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In my annual preseason prediction post, I predicted New England would play Seattle for all the marbles.  I also predicted New England would win.  Now, the first part of my prediction has come true, and I’ve been trying the last two weeks to come up with some way for the second part to come true.

It’s frankly hard for me to imagine how the old dynasty from the East can topple the budding dynasty of the West.  In the preseason, I’d actually expected the New England defense to be better than they are.  They’re good, don’t get me wrong–they’re the best one Belichick has had since 2004, the last time he won a title.  But the Seattle defense is awesome; downright scary.

So, how about the offenses? New England has a nice, creative, balanced attack.  Gronkowski is probably the best tight-end ever.  Their running game is very strong, and they seem to have learned that the passing game alone won’t win championships.  That’s a solid team.

But remember, this Seattle defense shut down one of the all time greatest passing offenses last year.  Granted, New England is more balanced than Denver was.  But still,  the Legion of Boom can handle Gronkowski with their own physical freaks on defense, and give Julian Edelman the same kind of nightmare game they gave Wes Welker a year ago.

When Seattle has the ball, New England will probably be able to stack the line against Marshawn Lynch and stop him running the ball.  Belichick is a master at taking away an opposing team’s number one weapon.  And their talented defensive backs can no doubt handle Seattle’s decent but unspectacular receivers one-on-one.

So, that sounds like a stalemate, right?  Seattle’s defense shuts down New England’s offense, and New England’s defense shuts down Seattle’s offense.  We’re looking at a 3-2 affair, are we?

Not quite.  There’s another factor here, which is Russell Wilson’s ability to run–and Tom Brady’s inability to do the same.  New England may stop Lynch, and they may stop Wilson’s throwing, but they’ll be hard pressed to do all that and keep Wilson in the pocket.  Advantage: Seattle.

The deck is clearly stacked against New England.  The match-up favors Seattle. It’s too bad, because this is the most complete team they’ve had since ’04.  They would crush either of the New York teams that broke their hearts their last two trips.  But sadly for them, this Seattle team is way better than those teams.

But even so, there is a path to victory for New England, even though they are distinctly the underdog.  As usual, I’m advising they go run-heavy. (As I did the last time they were in this game.) But not just hammering it between the tackles with Blount and Gray, though some of that is in order. No, they need to try something a bit more devious than that.

I’m thinking “wildcat” formation here–and various other trick plays.  Stuff Seattle has not seen and hasn’t practiced against.  Intersperse that with a few quick, short passes–ideally to Gronkowski, since he’ll hopefully be better able to with stand the hard-hitting style of the Seattle secondary.

Like I advised in my post-mortem on Denver last year:  defenses have the advantage in these games, so if you want to have a chance, you’ve got to be bold, and empty the playbook.  They’re going to be ready for your standard offense; so your only chance is to show them an offense they haven’t seen before.

Bottom line: Seattle is the better team, but Belichick is the better coach, and I’m thinking he’s learned from his mistakes in the last two championships games his teams have lost.  He’s coaching for his legacy in this game, as he has been all this post-season, and as in the Baltimore game, he’s going to pull out all the stops.  The pick here is that the sly old coach has a few more tricks up his sleeve–enough to make my preseason prediction hold up:

NE: 19

SEA: 17

 

 

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I only watched President Obama’s speech and part of Senator Ernst’s response; I didn’t see any of the other many response speeches various Republicans gave.

Overall, I thought Obama’s speech was good, and Ernst’s was pathetic. And I’m not even commenting on content here; since what politicians say frequently has hardly any bearing on what they do.  I am strictly reviewing them both in terms of their rhetorical skill here.

There was one thing both of them did that I found annoying, although it’s incredibly common in political speeches, so I guess it’s unfair of me to pick on these two for it.  But I’m going to.  Politics isn’t fair.

First, in Obama’s speech, he said:

It begins with our economy.  Seven years ago, Rebekah and Ben Erler of Minneapolis were newlyweds.    She waited tables.  He worked construction…  “If only we had known,” Rebekah wrote to me last spring, “what was about to happen to the housing and construction market.”

As the crisis worsened, Ben’s business dried up, so he took what jobs he could find, even if they kept him on the road for long stretches of time… They sacrificed for each other.  And slowly, it paid off.

Now, I get what Obama’s trying to do here, rhetorically. He’s trying to take a macro point (“the economy was bad, but it is getting better”) and illustrate it using a micro-instance of two particular people.  He explicitly said this later on: “America, Rebekah and Ben’s story is our story.”

This isn’t a bad technique.  In fact, it can be a very good technique.  But it’s overused.  I think Obama uses it almost every speech he gives.  And it’s getting to be just too much of a cliche.  This isn’t a criticism of the couple’s story, by the way; I’m happy for them.  But Obama’s use of telling these stories has crossed from being a good way of making things “relate-able” to being something the audience can start tuning out, because we’ve heard this before.

Watching the State of the Union, I felt like I’ve seen this speech before. Like it’s the same speech every year. And part of it is due to that same “John Smith did XYZ, and that’s what makes America great” style.  It gets to feel like it’s formulaic.

Then we have Ernst’s speech, in which she said early on:

You see, growing up, I had only one good pair of shoes. So on rainy school days, my mom would slip plastic bread bags over them to keep them dry.

But I was never embarrassed. Because the school bus would be filled with rows and rows of young Iowans with bread bags slipped over their feet.

Again, she’s going with the same technique, although she did a much worse job than Obama of explaining the relevance of this to her point. Even if she had though, it would really make for compelling imagery. As it was, she reminded me of Governor Bobby Jindal’s awful State of the Union response from a few years ago.
I’m sure this technique of telling these little stories to illustrate the point was useful, back in the days when politicians would give dry speeches full of numbers and such.  It made your speech stand out.  But now, it’s such a common thing that it’s gotten to be overused, and when something is overused, people don’t pay attention to it.  I suspect a drier, more statistics-filled speech would get more attention (not to mention being better suited to Ernst’s speaking style).

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So, I got the game Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as a gift.  When it came out years ago, I mentioned I didn’t care for the sword-and sorcery fantasy-setting, which was why I didn’t get it earlier, even as it won tons of Game Of The Year awards.

I still don’t care for the setting, but I will admit that it is so beautiful and atmospheric I can kind of get past that–it is a seriously gorgeous game, and it is really fun just to wander around the huge open-world with no aim, admiring the scenery.

But of course, this is a Bethesda production, so the minute you start to run into anything related to the plot or characters, things get silly.  The major issue so far in the game is that dragons are attacking the land for some reason, even though everyone thought they had been destroyed a long time ago. The opening sequence of the game involves a dragon attack, which is a shock to all the characters around.

Naturally, we learn that the player character is special, being a “dragonborn”, which gives them the power to absorb dragon souls, or something.  And of course there is a prophecy about it all.  (First rule of fantasy: there is always a prophecy. I guess they make their prophets in volume.)

My character has already been in five or six battles with dragons, and won all of them by hitting the dragon with a hammer when it lands ten yards away.  This makes the dragons seem, frankly, stupid. They could win continually if they just stayed up in the air, or perched somewhere I couldn’t get at them with my hammer.  But no, they obligingly allow themselves to be drawn into my kind of fight. It’s the “Cthulhu Problem” all over again.

Then there is the dialogue.  In one town that I rolled into while running away from monsters, there is some mystery that has to do with a house being burned down.  The locals are too afraid to investigate, because they are, according to the “Jarl” (the executive of the town) “too superstitious”.

I wanted to say to the Jarl “Of course they are!  We live in a world where dragons attack people and sorcerers openly summon evil spirits.  Just yesterday I was attacked by a gang of reanimated skeletons.  You’d be an idiot not to be superstitious in this world!”

(The house mystery, by the way, turns out to be the fault of vampires. And the clues to solving it are provided by ghosts. Yeah, I’d say the people are right to be superstitious.)

Also, there is the recurring problem of people saying essentially “well, hello there, heavily-armed stranger who just ran in three seconds ago from the vast wilderness populated by legions of bandits and bloodthirsty monsters. Here are all the secret intrigues and problems of everyone in town.. Please help fix them.”  This problem is to some extent inevitable in a game like this, but I think it could still be handled more deftly.

And then there is the criminal justice system in Skyrim.  It’s set up so the guards will attack you if you commit crimes against the people of a given town.  Neat idea, but I don’t see how it is that stealing a carrot can be punishable by death, whereas hitting the Jarl in the face with a sword can be forgiven if you put the sword down afterwards. (And yes, Fallout: New Vegas suffered from this too, a bit.)

In short, so far it seems to be Fallout 3 all over again, only more so:  awesome scenery and landscape, laughable character interactions, plot and dialogue.  And like Fallout 3, I’m having fun with it.  More than I expected actually.  If they had only gotten Obsidian Entertainment to write it, they would have had another masterpiece on their hands.

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NE: 30

IND: 17

New England has run the ball all over the Colts the last two times they’ve met, so I’m expecting them to surprise them by coming out throwing the ball this time.  That’s what I’d do anyway–then run the ball in the second half to wear them down.  I expect Luck to run for quite a few yards, but Revis will shut down the passing game.

SEA: 33

GB: 14

Green Bay is a very good team that has the misfortune of going up against a superb team on the road.  I like the Pack, but the Seattle defense is going to do to them what they did to Denver last year. 

Now that that is out of the way, I want to talk about Peyton Manning.  The guy needs to retire.  I could see it in Denver’s Monday night loss to Cincinnati back in December. Heck, I could already see it some of the dreadful passes he threw last year in the last two games of the postseason.

It’s not that he’s playing badly, exactly.  His knowledge of how to exploit a defense is still unmatched.  It’s a testament to what a great student of the game he is that he managed to lead one of the greatest passing attacks in history last year, in spite of having horribly diminished arm strength. They perfected the screen game. But now he just can’t put the ball where he knows it needs to go.  He’s started off strong the last two years, but he wears down before the season is over. 

It’s sad, because he still has the mental game completely mastered–he’s probably the best ever at reading a defense. But he just can’t physically throw the ball well anymore. He should retire and become Denver’s offensive coordinator.

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NE: 20

BAL: 16

I picked them to win it all this year–I can’t go away from it now, even if the matchup is horrible.

IND: 42

DEN: 28

Manning is wearing out, and Luck is the next star QB.

GB: 39

DAL: 34

At home, Dallas would have a shot.  But not at Lambeau.

SEA: 52

CAR: 7

Carolina struggled against a team that was starting its third-string QB.  Seattle will trash them.  Not that starting your third string QB inevitably means defeat, as we’ll see…

 

==Special Bonus Pick!==

Ohio St: 45

Oregon: 27

This makes me nervous, because I’m pulling for Ohio State, and I’m not used to teams I’m rooting for winning stuff. But I’m seriously getting a “team of destiny” vibe from them. 

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Yes, well, I suppose you knew it was bound to happen eventually.  I have finally written a book.  It’s a short collection of weird/cosmic horror tales of the kind I like to blog about.  I tried to put into practice some of the principles I’ve espoused on here regarding the writing of such stories.  You can buy it on Kindle here, if you’re interested. (I wrote it under a different name–this pseudonym doesn’t look good on a book cover.)

It was an interesting experience–even writing just a few short stories like these is hard work. If people buy it and enjoy it, I’ll definitely write more.  But I’ve gained an appreciation for how hard it is to write fiction.  It’s much easier to describe the ideal horror story than to actually try and write it.

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I couldn’t think of any resolutions.  Got any to suggest?  In general, other people have more ideas for how I should improve than I do.

In any case, here’s to a great 2015, loyal readers!

And here’s a video by comedian Jeff Lewis that has nothing to do with anything, but I think it’s funny, so I’m posting it: