Your steroids quote of the week comes from John Cole:

You can not convince me that Babe Ruth, that fat bastard, would not have used steroids had it been not against league rules and available. hell, the only difference between Bonds and Ruth would be that rather than put the creme steroid on himself, Ruth would probably have a hooker rub it in.

Note: I am still not with the “No Biggie” Party. But I don’t think they’re self-evidently wrong.

Meanwhile, downblog, our host pours cold water on Redskins (cue Jim Mora soundbite) playoff talk. But he’s not even up with the real irrational exuberance. I say the Redskins are a shoo-in for the Super Bowl. Look at it this way: if they run the table and get to 8-8, various tiebreakers favor them getting into the playoffs. To run the table, they first have to beat the obvious best team in the NFC, Philadelphia, this Sunday night. Well how hard is that, really? It’s already been done once this year, by Pittsburgh, a team with a great defense, a solid running game and a productive young quarterback. The Redskins have a better defense than the Steelers - don’t talk rankings to me; the Redskins defense has achieved what they’ve achieved without the backing of a competent offense until just last week. The Redskins played Phillie close for three quarters with a godawful offense last month. They finally have the right quarterback, who’s improving every week, and the running game has worked something close to half the time. It’s a division game, and those are almost always close. It’s the second division game of the season, which tends to favor whoever lost the first time, and it tends to favor the home team.

So it can be done. It is as good as done.And Philly is the toughest team remaining on Washington’s schedule by far. Minnesota is hollow, Dallas is a psychodrama and San Francisco is reaping the just rewards of running Steve Mariucci and Jeff Garcia out of town: they suck ass. So assuming the Skins can beat Philadelphia, which they already did at the top of this paragraph, the Skins can win the rest of their games. Really, who will stand against them?

Tiebreakers get them into the playoffs. They enter the playoffs on a five-game winning streak. That’s some serious momentum. The only NFC team anyone has to worry about in the playoffs is Philadelphia. But the Redskins already beat Philadelphia. (You remember that from the previous paragraph, right?) It used to be unheard of for a wild card team to get to the Super Bowl, or any team that had to win three games to get there, but it’s become much more common in the last five years. In the NFC, anyway. And the Redskins are an NFC team. We all know Philadelphia chokes in the conference championship game, and there’s nothing special about this year.

Now I’m not crazy enough to tell you that the Redskins will definitely win the Super Bowl. But let’s be realistic. They’re riding an eight-game win streak. They’ve beaten Philadelphia twice. They have to play either Pittsburgh or New England, once Indianapolis chokes in the conference championship game. No rookie quarterback has ever won the Super Bowl. And Bill Cowher - I love the guy, but compare his Super Bowl and conference championship record to Joe Gibbs and see how they stack up. So much for Pittsburgh. The Steeler fan in me weeps to acknowledge the bitter truth to which my inner Redskin fan cleaves.

That leaves New England. New England is a damned good team, no doubt. In fact, in the last fourteen months, only two teams have beaten them. One of them is the Pittsburgh Steelers. Do I need to name the other?

Really, it’s as simple as that.

Postscript: Meanwhile, on Unqualified Offerings, “proto-fascism” considered, with warblogging below. (Scroll down.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 9th, 2004 at 10:23 pm by Mystery Man and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.