Thursday Night Observations

Once in a while I stop to marvel at how much better the NFL product has become. I don’t mean the on-field product — that’s more or less the same — but the fact I can stream a 40-minute edited version of the game in the middle of the Atlantic ocean at the time of my choosing is crazy. I remember watching the CBS and FOX broadcasts of whatever crap local game they televised in LA and waiting for the ticker at the bottom of the screen and highlights to tell me whether my fantasy players had scored.

Then there was DirecTV which was like $150/month and a two-year contract, and you still had to pay $300 for the Sunday Ticket. It was great to get all the games, but expensive, and you had to be at home or at the sports bar where by the afternoon games, you’d be way too drunk to process what was going on. Six hours is a lot of time to be sitting at the bar. And the food was usually greasy and disgusting.

But now I’m sitting in nice hotel lobby lounge at 8 am with headphones on, watching the edited games for 120 euros a year on my laptop. (And the euro is only 97 cents, to boot!)

• Dameon Pierce (27-139-0) ran hard, broke tackles and hit the hole quickly. There were a couple plays where it looked like he had a hole and made the wrong decision, but it’s hard to tell from the TV where you only see part of the defense from the camera angle.

• Davis Mills looks like a quality backup — he’s a professional, but threw a lot of passes behind receivers.

• Miles Sanders (17-93-1) had cavernous holes through which to run for much of the game, though he lost a TD to Kenneth Gainwell.

• AJ Brown (6-4-59-1) almost broke free for a long TD, but caught a short one instead. Dallas Goedert (9-8-100-1) got a lot of targets in the second half. Devonta Smith (2-2-22-0) was not much of a factor.

• Jalen Hurts had a modest game, but the sign of a good fantasy QB is one who gets 243 and 2, even when he doesn’t get many rushing yards and doesn’t record a TD in the first half.

• I picked up Jake Elliott in a league due to the bye weeks, and not only did he badly miss a 54-yard FG attempt at the end of the half, but a Texans penalty on the last PAT, caused the Eagles to go for 2, costing him a fourth point!

• I had the Texans plus 13.5 in my picking pool at least. One down, 12 more to go for the holy grail of the undefeated week.