We called it a week for the dogs in our Friday picks. And the awful Week 5 schedule certainly lived down to the lack of hype: the NFL saw more blowouts this week than Goodyear did at the Fontana 500.

 

Six of Sunday's 13 so-called "contests" were decided by three touchdowns or more and some sad-sack fans were subjected to Cleveland's 6-3 loosely defined "win" over Buffalo that left a bad taste in the mouths of all decent, lakefront Otto Graham-fearing football fans. 

 

Only three games pitted winning teams and, salvaging the week, two actually delivered on the promise: Cincy-Baltimore went down to the wire and it shook up the AFC power structure, while Denver outlasted New England in overtime, 20-17, in a game that had all the atmosphere of a January playoff battle, right down to the frigid weather.

 

 

Our critics like to jump down our throat for every misstep, whether real or just existing in their fragile, fact-less, fantasy-filled minds. But our biggest misstatement of the past year might have been one that nobody called us on: our declaration that it was all over for Marvin Lewis.

 

The Bengals were 0-8 halfway through the 2008 season, but did manage to muddle through a 4-3-1 second half against an embarrassingly week schedule.

 

“Only in Cincinnati,” somebody here who shall remain nameless wrote, “does a 4-11-1 record save your job.”

 

But apparently that 4-3-1 stretch was no fluke. The Bengals are suddenly 4-1 and standing all alone in first place in the dogfight that is the AFC North. The Bengals are also 3-0 in the division, with a pair of Quality Wins in the last three weeks over a pair of pre-season favorites: the Ravens and the (very vulnerable looking) defending-champ Steelers.

 

Baltimore, meanwhile, is suddenly a second-rate club. They began the season with an impressive 3-0 performance – but against bad teams. Their opponents those three weeks, Kansas City, San Diego and Cleveland, are a combined 3-11. The Ravens, meanwhile, are now 3-2, losing two straight tough battles to Quality Teams (New England, Cincinnati).

 

Despite an early slate of games so embarrassing that even we were ashamed of them – and you're talking to a guy who goes to fancy new restaurants in his dress hoodie – the Cold, Hard Football Facts delivered once again with our weekly picks.

 

We went 6-2 straight up and 6-2 ATS in the eight games of the early hour, then a nice, even 3-1 and 3-1 in the four late games. And, of course, we pretty much nailed Indy's big win over Tennessee Sunday night. We anticipated a 33-20 Colts win. The actual final score was 31-9. 

 

That performance makes us 10-3 straight up and a stunning 10-3 ATS this week heading into the Jets-Dolphins Monday Night Football game.)

 

With only one game left his week, we’re 52-23 (.693) straight up this season and a brilliant 43-32 (.573) ATS.

 

We've posted winning records ATS in Weeks 1, 3, 4 and 5, failing only in Week 2.

 

We’re a half-point away from being 11-2 ATS this week. The Panthers were 3.5-point favorites against Washington. We predicted, only half jokingly, a 6-2 Carolina win – just enough to cover.

 

Instead, the Panthers won, 20-17, and we lost our roll of the dice.

However, our predictive powers are so astute that the game did deliver a rare safety, much like we expected there would be in this battle of fourth-rate offenses. However, the safety was recorded by the Panthers, not the Redskins, when Clinton Portis was taken down in his own end zone.

 

Pretty much everybody on Planet Pigskin knew that the Giants would destroy the pathetic Raiders.

 

We knew it would be a blowout – easily beating the massive 13.5-point spread – because it was a mega-blowout statistically in the passing game. And in the NFL, the passing game tells you everything.

We were so convinced that this mismatch of historic proportions in the respective passing games would go New York’s way that we predicted the biggest blowout in NFL history – a 74-0 pounding that would have surpassed the 73-0 whipping the Bears laid on the Redskins in the 1940 NFL championship game.

 

It didn’t quite work out that way – the Giants won convincingly, but not in record-setting fashion, 44-7.

 

But for a while in the first half it looked like it would go our way. The Giants were up 21-0 at the end of the first quarter. It was a pace, as our readers noticed, that put them on track for a 92-0 win. New York even took a 28-0 lead early in the second quarter, before the Raiders put their only points of the day on the board. (It should be noted that the Oakland score, a 5-yard Michael Bush run, was a gift: it came after a muffed punt by Sinorice Moss that the Raiders recovered on New York’s 15.)

 

We knew it would be one of the greatest mismatches on the field this season because it was one of the greatest mismatches in the passing game we’ll see this season.

 

But JaMarcus Russell almost actually played well by his standards. He completed 8 of 13 passes (that’s more than 50 percent completions, for those of you keeping score at home) for 100 yards, 0 TD and – shocker! – 0 INT. Those numbers add up to 7.7 YPA and an 85.3 rating – spectacular numbers by Russell's pathetic, Stone Age standards.

 

His best previous performance this year was a 48.5 passer rating last week against a bad Texans defense.

 

But he was no match for Eli Manning:

It was one of the most brutally effective, old-school-style efforts games we’ve seen from a quarterback since Bart Starr tore up the Giants in the 1961 championship game.

 

• Tennessee – 5.39 PYPA (0-5)
• Detroit – 5.36 PYPA (1-4)
• Buffalo – 5.17 PYPA (1-4)
• Carolina – 5.10 PYPA (1-3)
• San Francisco – 4.99 PYPA (3-2)
• St. Louis – 4.83 PYPA (0-5)
• Tampa Bay – 4.79 PYPA (0-5)
• Kansas City – 4.72 PYPA (0-5)
• Miami – 4.29 PYPA (1-3)
• Cleveland – 4.13 PYPA (1-4)
• Oakland – 3.96 PYPA (1-4)

As CHFF readers may know – and probably don’t care – I’ve been on the road pretty much every weekend this season.

 

And when people do strange things, like schedule Raiders vs. Giants or turn genetically modified fruit into boats, I want to be there.

 

This weekend it was a trip to Damariscotta, Maine, a 370-year-old shipbuilding, fishing and farming town of 2,000 people in the Midcoast, for the big Pumpkin Regatta.

 

That’s right, the Pumpkin Regatta. They grow huge pumpkins up here – so plump and round that they remind me of some of CHFF bon vivant Frankie C.'s high school conquests. Then they hollow out the pumpkins, attach a boat motor and race the giant gourds down the Damariscotta River.

 

The event is run by Friends of the Facts like Bill Clark and Buzz Pinkham (pictured here Sunday in his speedy orange pumpkin vessel and wool pumpkin-top hunting cap, complete with green stem-top). Clark, for his part, boasted the Maine pumpkin-growing record until just surpassed this year (some other Downeaster grew a 1,218-pound pum'kin).

 

You'd think these guys are a bunch of toothless, redneck hillbillies – spending their days drinking home brew, growing pumpkins and sleeping with their relatives. In fact, they do dress and act like a bunch of drunken country rubes, and they do make huge batches of homebrew (with a certain web publisher's in-laws at Alewives & Ales), and they do sleep with their relatives ... among the 2,000 people in town, they share no more than three different last names. Also, half the towns-men have first names like Eephus and Ezra, as if the evolution of baby names ended in this part of the world back in 1862.

 

But looks and thick, unintellgible Downeast accents – "A-yuh, Ebenezer, sure is a fi-en batch of pun'kin homebrew ya got thay-ere" – can be deceiving:  Pinkham runs a successful business and Clark is a project engineer at Bath Iron Works, helping design and build the U.S. Navy’s state-of-the-art destroyer fleet.

 

So attaching a little outboard to a gourd and racing it down the river is a piece of pumpkin pie. Convincing the wife to put up with it and the entire town to come out and watch? ... Well, that's a gift.

 

Hey, BrettFavre is awesome!

 

Kyle Boller is not.

 

Now that we got that bit of news out of the way, the race for 0-16 again is on, this time moving from Detroit to St. Louis, and we truly believe the Rams have what it doesn’t take to win a game.

 

But now we want more than winless – we want the blood of history on our hands. The 1977 Buccaneers, for example, hold the modern NFL record for offense-less-ness, scoring an average of 7.36 PPG. The 2009 Rams right now have scored 34 points in five games – an average of 6.8 PPG.

 

It's worth noting that the 1977 Buccaneers set an NFL record with 26 consecutive defeats (14 in 1976, plus their first 12 in 1977). The Rams are in the midst of a 15-game losing streak and would match Tampa's record with a winless season here in 2009. 

 

Given the fact that 1977 was the depths of the Dead Ball Era, and the fact that we live today in an era where most teams score like frat boys on spring break in Daytona, anything below 10.0 PPG would be, relatively speaking, just as bad as the expansion Bucs. But we want to leave no doubt.

 

 

But it won't be easy: to reach 0-16 and match the 26 losses of the 1977 Bucs, St. Louis must first undercome an un-formidable non-obstacle in the Lions on Nov. 1.

 

The Seahawks enjoyed a shocking 41-0 win over the Jeckyl-&-Hyde Jags, but the NFC West, once again, looks like it will be the worst the NFL has to offer here in 2009.

 

I just took a look at our brand-new Quality Standings through the end of Sunday's game, and here's how the divisions stack up.

 

The AFC West is a bit deceptive, as Denver, fresh off its 20-17 win over the Patriots, is the only team in the league with three Quality Wins. The rest of the divsion is 0-8 vs. winning teams. The AFC South also looks weak, too. The Colts are 5-0, but even their most ardent supporters must admit that the schedule has been soft. Indy has yet to face a single Quality Team.

• NFC North — 3-6 (.333)
• AFC East — 3-7 (.300)
• NFC South — 3-7 (.300)
• AFC West — 3-8 (.273)
• NFC East — 1-4 (.200)
• AFC North — 2-9 (.182)
• AFC South — 0-5 (.000)
• NFC West — 0-9 (.000)

The pack of dogs here in Week 5 was so bad that, in my corner of the world, CBS finally cut away from the Raiders-Giants debacle around halftime to give us … Steelers-Lions! Ouch.

 

The score was 28-13 when CBS finally cut away from the Pittsburgh-Detroit so-called "contest" to give us the fourth quarter of the only decent game of the hour, the Ravens-Bengals battle for AFC North supremacy.

 

Bad day for the networks, in other words, and a bad day for us football fans.

 

 

 

This week’s honor for the shiniest nuggets in the NFL goes to Bengals receiver Chad Ochocinco.

 

Late in Cincy’s game-winning drive, Ochocinco was going across the middle of the field and was laid out with a ferocious hit by no less an intimidating force than Ray Lewis. Ochocinco's helmet went flying off his head so quickly that we had visions of a certain headless Hessian along the Hudson.

 

Lewis is so scary that we build a fort of couch cushions and hide under our blankies everytime we see him interviewed. But Ochocinco leaped right up and starting jawing, as if he suffered nothing less than a bump in a pillow fight. The drive ended with a game-winning score: Carson Palmer's 20-yard TD pass to Andre Caldwell. Believe it or not, it was Palmer's longest TD toss in nearly two years.

 

In a physical and metaphorical sense, Ochocinco's reaction to the big-time hit sent a message to the Ravens and to the rest of the league: You won't have the Bungles to kick around anymore.

 

We had the foresight to write off the 2009 Cowboys back in the off-season. And we told you on Friday that the winless Chiefs would stay close with the overrated ‘Boys. In fact, we predicted a Dallas victory by a score of 26-21.

 

The Cowboys won 26-20 – our prediction was off by just one point – and took overtime to do it against a very bad Kansas City team.

 

It looks to us like the Dallas season could be over already. Their only wins have come against Tampa, Carolina and Kansas City – opponents who are a combined 1-14.

 

Let's face it: given performances like Sunday's OT win against the Chiefs, a team that lost to the Raiders!, the overhyped Cowboys have no shot of competing this year for post-season hardware.

 

The Curse of Flutie will continue to haunt Wade Phillips wherever he goes, giving it supremacy over the Curse of the Cuyahoga once again this week.