NFL Week 12 Status Update: The Fickle Broken Finger Of Fate |

who will defend our biscuits now?

(Ed. note: Mickey is moving today, leaving the safe confines of The Rock–aka Roosevelt Island–for the far more dangerous environs of Tribeca. We will speak well of him at his funeral.)

Smokey: For a moment, put yourself in the year 1919 or 1920. Imagine the situational gravity of living in the era directly following the first World War. Before this war, if some ish when down on your continent you handled yo biznass. You may get a tribe or two from a few fiefdoms over to help you out, but by and large conflicts existed on a comparatively minor scale. That all changed with The Great War; soldiers fought whose homelands were hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. In a way, some of the first seeds of globalization were germinated with the deaths of thousands.

It was in that time and that landscape that some pretty amazing literature was born. One such litfant was “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats. In it, Yeats basically lifts images from Revelations to describe post-war Europe. It’s a dark, depressing exercise in allegory that would seem almost pithy after the Nazis got all uppity. Alas, it did give us this verse:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

Those words strike true in the hearts of countless NFL fans after week 12 of the regular season. The last rays of playoff hopes for a handful of teams fell beneath the horizon of inevitability. Storied franchises like the Redskins and Bills are rudderless (although I have it on good authority that the Bills will spend the rest of their season ruining the rest of your favorite team’s). And despite not having a winless team still around, the bottom of the NFL barrel is looking gamier and more pungent than recent history’s.

For Panthers fans, the news of Jake Delhomme’s “broken” “finger” and Jon Beason’s assault charges are the delightfully oxymoronic “mere anarchy” loosed upon a fanbase that has spent the past eleven months trying to convince themselves that the playoff game against Arizona was a fluke. Hindsight being 50/50, it’s clear now that Jake had an expiration date, and that date was December, 2008, but that doesn’t make the bitter taste in my mouth go away. It just makes the actions of a man as stubborn as John Fox seem downright illogical. Owner Jerry Richardson made some promising moves that signaled to the fans that he was looking to the future, to a world beyond Jake & John. I just pray it comes sooner than later.

For the rest of the league, the center seems to be holding, as the league is rife with mediocrity this year. Week to week, middling teams can look phenomenal or atrocious, and there appears to be no rhyme or reason to it. Crippling injuries haven’t been that big of a story this season, but then again, injuries happen every year. Especially to Chad Pennington.

The murky waters in the Playoff Lagoon are subsiding as we head into our last month of pro football beleaguered and, for some, optimistic. For others, the promise of next year is all there is left to grasp. At this point the phrase “foregone conclusion” creeps into discussions often and the gods will see fit to decree one team tops amongst all other in just over two months. For my money, I like New Orleans (same as I did in my preseason predictions), but honestly, I just love football and will enjoy riding out these last few weeks under the seasoned tutelage of Matt Moore, Beaver extraordinaire.