NFL Wild Card Playoff Round

I have yet to write about the National Football League this season, its centenary year. This is the weekend of the wild card games, the first round of the playoffs. I thought I would provide my picks again this year.

I have watched a lot of NFL games in 2019. I even paid for a NFL Network subscription. The regular season was a good one. Ratings were the highest they have been in three years. This year saw the rise of the black quarterback to heights never before seen in the 100 years of the league's existence. More starting black quarterbacks than ever before. Tom Brady lost four regular season games. Three of those losses were to black quarterbacks: Lamar Jackson, Deshaun Watson and Pat Mahomes. If the playoffs go the way of the regular season, Lamar Jackson will join Doug Williams and Russell Wilson as the only black quarterbacks to win the Super Bowl.

There are only two black quarterbacks playing this weekend: Deshaun Watson of the Houston Texans and Russell Wilson of the Seattle Seahawks. Wilson plays the Eagles in Philadelphia tomorrow afternoon. I'm taking the Seahawks on the road. They beat the Eagles once already in Philly this season. Seattle's defense is not what it once was, but Philadelphia is depleted. The Seahawks got their mojo back in the second half of the final game of the season against San Francisco. With Marshawn Lynch back in action after more than a year, I'm anticipating an offensive rebirth.

Watson will face the formidable Buffalo Bills, who proved that they can travel to the Lone Star and win on the road in a high-profile match-up, as they did on Thanksgiving against the Cowboys. The Bills have a good defense and a strong rushing attack, but I'm convinced that Houston's offense is too powerful with Watson's strong arm and scrambling ability, DeAndre Hopkins and Kenny Stills at wide receiver, and Carlos Hyde and Duke Johnson out of the backfield. Too bad the speedy Will Fuller is banged up. I'm taking the Texans.

In the other games I'm taking the New Orleans Saints at home against the Minnesota Vikings, and I'm going out on a limb to pick the Tennessee Titans over the New England Patriots at home. It's a long shot to think that the Titans, who almost always seem to under-perform in big games, can go into Foxborough and best Brady and that Belichik defense, particularly with the playoff-unproved Ryan Tannehill at quarterback, but the Patriots are not the Patriots of old. I know that is said every year, and every year New England is back in the Super Bowl. This year will be different. If it is not Tennessee, then it will be Kansas City or Baltimore that knocks off Brady and Belichik who will have to get back to the Super Bowl by winning payoff games on the road.

Incidentally, and atypically, all these picks are in agreement with The New York Times' tout, Benjamin Hoffman.

To wrap up here, my biggest takeaway of another regular season spent watching countless hours of commercial television is the rampant, excessive militarism on display. The National Football League is now basically synonymous with the U.S. Armed Services. As Brittainy Newman notes in "The N.F.L. Wears Patriotism on Its Sleeve":

By the end of November, every N.F.L. team had hosted a Salute to Service game, during which active duty military members and veterans could watch the game from field-level suites. Players shook their hands, thanking them for their service.

[snip]

At the Panthers game, Bart Bazquez, a Marine, used his phone to take pictures of his friend Thomas Garza, also a Marine, as he posed by a fountain with a Marine Corps embroidered flag. “I think people see football players how they see military,” Mr. Garza said, “watching them from a distance, idolizing them.”

Never before in my lifetime has the military been so extolled in the United States. Since the NFL is the last bastion of national culture (along with the Hollywood superhero blockbuster), it makes sense that it is slathered in militaristic patriotism.

The founder of Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq, freshly-designated by the United States as a "terrorist organization," Qais al-Khazali correctly identifies this U.S. cultural monochrome in a quote from one of the many stories in The New York Times today about the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani:

“The United States has only one color, it is the military color, that is all that it spends its money on,” said Qais al-Khazali, the leader of a pro-Iranian militia. “But Iran has many colors — in culture, in politics, in religion, in many spheres.”