Live To Fight Another Day

WE LIVE TO WRITE ANOTHER DAY!!!

Lo and behold, our prediction of victory rang true! The Steelers had early jitters and ended up having to play behind for most of the game...the Mile High advantage actually worked for once! The Denver Broncos won again on the foot of Jason Elam, keeping LetPlummerPlay.com alive and reinforcing the legendary phrase “…On Any Given Sunday.” Pumpkin Pie had an above average game despite a couple of ugly picks that nearly ruined everything, even leading a drive halfway up the field (aided by a Steelers penalty) to get Elam in position to be the hero yet again.

We have to admit there’s not much to complain about this week outside of inflated expectations. Hopefully, all the fans screaming “playoffs” will come to their senses. Pittsburgh is pretty good, but they’re not Indianapolis or New England, and the NFL gave the Broncos a gift by scheduling most of their toughest games at Mile High. Amazingly enough there’s still a chance to make the playoffs, simply because San Diego hasn’t hit the hard part of their schedule yet. It doesn’t look like anyone in this division is going to win more than 10 games. For the love of Christmas, Kansas City is in first place, and that team was technically worse than the Broncos before the injuries hit! The Raiders are finding out that Miami game aside, Daunte Culpepper really IS washed up, and we’re about to find out if adding Chris Chambers will be a difference maker for San Diego. The Broncos, inconsistent as they are, have as much a chance of making the playoffs as they do of dropping their next 8 games in a row. That’s nice if you like surprises, we guess.

We won’t rub salt into old wounds this week just because this is a victory and we’re still Broncos fans...duh. However, this hasn’t changed our outlook on the season or the coach one bit. Last night was a young team with low expectations playing over their heads and getting out to a fast start, and the medium-powered Steelers offense isn’t geared to play from behind; they need to grind out early leads or keep games close for 60 minutes. They aren’t going to surprise teams every week. We do think next week is winnable because media is over-hyping a Brett Favre team as usual, and the Packers are coming to Mile High with no running game.

Quite simply, it’s one of those “everyone else” years in the NFL. Parity has made the league so diluted and weak that it comes down to Patriots, Colts...and then everyone else, with only a few lucky games and bad decisions separating the 2-4 teams from the 4-2 teams, and so on. No matter what kind of record the Jags, Giants, Bucs, Chargers, Steelers, Cowboys, or yes, the Broncos put together, they aren’t going to knock off one of the big boys when it matters unless the stars align, or Brady and Manning fall off a cliff in each other’s warm embrace to spite a world that cannot accept their cannon arms and massive charisma. The problem with the Broncos is that if you know you aren’t going to win the Super Bowl, you have to at least look a team that can fool a city. It’s been easy for Shanahan to fool Denver...he’s been doing it for 8 years and running. But there’s less to work with here than usual and the base for the future is iffy. Maybe he’s got the next Joe Montana/Jerry Rice in Jay Cutler/Brandon Marshall. But even if those two develop into very good players, there’s the chance that they end up as Jim Everett/Henry Ellard, which makes for very pretty statistics...and nothing higher than Conference Title losses, which this city has deemed absolutely UNACCEPTABLE to the point of turning on certain otherwise successful parties. Shanahan is not putting a good and consistent team together and he hasn’t done it all decade. They won yesterday as we predicted and his job is safe yet again...but we’ve made other predictions too, and we haven’t been wrong a whole hell of a lot lately. To paraphrase the immortal words of The Wolf: Let’s not start sucking each other’s dicks just yet...even Buffalo won a game yesterday. One win doesn’t fix everything, it just makes Monday morning a little easier to deal with when you’re at the office ragging on a bunch of Raiders and Chargers fans (we run into this quite a bit, and frankly this is one reason we’re sick of Shanahan falling short of the Super Bowl...we want to shut up the prick in the mail room who keeps reminding us--correctly--that the Raiders have more AFC titles in the 21st century than the Broncos.)

Enjoy the small victories, Denver, but the big picture is much bleaker. When the season ends with a fizzle, just make sure you blame the right guy. The TOP guy. And why not puff up your Favorites list by adding:

LET PLUMMER PLAY!!!