The Remainder of NFL Week 13: Some Big Games for NFC West Teams

The Pittsburgh-Baltimore game turned out to be even better than its hype, providing a little Thanksgiving televisual bliss. The Steelers' final drive at the Ravens' goal line -- the hit on Le'Veon Bell that sent his helmet flying and killed the play on the half-yard line; Roethlisberger's TD pass to Jerricho Cotchery; then the failed two-point conversion to Emmanuel Sanders to tie the game -- made for some riveting holiday passivity. At 5-7 and one wild card spot already spoken for by either Kansas City or Denver, Pittsburgh's hopes of making the playoffs are remote. If Baltimore finds a running game, the Ravens could be a team to watch.

Sunday, a number of games have playoff implications. Arizona travels to Philadelphia to take on the Eagles. The Cardinals are hot at 7-4 having won four in a row while the Eagles have not played their best football at home this season. It is hard to believe that the Cardinals are locked in a battle for second place in the NFC West with the 49ers. I'm not a believer in Carson Palmer. But in a match-up between Bruce Arians and Chip Kelly, I'm taking Arians. The early betting line had the Cardinals by 4 points but then the money moved in the Eagles' direction. Ignore the money. Pick Arizona.

The afternoon game has the impressive Rams, winners of two in a row, traveling to Candlestick to take on San Francisco. St. Louis always plays tough against the 49ers and the Seahawks. The line has the 49ers as anywhere from a eight to nine-and-a-half point favorites. I don't know if San Francisco covers the spread, but I think the 49ers win the game. Take San Francisco.

The Monday night game is a potential NFC Championship preview: New Orleans at Seattle. Last year the Seahawks were flat coming off the bye week. But that involved cross-country travel to Miami. Monday they'll be at home in front of loud, adoring fans with a hunger for the Super Bowl. Drew Brees is masterful in his home dome, but more common playing in cool, rainy weather against a speedy pass rush. The line has the Seahawks by five. Take Seattle in a romp.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #38

Super Bowl XXIV was the zenith of the Joe Montana-era San Francisco 49ers. Montana was named Super Bowl MVP for the third time as his 49ers, bringing home the Vince Lombardi Trophy for the fourth time, steamrollered John Elway's Broncos 55-10.

Sports teams, sports leagues, sport seasons, playoffs, championships mark time like nothing else. As the last decade of the millennium began that January, it was the beginning of the end for my marriage, as it would turn out to be for Joe Montana appearing in the Super Bowl. Time is a most mysterious thing. A major preoccupation of western philosophy is whether man has the ability to know time. I definitely felt something was afoot, that some momentous shift was underway that winter. The 49ers had never looked so machine-like as they did that year. They had a slightly better record in their 1984 championship season, and that was probably a better team. But it was a joyous affair, whereas the 1989 San Francisco 49ers were all corporately-perfected business.

The next season the 49ers would equal their 14-2 regular season record of 1989. Montana was reaching a level of control and mastery at quarterback that is hard for us to understand today -- like Drew Brees, but mentally stronger; like Tom Brady, but more able to create opportunities for victory; like Aaron Rodgers, but more of a leader. If you want to see what I'm talking about, check out the 1990 NFC Championship Game between the New York Giants and the 49ers. Before Montana is knocked out of the game by a vicious blindside Leonard Marshall hit, he is in control -- a man at the top of the game.

That hit by Marshall would cause Montana to miss nearly two seasons with an elbow injury. When he returned, Steve Young had assumed leadership of the 49ers. Eddie DeBartolo traded Montana to the Kansas City Chiefs in the spring of 1993.

By that time I was divorced, living in Brooklyn with my new girlfriend and getting ready to move to Texas. I would listen on the kitchen radio in San Antonio as Montana made his playoff run that 1993 season with the Chiefs. But the loss the 49ers suffered to the New York Giants in the 1990 NFC Championship that brought the Montana-era to an abrupt end -- I watched the game at a friend's Manhattan basement apartment --would also spell the end of my life as I lived it up until then, a life lugubriously recorded in this "Colt 45 Chronicle." From the spring of 1990 forward I would lead a much more solitary existence. My transition to this new lifestyle and the end of the Joe Montana-era will be told in Shit Stinks, a spontaneous prose document written the summer of 1991. But for now, it's letter number 38.

Winter 1990

Mark!

I'm tardy in my correspondence. Let me explain. I believe that when I wrote you the last time I spent a small amount of space filling you in on my resignation (immediate and verbal) from the polluted Wall Street law offices of DAVIS POLK & WARDWELL. Well, as it all turns out, I was out of work for almost a month, enough time to enjoy the eerie, truly eerie, 49ers devastation of any and all playoff competition. It was so goddamn eerie and alien for me, a dyed-in-the-wool career 49er sufferer and supporter, that I would hit the bourbon and get speech-slurring drunk, being better able to deal with what was going to happen next by looking at it through flannel gauze Jack Daniels glasses. Anyway, it ended joylessly in New Orleans in the most perverse -- most lopsided -- scoring orgy in the history of the Super Bowl.