It’s that time of week. Time to man up and make your pick for Sunday’s game. Get it right, and you’ll be FAMOUS. You’ll be feted at numerous, exclusive Hollywood shindigs, and given goodie bags with free jewelry, iPhones, and any number of expensive Kiehl’s body lotions. You’ll appear on magazine covers, and host SNL. Until, finally, you will lose yourself in thick haze of drug and alcohol abuse, frequenting clubs every night with “friends” you barely know, watching your parents try and glom onto your fame in order to get some of their own, and being photographed outside restaurants with no underwear on. Get it wrong, and you can more or less keep going about your business. Here are our picks, plus picks from across the rest of the media.
Scott Crisp: Cowboys 30, Eagles 27
Josh Alper: Cowboys 30, Eagles 28
Bill Simmons: Not in yet. You can be late with your picks all the time when you’re a number one best-selling author.
Peter King: Eagles 31, Cowboys 20.
71 percent of SI users: Eagles. 71 percent? In a game this evenly matched? Someone has loaded the polling! I BLAME THE HAWAIIANS.
Eight of 10 ESPN experts: Eagles. Again, not terribly balanced. ESPN IS IN THE TANK. THEY’VE HATED THE COWBOYS SINCE THE BEGINNING, AND ED WERDER IS THEIR SABOTEUR.
Michael Silver: Eagles.
72 percent Of Yahoo! users: Eagles.
Pete Prisco (CBS): Cowboys.
Andy (Cowboys fan I know): Cowboys 39, Eagles 10 (“I have no clue how Andy Reid isn’t a cop. He should clearly be a cop. He should be in the district house, swilling black coffee, complaining about his exes, and slamming skells against the interrogation room table. It’s plain as day.”)
Index Card I Threw Up In The Air With The Name Of Each Team On Either Side, Seeing Which Team Would Land Face Up: Eagles.
The Wife: Cowboys.
Me: The collective public seems to be overwhelmingly in favor of the Eagles. IT’s odd, since these teams are identical in so many ways. Streaky QB’s. Rotund coaches. A penchant for the occasional stinkbomb. The only explanation there can be for the Eagles being so decisively favored here is A) They’re at home, and B) Everyone still remembers the Week 17 beatdown from last season. But I’ve completely bought into this Cowboys team now. I think, like Crisp and Alper, this is destined to be one of those high-scoring affairs where every fantasy player involved has a fiesta of points. I think that, even if the Cowboys lose, they won’t come out of this game looking limp and uninspired. And I think Philly, more than Dallas, has the capacity to come in and lay an egg. Cowboys 34, Eagles 27.
Yours in the comments.
