The best team in the NFL!?

The end is near. For this blog location, anyway. AOL is terminating this service, so I am moving the blog to www.blogger.com. I thought about changing the name, since I haven’t actually been inside the Oakland Flight Service Station in a long time, and it hasn’t belonged to the FAA for even longer than that, and OAK will cease to be next year. But if I change the name, then people wouldn’t be able to find it. So the name stays, as anachronistic as it is.

Now where was I? Oh yes, the best team in the NFL!

Five weeks into the NFL season, the New York Giants were unanimously regarded as the best team in football. The defending Super Bowl champions were one of only two undefeated teams, and had not lost since last December. They were playing the Cleveland Browns, a group of underachievers they had routed in the preseason.

Of course preseason games don’t mean anything, but when both teams had their starters playing, the Giants were up 30-3, and they knocked out Derek Anderson and injured four other Browns. Meanwhile the Browns, whom many had picked to go deep into the playoffs, were underachieving, had lost three times, and were playing without Kellen Winslow.

And so, on national television, the mighty New York Giants laid an egg, losing by three touchdowns to a team that couldn’t even line up properly. The Browns had to set a record for offensive penalties by a team playing at home. I can only imagine how many false start penalties they would have had if they were playing on the road with crowd noise.

This game teaches us two things: 1) never bet on football, and 2) maybe all that talk about Eli Manning being better than his brother was a wee bit premature. This week there was a lot of talk about how Eli Manning is about to receive a contract extension that would exceed Peyton’s $99 million contract. I expect that will happen, but when people start saying Eli is actually BETTER than Peyton, it’s time to take a deep breath.

First of all, I have always liked Eli, always considered him to be the franchise quarterback, even when he was terrible. Dan Marino aside, all young quarterbacks go through growing pains. There were many games when Eli threw 3 or 4 interceptions, but I remember the same from John Elway, Bert Jones, and Joe Namath. The guys who said Eli was a bum, that he was adopted and his real name was Eli Leaf – they were wrong. Just as the pundits who jumped on the bandwagon this year and said he’s better than Peyton are wrong. Eli is a good quarterback who can have an occasional horrible game, but plays great when it counts. As far as I’m concerned, he can be the Giants quarterback for the next ten years, but he isn’t going to be Peyton. But that’s OK, because it took Peyton 9 years to win a Super Bowl, and Eli did it in 4 years, and with a lesser supporting cast as well.

The bottom line is that the Giants aren’t as good as they were made out to be, the NFC East isn’t as dominant as expected, and the NFL has achieved parity. The NFL season still has 11 weeks to go, and I expect to be watching my DIRECTV Sunday Ticket for all of them.