2008 NFL Week 3 Picks - Another Simmons Classic

The Sports Guy Bill Simmons pounded out a great Week 3 picks article. I usually end up reading the picks the following week for some reason but even if the games are already over it is still worth a read. In case you don't want to read the entire article here's some highlights (I wouldn't make a good editor because as you can see I've included a lot of the article).

On fantasy football backlash in the early stages:

When I worked for the Boston Herald in 1995, I pitched a weekly fantasy column to my editors that August; I might as well have been pitching a column about drinking and driving or trying to sleep with underaged girls. They couldn't have said no fast enough.

On fantasy football soaring to new heights in popularity today:

While the Summer Olympics were doing such gangbuster ratings for NBC in August, the most-searched term on ESPN.com for those two weeks wasn't "Olympics" or "Phelps" or even "Sacramone." You know what it was? That's right … "fantasy football." A few weeks later, the Eagles-Cowboys game became the most-watched cable event of all time. You might think this was a coincidence. You would be wrong.

On what makes fantasy football so great:

Miss out on fantasy, and you miss out on the draft, biting e-mails, jokes, barbs, funny team names, inane arguments, idiotic trade offers and everything else. In some cases (like with me and my East Coast friends, who have something like 58 kids among us), the draft is the only day of the year when you're in touch with friends who were once essential parts of your day-to-day life. Look, I support anything that keeps friends in touch, keeps them arguing and keeps them busting each other's balls for five months a year. That's why I love fantasy over everything else.

On Vikings fans:

Booing Tarvaris Jackson during that Colts debacle wasn't nearly effective enough this past weekend; the Vikings' fans should have been singing "Hurt" by Nine Inch Nails or chanting, "You're ripping out our souls! You're ripping out our souls!"

Observation I've made before but would never have been able to put it in such a way:

If you made an All-Star team for "Athletes with Latino Names Who Look Like Their Name Should Actually Be Something Like Jimmy Scott or Rick Stevens," would you call it the Jeff Garcia All-Stars or the Anthony Gonzalez All-Stars?

On Peyton Manning:

after unleashing a Hall of Fame Manning Face in the first half, no less -- and the thing that stood out was how, after a certain point, when Minny kept blowing chances to blow that game wide open, it became patently clear that Manning was going to make the Vikings pay, no matter how grim things looked. Now that, my friends, is a great player. I now will wash my eyes out with paprika.

Finally, one of the best rants I have ever read:

Three more notes about my Sunday in the airport (we were there for a wedding and grounded by weather delays): First, a belated middle finger to everyone working at the diner who refused to change the channel from NASCAR to the Colts game even though nobody was watching the TV. I'm sorry, I worked in a restaurant once upon a time -- you can't tell me you "don't know where the remote is" when we both know you are just more interested in texting your friends. By the way, that was me who went into the bathroom and peed all over the toilet seat. Sorry about that. Second, just when I thought the day couldn't get worse, my daughter pulled the fire alarm and nearly caused a riot. I continue to hate every one of my friends who told me, "You have to have kids -- they're the best!" Burn in hell, all of you. And third, I finally found a TV that was showing CNN. One lady was watching it. Telepathically, I convinced her to go to the bathroom within 35 seconds. I know that's hard to believe, but it couldn't have been a coincidence that I stared at her thinking, "Bathroom, bathroom, you have to go, bathroom," and then she just got up and went. Then I turned it to the Colts game. This made up for everything else you read in this paragraph. I briefly turned into Uri Geller. It happened, and you can't tell me it didn't.