Thursday Night Observations

For a Thursday night game, that was a lot of action. My 10 YO daughter stopped into the home office to watch a few minutes with me and saw the two pick sixes on consecutive series. I tried to explain you could go five games and not see one of those, but she wasn’t impressed.

I didn’t have a lot going on — I was happy to see Eno Benjamin and Taysom Hill score for me in different leagues, and I coin-flipped onto the Cardinals -1.5 in my picking pool — but even so it was a surprisingly watchable game.

• Andy Dalton had three picks including the two taken to the house, but one of them was off Marquez Callaway’s hands. He threw some nice balls too, especially the 53-yard TD to Rashid Shaheed. He’s still got it (and by “got it” I mean can be a league-average backup.)

• Alvin Kamara (11-49-0, 9-7-56-0) looked sharp, but gameflow limited his workload. He’s disappointed due to an injury so far, but the upside is largely intact, even if Hill might steal TDs from him.

• Kevin White (1-1-64-0) is apparently still in the league, and still fast.

• Kyle Murray didn’t have to do much due to the two pick sixes. It’s unfortunate he won’t have DeAndre Hopkins (14-10-103-0) and Marquise Brown on the field at the same time for another month or so. Hopkins looked more or less like himself too.

• Eno Benjamin (12-92-1, 5-4-21-0) runs hard for a 207-pound back. James Conner should be back soon, but Benjamin is too good to bury even after Conner returns.

• I didn’t see if anything happened to Rondale Moore (2-1-31-0) but he was non-existent. Zach Ertz (4-2-21-0) didn’t do much more than Moore, either. Maybe Hopkins takes up most of the short throws to Ertz, and they brought in Robbie Anderson, who saw only one target, as a short-term replacement for Brown.