will be nothing like the 2010-11 season in which the Blackhawks had to creep in after grabbing the eighth and final spot in the Western Conference. Unlike the fire sale that followed the 2010 Cup win, this year's team has been kept largely intact and is storming through the NHL 41 games into this season. Consider that Chicago has scored five or more goals in nearly half of their games this season.
Name a player on this team and chances are good that he is having a solid campaign thus far. When a waiter at a local restaurant saw my Blackhawks cap during a recent visit, he asked who my favorite player was. It had been a while since I'd been asked this and I had to think about it. Based upon the very Norris Trophy-worthy season he's having thus far, my reply was Duncan Keith. But it could have just as easily been Patrick Kane. Or Patrick Sharp. Hell, why not Brandon Saad?
Blah blah blah. In short, there isn't a whole helluva lot that 'Hawks fans shouldn't feel good about right now. The champs are playing like the best team in the league, and it once again remains very hard to imagine that any team is going to be able wo win a seven-game series against Chicago come April. If there is one worry, it is undoubtedly the penalty kill that currently ranks among the league's worst after going on an amazing streak of success in last year's playoffs. Then again, with the team scoring as often as it is right now, simply avoiding stupid penalties would seemingly be the easiest fix to that, ahem, "problem."
Oh, and then there's the whole three-week interruption we're about to go through for what I hope and fervently pray is the final NHL player participation in the Winter Olympics. In addition to the fatigue concerns and how the sudden time out of the country will affect the roll the Blackhawks have been on, there is as alawys just the overwhelming fear of a star player sustaining an injury. Sure, Chicago has more than enough contributors right now to possibly make up for the inevitable player loss or two that will happen between now and the playoffs, but I'd still prefer safe than sorry. And it's hard to ignore the fact that the last time there was a mid-season Olympics break, the 'Hawks won the Cup that year.
I see no point in lying. I attempted to listen to the Bulls game last night, but only made it about two quarters in before I decided to watch TV instead. (This, for the record.) OK, I lasted less than two periods.
This is likely to be the story for the remainder of the season. Oh, sure. The Bulls could be hard-working and grindy enough to make the playoffs in an appalling Eastern Conference, but this season's hopes for any sort of deep playoff run were vanquished as soon as Derrick Rose—fresh off missing an entire season—went down a mere 10 games into this one.
The Bulls quickly announced Rose would be out for the season. No playoffs, no nothing. Year over. End of story. Commence talking about the possible draft pick even though management will have to publicly dismiss any discussion about possible benefits of tanking.
It seemed we would get through another painfully disappointing regular season, but things were considerably worsened when Rose talked about a possible return if the "situation is right" in his first public comments.
*SIGH*
Which means for the rest of the year, the media is going to be obligated to have headlines just like these ones. I'm casting my vote early: He won't be back for the playoffs and I'm not holding out any hope for the team even he does. Like many of us thought, this year appears destined to come down to Miami and Indiana in the East, with the rest of the field being a sideshow.
While not yet technically eliminated from the playoffs, it seems to be a safer assumption that this first season of the Trestman era will end immediately after Week 17. For me, it's more or less what I expected coming into this year, although the loss to the Vikings in Minnesota that concluded this most recent quarter of the season was more discouraging than anything I could have imagined. Much of the week on Chicago sports radio has been spent calling to question the logic of attempting a 47-yard field goal on second down in overtime. Indeed, for a guy who has seemingly been as smart and analytically aware as Marc Trestman has seemed to be all year long, his defense of the decision left a lot to be desired. Then again, perhaps a poor defense is the best summary of this Bears season.
The team continues to deal with a set of highly consequential injuries to arguably two of its most important players on the two sides of the ball in Cutler on offense and Briggs on defense. There's been plenty of bright spots on the offense this year (for once), what with Matt Forte's continuing efficiency, Alshon Jeffery breaking out, and Martellus Bennett being a tight end who can actually, you know, catch. Oh, and that McCown guy's been pretty effective too. The defense, however, is even more dreadful than my initial fears about depth led me to fear they would be. Never in my lifetime can I recall Chicago having a league worst run defense.
I don't doubt that the team will continue to battle in these final four games, what with the North being similarly pathetic and underwhelming. Oh, and Jay Cutler has a payday coming up.
There's better pictures out there of the championship baaner ceremony, but few of them fit very well in the quarterly graphic. So there ya go. (You can go here to watch the ceremony, or get a better range of images here.)
When the NHL dropped the puck on this 2013-14 season, it seemed to come up on a lot of people sooner than usual. That was partly because we were coming off a shortened season that didn't begin until January last time around and partly because this season did start a little sooner than usual thanks to the three-week interruption we'll get courtesy of the Homophobic Hockey Winter Olympics over on the other side of the planet.
So whereas I was quite the dedicated fan last year who listened to or watched every single 'Hawks game, this season's competing with playoff baseball and regular season NFL as well as us finally cutting the cord with cable has ultimately seen me only pay passing attention to the developments of games I get in the form of various push notifications on my cell phone. And the one thing that has been an annoying constant thus far this season is being informed that Chicago will be up 2-0 or 3-0, but then later that evening I will be told to tune in because the game is tied and is going to overtime. Sure, the Blackhawks end up winning a majority of these contests (I'm a little stunned to read that the 'Hawks are 1.000 when leading after one and .917 when leading after two, but are 3-4 in overtime), but the defense late in games is my foremost concern.
Some of that has to do with goaltending issues (possibly because of new equipment?), largely because Nikolai Khabibulin thus far has not shown any signs of being anywhere near the backup that Ray Emery was last year. However, another aspect concerns a penalty kill that has essentially been the complete opposite of the dominance showcased last year. Still, none of these are issues that cannot be corrected.
And it's hard to complain too much when Chicago sits atop the division standings.
Even during the conclusion to the last quarter of the season, there were signs that this year's Bears defense was going to be one that was going to struggle. Still, it was hard for me to imagine that Chicgao's D would be as awful as it has been, and things only got worse this past quarter when Lance Briggs became the latest player to sustain an injury. Oh, and Jay Cutler went down too.
I was preparing to search for a very frumpy-looking Marc Trestman photo to use for this quarter's graphic after the team suffered a convincing loss to New Orleans, came up with on the losing end of a shootout with the woeful Washington Redskins, and barely beat a then-winless New York Giants. Then suddenly, lo and behold, this past Monday night in a game that the rival Packers were supposed to basically have wrapped up by the end of the first half, an incredible thing happened: Green Bay's star quarterback was not only sacked, not only suffered an injury that forced him from the game, not only will miss several weeks of action, but all of this was the result of a play by much-maligned first round draft pick Shea McClellin.
Not only did the Bears pull off a stunning upset on Monday night to stay above .500, but Chicago now sits in a three-way tie for first place. With Jay Cutler expected to return in a matter of weeks, the playoffs still seem like a very real possibility for many fans. Perhaps that's fair, but I say slow down. After all, the Lions were my Super Bowl pick. Still, there is one Wild Card out there.
