Hard Truths About the 2020 NFL Season

 

"Woah!"

Everyone always says they want the truth, but when the truth is hard to swallow, they prefer to ignore it and remain in the dark, blissfully ignorant to the hard-factual truths going on around them.  But much like Neo in the Matrix sometimes you need a middle-aged man who haunts your dreams to abduct and drug you with a pill to wake you up to the real world around you.  I am your Morpheus, and these are 4 hard truths about the 2020 NFL Season. 

1) Covid is Going to F**k up Your Fantasy Season

Every fantasy football player who’s not currently in 1^st place in their league is already lobbying to have asterisks placed all over the 2020 season.  The sad truth is that not only is Covid going to F’ up your fantasy season, its looking like it’s going to F’ the real NFL right in the asterisk too.  Between postponements, star QB’s missing games, and teams not being allowed to practice for weeks on end it’s only a matter of time before the scheduling wizards at the NFL run out of answers and a team has to either forfeit a game or play two games in a 2-3-day period.  Good luck having the NFLPA sign off on either of those scenarios.  Losing a fantasy game because your only healthy RB suddenly has a bye when you wake up on Sunday morning is a punch in the gut.  Missing out on a game check because 5 of your teammates, a strength coach and 3 front office employees got breathed on wrong and tested positive for The Rona is a kick in the dick.  These are both dumb things that happen in the stupid world we now live in.  All we can do is deal with it and pray it doesn’t get worse. Oh, and complain, we can complain and use the stupidity as an excuse for why we didn’t win our fantasy league or why our favorite team didn’t make the playoffs this year.  

2)The Lack of a Preseason is Leading to More Injuries

For years we suspected that 4 preseason games were too much, and we were right, but do you know what’s worse?  No preseason games at all.  The proof is in the hospital pudding that is the 2020 season so far.  The Omaha Beach opening scene in Saving Private Ryan was less harrowing than the first quarter of this NFL season.  Flippancy aside, it’s hard to ignore the unusually high rash of injuries taking place so early in the season.  Obviously, football is a violent sport and injuries happen every year, but this year’s injuries have been early and often and at a higher volume than normal.  We haven’t seen anything like this since the 2011 season that had a statistical increase in soft tissue injuries which coaches, GM’s and medical experts attributed to the lack of OTA’s and disrupted preseason following that year’s lockout.  2011’s high profile injuries took place over most of the season.  The 2020 NFL injury bug was a star whacker right out of the gate.  Superstars like Saquon Barkley, Christian McCaffery, Nick Bosa, Bruce Irvin, Courtland Sutton and Dak Prescott (just to name a few) have all ended up on IR already (McCaffery is likely to return this season, the rest will certainly not).  We can argue all day over the cause of each individual injury.  Be it a freak incident like Dak Prescott’s unfortunate and gruesome compound fracture/dislocation, or the turf at MetLife Stadium being more dangerous to play on than if “The Floor is Lava” game was actually played on real lava, but when you put all of the early season injuries together it’s undeniable that the lack of a pre-season is a factor, if not the biggest factor. 

 

3)The NFC East is a Garbage Division (& Has Been For 10 Years)

Every decade there is one division that is simply worse than the rest, this decade it is without a doubt the NFC East and 2020 is reaching a new low point for the dumpster fire division.  

In the past decade The NFC Least has sent two teams to the playoffs in the same year just twice, that’s an NFL low water mark for any division over that time frame.  In that same 10-year span the NFC East champions won more than 10 regular season games just 3 times. You guessed it, that is also an NFL worst since 2010.  This year the division is on pace to continue its mediocracy.  The Dallas Cowboys are currently leading the way with a 2-3 record.  Through 5 weeks the entire division has only won 4 games total and only 2 of those wins were over teams outside of the division.   One of the teams from this dirt division is going to host a home playoff game!!! LOL!!

The most perplexing part about this whole thing is that every few years some 9-7 team from this shithole division gets hot at the right time and makes a run to the Superbowl, and sometimes they even win it!  This adds a weird super bowl pedigree to this 3^rd world division and makes people blind to the fact that for 10 years the NFC East has been the D-League of the NFL and judging by 2020 that isn’t going to stop anytime soon.  

 

4)Analytics in Football is Overrated but it Isn’t Going Anywhere

Analytics in Football is nothing new.  Hell, Tex Schramm & the Dallas Cowboys were using computers all the way back in 1962 to streamline their system of drafting players.  Since then teams have been using bean counters to analyze every possible aspect of football to try and earn a slight advantage over their opponents.  Stats have always been an undeniably huge part of football, but the true beauty of the sport comes from the unquantifiable, the intuitive smarts of the coaches on the sidelines and the instinctual athleticism of the players on the field.  That is why football purists have a hard time with the analytic takeover that has been happening in the game.  Why should a grizzled old coach who has spent 50 years immersed in football listen to some nerd who (to paraphrase Al Bundy) “wouldn’t know the difference between a football and a hooter because they’ve never touched either”? Simply because he’s ‘crunched the numbers’? Because the computer algorithms say so? The fact is there is a time and place for analytics in football but when the lights are on and the rounds are live leave the math book at home and go with your honed instinct.  Going for it on 4^th and 1 may work 65.7% of the time according to the Yale Undergraduate Sports Analytics Group, but what the Yale kids can’t account for in that study is a pissed off D-tackle imposing his will on a Guard and a backup running back missing a cutback lane and getting tackled a yard short.  (Looking at you Mike Zimmer), sure the analytics were on your side with that week five 4^th & 1 gamble, but the football guy in you should have known that making Russell Wilson drive 75 yards with an 8-point lead was a better option than making him drive 96 yards with a 5-point lead.  For every useful analytical stat there are dozens of useless ones that can be skewed any which way, it’s like Grampa said “figures lie and liars figure” and “stats are for losers unless it’s the final score”. 

Writen by Evan Slade AKA Gene Wilder's Def Boner