The CHFF first-response team: Week 3!

The sexy, bikini-clad Cold, Hard Football Facts first-response team races to the rescue following the conclusion of the afternoon Week 3 games, administering CPR to to the plastic blow-up dolls of pigskin analysis found at the lesser sites, while saving you from a heart-stopping plague of ignorance.

 

As you know, we've been huge BrettFavre supporters ever since BrettFavre invented football at Southern Mississippi back in 1991. BrettFavre is the greatest man ever ... even greater than Swayze.

 

Plus, BrettFavre is still alive. He will never die. He will return to play quarterback for the Packers in 2053, at age 84.

 

We got further proof of his immortality here in Week 3. It's an immortality the Cold, Hard Football Facts have supported unwaveringly since like ever and ever.

 

BrettFavre absolutely pulled a rabbit out of his hat in Week 3. He had faltered for much of the fourth quarter, as the visiting 49ers clung to a 24-20 lead in a battle of up-and-coming NFC heavyweights. With 1:49 to play, BrettFavre even threw a pass straight into the hands of 49ers cornerback Dre Bly that should have been an easy score and a 31-20 lead for San Francisco in the final seconds.

 

But Bly dropped the ball.

 

And then given one more chance at life, BrettFavre, the NFL's own version of Rasputin (minus the roguish good looks), fired a gorgeous 32-yard scoring strike – seriously, one of the best passes he's ever thrown – to Greg Lewis for a game-winning TD at the back of the end zone with 2 seconds to play.

 

The Vikings now are officially legit. And our unquestioned love since the dawn of time for BrettFavre has never been greater.

 

"Sometimes there's still just magic in sports and he may have done it again!" screamed orgasmic NFL Red Zone announcer Scott Hanson as BrettFavre pulled out the home victory for the heavily favored Vikings. "Now I know why I stood in his driveway for 10 days this summer!"

 

 

Crabtree was San Francisco's No. 1 pick in the 2009 draft, but until now he's seemed content to just piss away his rookie season in a holdout for more money.

 

As you and we and everybody but Crabtree seems to know, holding out as a rookie is almost never a good move.

 

The last major rookie holdout was Raiders quarterback JaMarcus Russell. His career has been a disaster.

 

Now in his third NFL season, the physical phehom out of LSU has thrown just 16 TD passes in his NFL career. His 2009 season his shaping up to be yet another disaster for him and for the Raiders.

 

Oakland was smoked at home Sunday by the Broncos, 23-3, and through three games Russell has put up the following stat line:

This is a guy taken with the No. 1 overall pick in 2007. Must be something about the Bay Area water.

 

The Redskins lost 19-14 to a Lions team Sunday that had suffered 19 straight losses dating all the way back to December 2007 and fielded one of the worst defenses ever to talk God's Green FieldTurf.

 

It's the most embarrassing loss the Redskins franchise has suffered since being blown out by the Bears, 73-0, in the 1940 championship game.

 

(The 38-9 loss to the Raiders in Super Bowl XVIII is a close third.)

 

We didn't pick Detroit to win this week. We're not going to pretend we did. The Lions had not only suffered 19 straight losses -- all but three of them had been losses by at least one TD.

 

But we did tell you that the Redskins offense was a huge liability this year. In fact, the way we put it, the 2009 Redskins were more imbalanced than Charles Manson. We also said that "the lack of a franchise quarterback will haunt the Redskins this year."

 

In fact, if there's on point we hammered home during the off-season, it was our utter confusion that the Redskins would dump so much time and so many resources into shoring up what was one of the league's top defenses in 2008, while ignoring an offensive unit that was in desperate need of help. (They made one of the big off-season signings in DT Albert Haynesworth, but made almost no moves on offense.)

 

Well, if you didn't believe in our wisdom back in July and August, you certainly must see the wisdom of this position here at the end of September.

 

The Redskins last week eked out an embarrassing 9-7 win over the pathetic Rams, before hitting rock-bottom this week with their loss to the Lions.

 

That's 23 points of offense for Washington in two games against two of the worst teams in modern NFL history – with one very bad win and a humilating loss in the record books.

 

The Gridiron Gods were kind to the Redskins, giving them back-to-back games early in the season against teams that were a combined 2-34 last year. The Redskins emerge from those two games (and a Week 1 loss to the Giants) with a 1-2 record and the possibility that they're the worst team in football.

 

Last week, we issued our first Golden Nuggets award to Jets cornerback Kerry Rhodes for mouthing off against a team, the Patriots, that had owned his team for the past decade, but then delivering in crunch time.

 

This week the tables are turned as the Golden Nuggets award goes to New England coach Bill Belichick.

 

His Hall of Fame quarterback was once again wholly ineffective (6.6 YPA and 1 TD on 42 pass atempts)  and the offense sputtered more often than a 1957 Edsel (four field goals on five red zone trips). But with the game still on the line, Belichick put his Golden Nuggets out on the field when the Patriots faced 4th and 1 at their own 24 in the third quarter, clinging to a 16-10 lead over the red-hot 2-0 Falcons.

 

A failure to convert would have been a disaster.

 

But the Patriots picked up the first down deep in their own territory thanks to a 2-yard run by Sammy Morris. They also converted a 4th and 3 later in the drive, before settling for a field goal and a 19-10 lead.

 

The Patriots scored again for a 26-10 win. But the game easily could have turned on that single play, with a 4th down deep in their own territory – failure giving the Falcons an easy opportunity regain the lead.

 

We were a little concerned with the situation that the new Browns coach inherited when he took over this year: as we stated, it was a dysfunctional franchise in recent years with a rabid but disappointed fan base and a full-blown quarterback controversy. In fact, our exact words were, "talk about a guy who inherits a big ball of sh*t."

 

One point we made was that it would be a long season if Mangini didn't handle the QB controversy well.

 

But maybe that was unfair to Mangini. Maybe he really didn't have many options.

 

Brady Quinn, who got the starting nod since week 1, was once again ineffective in Cleveland's crushing 34-3 loss to Baltimore. He completed 6 of 8 for 34 yards with 1 pick on Sunday. That's 4.25 YPA for those of you keeping score at home.

 

Quinn was replaced at halftime by Derek Anderson, the guy he fought with for the starting job all off-season. Anderson promptly threw three picks – granted in desperation mode – but also proving that he's not the answer, either.

 

The Browns are now 0-3 and appear to be without a true No. 1 quarterback. As we all know, a team without a true No. 1 QB is a team without hope. Plus, the offense is bad and getting worse: 20 points scored in Week 1; 6 points in Week 3; 3 points in Week 3. That's an average of 9.7 PPG and at this point the Browns will score -52 points by Week 7.

 

Other than that, the Mangini Era is off to a good start.

 

We killed it in Week 1. We got our ass kicked in Week 2.

 

But so far Week 3 is looking up for the predictive pigskin powers of the Cold, Hard Football Facts.

 

Heading into the Monday night Carolina-Dallas, we are 10-5 straight up and a sterling 10-5 ATS picking games in Week 3.

 

We'll update these standings after the MNF game. But, as of this moment, we are 31-16 straight up and 25-22 ATS here in the 2009 season.

 

The Dolphins were the great surprise story of 2008, rebounding from a historic 1-15 season in 2007 to win the AFC East with an 11-5 mark in 2008.

 

Today they're 0-3, follwing their 23-13 loss at San Diego.

 

Maybe you're not impressed with the amazing consistency of Indy (2-0 heading into Sunday night), New England (2-1 after an impressive 26-10 win over a very good Atlanta team) or Philly (2-1 after smoking the Chiefs like a pigskin Pall Mall), but these teams represent historical anomalies: teams that find ways to win year in and year out.

 

The Dolphins are the norm, up one year, down the next. And the norm, from the point of view of success-starved fans, sucks.

 

Speaking of consistent winners, the Steelers are usually on the list.

 

But it's officially time to worry in Steel Town. The Steelers took overtime in Week 1 to beat the Titans, 13-10. The Titans, by the way, are now 0-3 following their loss this week to the Jets.

 

The Steelers lost in Week 2 to a questionable Chicago team, 17-14.

 

And this week they suffered a humiliating loss in Cincinnati, 23-20, getting outscored 13-0 in the fourth quarter.

 

Pittsburgh has plenty of time to recover. But out of the three big AFC powers of the 21st century (with Indy and New England), the Steelers are the team that's clearly struggling the most out of the gate here in 2009. One win over a winless team is not a good trend.

 

Have you seen the commercials for this thing? It's supposed to be a combination grill and cooler sent to us from the future by our pals at Anheuser-Busch.

 

We thought it was a joke. But it turns out this thing is real ... and real cheesy.

 

They have a Bud Light "grooler" for sale over with our pals at Wolly Wine near the cardboard-box world headquarters in lovely downtown Wollaston, Mass.

 

The grooler is so cheesy that CHFF bon vivant Frankie C. should use it as a pick-up line. The commercials tout it as "tailgate tested, tailgate approved." But after looking at the chintzy quality of Third World plastics used to build the thing, we're fairly certain that any attempt to build heat in the "Grooler" would melt the thing in a black, stinking smoky pool of polyethylene, poisoning everybody within a 50-yard radius.

Other than that the Grooler looks pisser! In fact, it reminds us of the Browns offense.