10 Things You Need to Know: NFL Regular Season Week 10

The 49ers are overcoming every obstacle and are again
considered Super Bowl contenders.

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10.            Sean Payton

By now you all have undoubtedly heard about Sean Payton’s contract situation. Just to clarify for people who may not realize, this is something that happened shortly after Payton and the Saints had agreed on an extension. It did not just happen this week; news of it only surfaced this week.

People are saying that the Cowboys can lure Payton away, which technically is true but I don’t see it happening. The Saints should have their coaching icon back next year after his suspension ends.

9.            Jerry Jones

Jones said a few days ago that by now he would’ve fired himself as General Manager of the Dallas Cowboys. Now he says he doesn’t see himself hiring someone else to perform GM responsibilities, saying that he will maintain his role of Owner, President and General Manager of the Cowboys. This guy seems to get more senile each year.

8.            ‘Giant’ Defensive Issues?

Tom Coughlin said his defensive unit was soft against the Pittsburgh Steelers. I saw a soft defense against the Dallas Cowboys a week earlier. New York was having a lot of issues on defense early in the season as members of their secondary dropped like flies. They seemed to have covered the holes, miraculously considering the personnel they had to replace the usual starters. It seems those holes are flaring up. The Giants are always better in the postseason, and the NFC East is particularly weak this year, so they shouldn’t be too concerned, yet. Still, Giants fans are starting to feel antsy.

7.            Going Bald, in a good way

If you read my Sunday Football Afterword for the early games, you may have clicked the link I provided to Chuck Pagano’s postgame locker room speech. Yesterday, several players on the Indianapolis Colts’ roster shaved their heads in honor of Coach Pagano, who is undergoing treatment for leukemia.

I don’t believe Andrew Luck was one of those who shaved his head, but I imagine he’d look pretty silly if he did that but didn’t shave his caveman beard.

UPDATE (11:20am EST): According to Adam Schefter, Andrew Luck has, in fact, shaved his head. No word on the status of his facial hair.

6.            Fantasy Disappointments

There were plenty of fantasy disappointments this week, so I’ll just list a few that stood out to me.

• The number one player to jump out at me was Percy Harvin. He hadn’t scored fewer than 10.5 points in my league all season, but he put up just two against Seattle. Granted his ankle is bothering him, and because of that he didn’t play this week, still, it’s a fantasy disappointment.
• Titus Young went nuts against Seattle, one of the best secondaries in the league. Everybody scrambled to grab him off the waiver wire, but for what? He scored just three points against a terrible Jaguars team. Hope you didn’t give up anyone important for him.
• The biggest fantasy disappointment of them all? Eli Manning. He has been a disappointment for fantasy owners and has failed to touch 20 points in the past four weeks. But Week 9 was the worst yet. He scored just three points as he threw for no touchdowns and one pick for the second consecutive week. At this rate, Eric, it might be better to start Sam Bradford, and he’s on bye!

5.            Fantasy Surprises

• The obvious starter to this list is Doug Martin. Sure it was his fourth consecutive double-digit week in fantasy, and sure he scored 35.5 points in Week 8. But if anything, that was all the more reason to bench him. Nobody scores that many in consecutive weeks. Nobody, that is, except Doug Martin, who put up 59 points in my fantasy league this past week.
• Brandon Marshall had caught three touchdown passes over four games before hauling in three on Sunday against Tennessee. For his efforts, his owner was awarded 34.5 points in my fantasy league.
• The Saints defense scored 25 points this week. Funny, then, that they are projected to finish this week five points in the red.

4.            Games to Watch

Like last week, I’ll be more specific on why these are the biggest games to watch in my predictions post tomorrow.

• Tennessee Titans at Miami Dolphins (Sunday, 1:00 p.m.)
• Detroit Lions at Minnesota Vikings (Sunday, 1:00 p.m.)
• Atlanta Falcons at New Orleans Saints (Sunday, 1:00 p.m.)
• St. Louis Rams at San Francisco 49ers (Sunday, 4:25 p.m.)
• Houston Texans at Chicago Bears (Sunday, 8:20 p.m.)

3.            Power Rankings

For the sake of space, I will list just the top 6 and the bottom 6 here. You can see the rest on NFL.com.

1. Atlanta Falcons	27. Oakland Raiders
2. Houston Texans	28. Tennessee Titans
3. Chicago Bears	29. Buffalo Bills
4. San Francisco 49ers	30. Cleveland Browns
5. Green Bay Packers	31. Jacksonville Jaguars
6. Baltimore Ravens	32. Kansas City Chiefs

The Saints and Panthers made fairly significant jumps after winning their third and second games, respectively. Other than that, several teams jumped or fell a couple of spots but by and large the landscape looks much the same in the NFL.com Power Rankings.

The Power Poll is a better representation of where the teams stack up, in my opinion. Check that out here.

2.            Atlanta Falcons

The Falcons are the near-unanimous number one team in the NFL according to NFL.com’s Power Poll. They are still undefeated after run-ins with the Eagles and Cowboys in consecutive weeks. Now they face a New Orleans team with a level of confidence few thought they would have at this point in the season. Oh yeah, and the game is in the Superdome. If they win this, they might not lose the rest of the way.

1.            San Francisco 49ers

The 49ers are the one team that stole away a first-place vote from the Atlanta Falcons on the NFL.com Power Poll. They’ve lost a couple of games, but they continue to fight back and not let those losses change their attitude heading into the following week. In a stacked NFC, the 49ers are here to stay in 2012.

Sunday Football Afterword: Week 5 Early Games

The Colts earned an emotional win just a week after learning
head coach Chuck Pagano is fighting leukemia.

There were plenty of headlines to make Sunday’s games exciting, even when the games themselves weren’t so much.

Baltimore played to a 9-6 win in Kansas City, hardly a must-watch game. Baltimore gave up 140 rushing yards to Jamaal Charles, but Kansas City turned the ball over four times. It was possibly the most boring game of the day, despite several blowouts during the later games. Matt Cassel went down with a head injury, and the crowd began cheering. It is still not apparent if the cheering was for Cassel getting injured, for Brady Quinn entering the game, or for Cassell when he got up and was leaving the field, but it was enough to send one Chiefs player on a tirade about football players not being gladiators.

I fully expected Cincinnati to beat Miami, but not only did Andy Dalton continue his streak of consecutive games to start a season with at least one interception (don’t worry Redskins fans, he’s nowhere near your record), he threw two picks on the game, the second one on Cincinnati’s last drive of the game. Miami won 17-13.

Cleveland forced an early Ahmad Bradshaw fumble and turned it into seven points on a powerful Trent Richardson run. A few minutes later a big touchdown pass gave Cleveland a 14-0 lead and suddenly everyone in America was put on upset alert. It was all for naught as Eli Manning kept his cool and led his team to a 41-27 rout of the still-winless Browns.

Michael Vick’s turnover issues seemed gone after Philadelphia’s best game of the young season, a legitimate victory over the Giants in Week 4. They came back in full force yesterday as he fumbled twice and Pittsburgh won on a game-winning field goal by Shaun Suisham.

Atlanta and Washington played one of the more exciting games of the day. Washington had their best defensive game of the season, and it came against one of the best offenses in the NFC. For once it was their offense that struggled at times, especially on third down. Robert Griffin III went down in the third quarter with a concussion (the Redskins could be in trouble about how they reported it, though) and Kirk Cousins came in and threw a 77-yard touchdown pass for his first career touchdown. He struggled afterwards, mostly due to a worn-out offensive line not giving him time to set, and threw two interceptions that kept a possible comeback from forming. Atlanta is now 5-0 for the first time in franchise history and the Redskins have lost 8 consecutive home games. They play Minnesota at home next week.

The biggest story line from the early games came out of Indianapolis. In a storybook ending, the Colts overcame several lead changes to beat the Packers and secure a game ball for hospitalized head coach Chuck Pagano, who was diagnosed with a treatable form of Leukemia last weekend. Reggie Wayne, who had ties to Pagano from his college days and accepted a smaller contract than he deserved in order to stay in Indianapolis and play for Pagano, has a career-high 212 receiving yards, including several key plays in the fourth quarter while battling cramps.

Keep Coach Pagano in your prayers. The form of leukemia he is battling is one that many adults have been known to recover from, but there is no telling how late he may have been in getting it diagnosed. To show your support, include the hashtag #CHUCKSTRONG on tweets.

Check back a few hours for my recap of the later games. Tomorrow I will publish my recap of tonight’s Monday Night Football matchup between the unbeaten Houston Texans and the reeling New York Jets, who have said they plan to make more use of Tim Tebow in the game.