Dumb Football With Mike Tunison, Week 8

The NFL does a great job of desensitizing people, in large part because of how dazzling its football can be. One can easily forget, after an amazing touchdown catch or a thrilling comeback victory, that the sport is steadily killing those who play it. Such a mental disconnect sounds incredible, and maybe it is, but millions manage to do it each week with little difficulty.

When the dangers of football become immediate—this usually involves a player being loaded onto a gurney—it's shocking without being altogether surprising. There's a ritual for this, too. The roar of a stadium becomes a concerned silence; the announcers speak in funereal whispers and send it off to commercial break without any flourish. The booming FOX NFL Sunday Music becomes the more elegiac FOX Injury Music.

And then, a few minutes later, the fever is back, the PA is once again playing "We Dem Boyz," and the game resumes with little sign that anything happened. The badly injured player has—hopefully—delivered an assuaging thumbs up, which the crowd takes as permission to file his pain under These Guys Are Warriors, and then get back to work shouting the way to victory.

There's always an acceptance of injury in the NFL, if only because there has to be—there's no way to play the sport in its current form without risk of serious injury. Week 8 seemed like a particularly grueling one for injuries in the NFL, or at least it felt that way—I can't say for sure that it was. Not all that surprisingly, it's harder to find statistics about the number of players stretchered off the field than it is to, say, find out how many touchdowns Drew Brees threw (seven! Dayyyyyum!).

So I don't know if Sunday was worse for catastrophic injuries than the norm. It might have been, and no Sunday is exactly good where this is concerned, but not every week will have the same number of players going down. A big part of the reason that people reacted as they did on Sunday was the type of players getting hurt.

Love too check on my fantasy teams — Sweet Potato Baffoe (@TimBaffoe)November 1, 2015

Week 8 might be the worst — Yahoo Sports (@YahooSports)November 2, 2015

There's a big segment of the audience that will react only when fantasy-relevant players such as Le'Veon Bell, Matt Forte, Steve Smith, and Reggie Bush go down, as all four did on Sunday, and care only so far as those real people's real injuries impact their fantasy teams. A rant about fantasy football's dehumanizing effects is a facile way to explain this callousness, as though NFL fans were far more concerned about linemen and special teamers getting injured before fantasy football existed. That simply isn't true.

That lack of empathy has always been there, because it has always been necessary to watch this sport. It's in no small part encouraged by the NFL itself; the NFL's owners have always viewed their relationship with their players as, in the words of Tex Schramm to Gene Upshaw, one between ranchers and cattle. The less we know about a player—the less we can identify them by a crazy touchdown dance or a unique uniform alteration—the less we feel for them when they're getting loaded into an ambulance, and the less likely we are to support them when they stand up for, say, decent post-retirement benefits or guaranteed contracts.

So, yes, it was an ugly NFL Sunday insofar as all of them contain certain amounts of the same ugliness. It's up to you how much you want to dwell on it. If you're willing, the NFL is always eager to offer an easy out.

Steve Smith: A Possibly Premature Appreciation

Football's destructiveness is at the core of why Steve Smith is so appealing: his every mannerism and statement is spring-loaded with potential violence. That isn't to say he's a bad person—far from it. He's simply very raw and open about being an agent of destruction as part of his job, and does so without contributing to the league's culture of abuse off the field.

Steve Smith has, of course, long been a badass on the field. Even this year, at age 36, Smith was putting up numbers that projected to be among the best of his career. This season was to be Smith's farewell tour, as the receiver had announced that he planned to retire. Yesterday, Ravens head coach John Harbaugh hinted that Smith may be back in 2016, because a torn Achilles like the one he suffered on Sunday is no way to call it a career. The NFL would be less watchable, less fun, and less itself without Smith, and it's hard not to pull for him to recover, for one last run.

An Eli Manning Derp To Soothe Our Jangled Nerves

Eli, untouched. Oh no. — Kerith Burke (@KerithBurke)November 1, 2015

Look, it was a stressful Sunday for a lot of folks. If you're one of those weird people who feels the need to defend Eli Manning when everyone just wants to laugh at him for being goofy, fine—he threw for six touchdowns and that's a good outing for anyone. That's good and he's good at football. He also derped gloriously, and that's a welcome service to a struggling football world.

By the way, any word from NFL media on whether Eli and Odell Beckham attended the same high school, albeit years apart? Was checking all day yesterday and couldn't get an answer.

The Broncos Are Now FOR REAL, At Least Until They Lose a Game

Denver's defense was already among the NFL's best coming into Sunday night's battle of the unbeatens against Green Bay. After the Broncos held Aaron Rodgers to a career low 77 yards passing on 22 attempts in a 29-10 victory, it's very hard to argue that theirs shouldn't be considered the premier defense in the league. That effort, coupled with a full game's worth of Good Peyton Manning, allowed Denver to make surprisingly easy work of the Packers.

The next few weeks will prove whether this was an aberration or an indication of where the Broncos are headed, especially when Denver hosts New England at the end of the month. For now, a team many doubted because of the up-and-down play of its legendary quarterback is finally getting some respect. It only took seven straight wins to get there.

The Weekly Cowboys Melodrama, Starring Dez Bryant and the Media

The least surprising thing of the week, aside from gruesome injuries and the Browns deciding to rebuild again, is that the Cowboys were embroiled in scandal. Greg Hardy decided to take a week off on this score, so Dez Bryant picked up the slack. The Cowboys receiver cussed out reporters in the locker room after discovering that one of them posted a Vine with a caption alleging that Bryant was celebrating Ricardo Lockette's injury.

If Dez wasn't actually taunting while Lockette was down, it's easy to understand his frustration. For what it's worth, Dez denies it and Seahawks linebacker Bruce Irvin tweeted Monday morning that Dez was talking to the officials the whole time during the incident and never mentioned Lockette. Rest assured, even if the sports media cycle can't make this one stick, there's sure to be another meltdown somewhere within the Dallas organization next week. Perhaps Jerry Jones can find a way to blame the team's struggles on PC culture? Just a suggestion.

In the meantime, PETA is pushing for Dez to be investigated for the illegal possession of a monkey. Fire up the Bad Cowboys Headline Generator, somebody.

Look, a Positive Cowboys Thing!

Ok La'el Collins. Ok. — Mike Sirois (@MikeSirois)November 1, 2015

Not that the Cowboys are an organization that anyone needs to go out of their way to praise, but I feel like being a little positive. And so, holy smokes, that's some downfield blocking by rookie La'el Collins. Many cursed the Cowboys' fortunes for scoring a possible future star by being bold—or sketchy—enough to sign Collins while he was still a non-suspect in a murder investigation, but thankfully luck has been sufficiently not on their side during the season for it to matter.

Enter Promo Code LITIGATION

The blowback against daily fantasy sites continues apace, with lawsuits ranging from the frivolous to the not frivolous. Washington receiver Pierre Garcon is leading a class action lawsuit against FanDuel for, he claims, using player likenesses and names without license or permission. Unlike apparently 90 percent of Sports Twitter, I'm not a lawyer, so I can't comment on the merits of the case. I will say, at least, that I've noticed a slight dip in the amount of DFS commercials during sports broadcasts. Perhaps these companies realized that being inundated with the same commercials was half the reason the public turned on them in the first place. It's also possible that an increasing amount of what was the advertising budget of these companies is going to future legal defense funds.

Until 2016, London…

The third and final London game of the 2015 NFL season has passed, and no one looks more relieved than the Brits who moped through the second half of Sunday's Chiefs-Lions blowout. It's hard to tell whether the sadness in the screenshot above is within a standard deviation of typical British misery, though it's difficult to fault them for being annoyed as Jim Caldwell challenged first-down catches with his team losing by multiple touchdowns late in the game. The Chiefs' biggest inducement for its American fans to travel with the team was to give out free beer at one happy hour. I would love to meet anyone who was swayed to make the trip for that reason. Meet, not drink with.

Because the NFL is committed to this tradition for the foreseeable future, football will visit the Brits again next year for more Jaguars games, more end zones with digital paint, and, of course, more fans wearing jerseys of teams not appearing in that broadcast.

Power Ranking The Saddest Quarterbacks The Jets Could Sign

Ok — jared lorenzen (@JaredLorenzen22)November 2, 2015

After a bizarre spurt of adequacy to start the season, the Jets are finally starting to look like themselves, which means painful and dispiriting losses. Ryan Fitzpatrick left the game on Sunday early due to torn ligaments in his thumb. Despite being ruled out, he was forced to return at the end of the 34-20 loss to Oakland because Geno Smith left the game with shoulder pain and the team had no other quarterbacks on the active roster.

While Geno says that he is "pretty confident" he will be able to play next week, it's likely Fitzpatrick will not be, which means the Jets are going quarterback shopping. There are plenty of available quarterbacks—all of them bad, but only a few that are appropriately Jets-y. Let's rank 'em!

1. Tim Tebow

This Masochist Has Deflategate Jokes

OK, stop the — thekennaj (@thekennaj)November 1, 2015

Barry Goldmeier is a government statistician who runs 25 marathons a year as a "goofy hobby." Even without the government job spoiler, it should be obvious that he's the sort of Type A person who could only exist in the Washington, DC, area, and indeed he's from Rockville, Maryland. Goldmeier has been getting goofy this year by juggling footballs and wearing a Tom Brady costume during races. Here he is in Chicago. Here he is in Minneapolis. Here he is in Pittsburgh. He got attention again yesterday during the New York City Marathon, whose spectators seem almost perfectly calibrated for cheap Tom Brady jokes.

Goldmeier's unofficial time was 5:58:31, which is ridiculously good for someone who is both juggling and wearing what looks to be a terribly uncomfortable costume, at least for running purposes. While that time is nowhere close to winning the race, there are surely thousands of runners that Goldmeier beat. They must now face the truth of being outrun by a jogging juggler with a sideline in semi-topical sports jokes. Running is miserable enough on its own, without those kind of brutal realizations—though this may be my own experience of finishing after costumed racers speaking. I hope one of the volunteers at the hydration stations threw a cup of water in his face.

Fan of the Week

Factoid of the day: Rep. Paul Ryan will become the first House Speaker who is also a — Gil Brandt (@Gil_Brandt)October 27, 2015

There are literally thousands of cluelessly self-righteous Packers fans who are all too eager to offer their useless team stock—which is actually more a Packers fund-raising scheme than an investment—as evidence that they root for an organization that is not bound by the type of greed that operates the rest of professional sports. But only one of those assholes is the new Speaker of the House! So congrats, Paul Ryan, and good luck to the rest of the House, as the new speaker will doubtlessly compel John Kuhn chants from members of his party and force votes on which type of hat should be made to look like cheese next. (The answer is a cloche.)

Five Winners Who Covered Their Bloodline in Glory

1. Denver's defense, a group of bloodthirsty killers led by Wade Phillips, a human Winnie the Pooh

2. Drew Brees

3. Odell Beckham

4. Todd Gurley

5. Kwon Alexander—check out his emotional reaction dedicating the game ball to his brother who died on Saturday

Five Losers Bathing in the Hard Water of Infinite Shame

1. Colin Kaepernick

2. Brad Wing

3. Antonio Cromartie

4. Whoever booked @MattyBRaps to perform halftime in the Georgia Dome

5. Matt Cassel, putting up stat lines reminiscent of Quincy Carter

As For Tonight…

On Sunday, reliable MMA trainer/journalist Jay Glazer reported that Andrew Luck has been dealing with fractured ribs in addition to the shoulder injury the Colts listed from Weeks 4-6. Luck hasn't appeared on the injury report the past two weeks and the rib injury was never listed at all.

If true, it's a curious move by the Colts, who were happy to pretend to be the lone virtuous organization in the NFL as the league investigated the Patriots for deflating footballs over the offseason. That may explain why general manager Ryan Grigson is extremely red and naked and mad online about Glazer's report, which the NFL will now investigate. Surely the Colts would never bend the rules in the same subtle ways that every other NFL team does; it's just not their way. Heaven forbid and perish the thought. My garments are rent, and not just because I'm a slovenly sports blogger.

The Panthers look to remain the NFC's sole remaining undefeated team. The way these teams have been playing, Carolina seems likely to do so, though a rare victory by the Houston Texans on Sunday means a Colts loss on Monday would make first place in the AFC South a tie between teams with 3-5 records. Do those stakes provide the sense of urgency Indianapolis needs to come alive? Given that the last time the Colts were in a pressure situation, they brought out the inexplicable and hilarious swinging gate play, let's hope so.