National Football League

Happy Monday, friends, and welcome to The Mothership.  We've got a couple more teams going fishing, and we'll explore their situations.  We'll also devote some early thought to the Super Bowl matchup.  Finally, since the Senior Bowl is this week, we'll get into that a little bit, and possibly also consider the less important Pro Bowl.  The NFC Championship game isn't over yet, as I start writing this, but I want to get a couple thousand words written before midnight.  Ready..... BEGIN!!!

1.  Both championship games were very interesting on Sunday, after the first two weekends had a lot of blowouts, and a few uninteresting close games.  I would venture to say that the only entertaining game in the first two weeks was Arizona vs. Green Bay.  It was a good Football Sunday, and we'll start by thinking about the losers.

a.  New York Jets - First of all, let me reiterate that anybody who made it to their conference championship game had a good season.  That said, this was not the year New York planned to be in Super Bowl contention, so I think they were already playing with house money on Sunday.  They wanted to win, and I know they believed that they could, but they're still developing into what they ultimately want to become.

First things first, since the MSM will always focus on the QB position first.  Mark Sanchez generally has a ways to go as a decision maker, but he showed a lot of poise during the recent run, and it has to make Jets fans very excited for the future.  He had a good day on Sunday, and the two TD passes he threw each showed a quality that the elite QBs possess.  He showed outstanding touch on the deep ball on the first, and impressive toughness and accuracy under pressure on the second.  My concerns about his ability to play in bad weather aside, it's pretty clear that the Jets have their guy of the future.

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Ted a bit of a technical point I guess;

Is it just me or is max protection seriously underused in the NFL? It seems to me that there is too much obsession currently with keeping defences off balance by disguising the intention of a play.

What I mean by this is defences (like the Jets) are now scheming so well they don't really care if you run or pass the ball, their blitz packages are designed to take care of outlet targets in the flat and disrupt recievers at the line of scrimmage, as well as pick up the run and pressure the quarterback. Cut To The Chase »

This is a test written on the announce date, December 29, 2009.  I am using this content to test the date filtering mechanism on the Top Rated Essays feature.  I am hoping that the presence of this item will bump the two which are more than two weeks old. 
One more week to go in the NFL regular season, and only two AFC playoff spots available.  I think they'll be won by the Baltimore Ravens and Denver Broncos.