Thursday Night Football Preview: Seahawks @ Cardinals (Week 4, 2025)

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This week we have another divisional matchup between the Arizona Cardinals and the Seattle Seahawks. Both teams are 2-1, but they got there in very different ways. Both teams are tied with the Los Angeles Rams for bottom three spots in the tightly contested NFC West, with only the undefeated San Francisco 49ers having a clear lead over them. The Cardinals began the season on a strong note, narrowly holding on for a 20-13 road victory over New Orleans in Week 1, despite quarterback Kyler Murray dealing with an unknown illness. In Week 3, they suffered a tight 16-15 loss to the 49ers after taking the lead late in the fourth quarter on a safety, only to give up a game winning field goal in the final seconds. This will be the first game of the year that the Cardinals play without running back James Conner, who was carted off the field during the Week 3 loss with a season-ending ankle injury. The Seahawks recovered quickly after starting their season with a narrow 17-13 loss to the 49ers in...

I Have No Wins and I Must Draft (Part 2)

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   Week 15 of the NFL season has come to an end, meaning each team only has three games left before the playoffs. The draft order hasn't changed much since last week, because every team with a top 12 pick lost except for the Jets. Their narrow defeat over the Mac Jones-led Jaguars has pushed them back to the 8th pick in the draft, while the Jaguars moved up to the 4th pick. This doesn't do much to change the way the draft is expected to play out; the Raider and Giants are still going to reach for their QBs, while the teams picking 3rd, 4th and 5th will get to pick the best player available at another position. 

    Looking ahead, there is still a lot of room for this order to be shaken up before the season is over. Over the next two weeks, the Jaguars have games against the Raiders and the Titans. A handful of other teams that are currently sitting close to a .500 record are rolling out new quarterbacks in the near future due to injury or whatever happened to Kirk Cousins, so there is a lot of unpredictable football coming up that could easily result in a big shift in the draft order. 

    If the Patriots, Jaguars, or Panthers end up with the first or second pick overall, you have to think they start getting a lot of calls from the more QB-needy teams looking to trade up and jump the line. Both the Titans and the Browns are also in that category and I have no idea what they're going to do. They're all only one game better than the Raiders and Giants as of right now. If the general consensus is that there are only two QBs worthy of a first round pick, we could very easily see a bidding war to grab one of those two guys as quickly as possible if the Raiders accidentally win a game or two over these last few weeks.

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P.U.L.P. Predictions: Week 2

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Six years ago, someone with too much time on their hands set out to develop a perfect formula to predict the results of NFL games. It didn’t work. Instead, we ended up with a formula we call P.U.L.P. that we use to try and figure out which teams are currently playing the best football. The formula will not be explained here, but we will share with you what it says and how it is doing over the course of the season. This time of year, where there still isn't a ton of data on how teams are playing this season , P.U.L.P. doesn't work much better than flipping a coin to decide a winner. We used last year's final numbers to predict the results for Week 1 , and surprisingly went 9-5 (64% correct) in the games we did predict. While we don't like to give P.U.L.P. credit for retroactively picking winners for games that already happened, it is worth mentioning that it would have picked the Eagles to beat the Cowboys and the Chiefs to beat the Chargers in the first two games of the...
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Gilmore's Still Got More

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   Stephon Gilmore's career looked like it was coming to an end back in 2021. After winning the Super Bowl with the Patriots in 2018 and then winning Defensive Player of the Year in 2019, he finished 2020 with a quadriceps injury and opened the 2021 season on the Physically Unable to Perform list. By October of that year, the 31 year old defensive back was traded to the Carolina Panthers for a sixth round draft pick (which was later used to draft Kayshon Boutte).    Cornerback careers are notorious for coming to sudden ends at a certain age, especially after lower body injuries. The speed that is essential to their position doesn't always fully return, and without the ability to keep up with younger receivers, their drop off is usually pretty steep. Most players in Gilmore's position would quietly fade out of the league within a year or two of that injury and subsequent trade.   Instead, Gilmore beat the odds. He recovered from his quad injury and in t...
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Thursday Night Football Preview: Seahawks @ Cardinals (Week 4, 2025)

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This week we have another divisional matchup between the Arizona Cardinals and the Seattle Seahawks. Both teams are 2-1, but they got there in very different ways. Both teams are tied with the Los Angeles Rams for bottom three spots in the tightly contested NFC West, with only the undefeated San Francisco 49ers having a clear lead over them. The Cardinals began the season on a strong note, narrowly holding on for a 20-13 road victory over New Orleans in Week 1, despite quarterback Kyler Murray dealing with an unknown illness. In Week 3, they suffered a tight 16-15 loss to the 49ers after taking the lead late in the fourth quarter on a safety, only to give up a game winning field goal in the final seconds. This will be the first game of the year that the Cardinals play without running back James Conner, who was carted off the field during the Week 3 loss with a season-ending ankle injury. The Seahawks recovered quickly after starting their season with a narrow 17-13 loss to the 49ers in...
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