73 Alamo City Spartans
54 Judean Front
Congratulations to Clay, whose Alamo City Spartans continued the VPFL tradition of upsetting the regular season champions and claimed the 4th VPFL title.
As for the NFL, I do not understand the coaching decisions on the part of Caldwell and Childress. I thought the decision of the Colts to stupidly throw away their opportunity to go 16-0 was totally ridiculous and will contribute to their being upset in the playoffs. The Vikings are suffering from overly conservative play calling, a mysterious offensive line meltdown, and defensive injuries to Pat Williams, EJ Henderson, and Antoine Winfield; our star cornerback is clearly still a little off his game after returning from his six-week injury. They could certainly use that bye week, but it looks as if they probably threw that away too.
I’m not sure which was dumber, the predictable first-half playcalling – I called one third-down play-action rollout that the Bears defensive coordinator obviously expected as well – or Ben Leber’s continuous inability to understand the concept of containment. AD’s overtime fumble and Longwell’s blocked PAT both hurt, but neither would have mattered if Leber hadn’t made exactly the same mistake he made last week against Carolina and simply held his position to the ballcarrier’s left instead of attempting to dive in wildly and make the tackle before his four teammates who had the running back pinned to the front and right did. The result was that instead of a loss of two followed by a fourth-down punt, Leber gave Forte a first down that led directly to a field goal. But the worst decision was the one to kick the tying PAT with 20 seconds left instead of going for two. The Viking special teams had been terrible all night, the Bear defense was reeling, and it was a perfect time to put them away. It was a horrendous call by Childress and it reminded me of an equally bad decision by Denny Green to play for overtime against a heavily favored Dallas team. In both cases, the overtime result was the same. The Vikings lost.
Right now, Philadelphia and San Diego look like the teams of destiny. Of course, this probably means that they are the only two playoff teams we can be certain we will not see in the Super Bowl.