It isn't cherry picking, green bay beat the bears as well. The Panther and Titans are good teams and missed the playoffs by a few games. Cleveland won despite having a historically horrible Coach. Also, Cowboys won their division but each division game was pretty close imo.

It is cherry picking when you pick like five or six division games that were upsets and ignore the myriad of upsets that occurred outside the division. Yeah, Green Bay beat Chicago. So did the Dolphins and the Giants. Upsets happen both inside and outside the division. What you're ignoring is that those upsets were just as, if not more, likely to occur outside the division than inside. Again, Chicago was 5-1 against NFC North teams and 7-3 against the rest of the league. Being almost 15% more likely to lose outside of your division than inside doesn't exactly support the idea that division games are somehow tougher.

And it's not as if this is just a case of the NFC North being weak and the Bears having a better record only because everyone in their division sucks; this phenomenon is throughout the league. As I previously mentioned, of the eight division winners this year, only one had a worse winning percentage inside their division than outside. And that includes your Cowboys, who went 5-1 in the NFC East and 5-5 outside of it.

Speaking of which, yes, Dallas' games against division opponents were pretty close. But so were their games against everyone else. In fact, their point differential against the NFC East (+26) is substantially better than against opponents outside of their division (-9).

I send you a PM did you receive it?

I'm afraid I did not. TheGoldenBoy and I ran into some similar issues last week. Not sure what's going on with the site.

For the sake of ensuring we get everyone's pick in, it might just be safer to have people email me at ogvernment@gmail.com.

First off, Giants and Dolphins are pretty decent teams at the end. So it shouldn't come as a surprise they win against them. If memory serves me correctly, Bears was missing their starting QB against the Giants too which played a huge role.  Also, Greenbay, Lions, and Vikings are out class significantly by the Bears in almost every way and yet the games were close as hell. It has to do with familiarity and matching the rival team's players in the draft because you have to play your rivals twice a year.

So it makes sense to counter your rival teams.  You shouldn't bring up the Cowboys as proof that it isn't because Bears' division is weak. Cowboys division teams such as Redskins are considered weak and we lost to them and almost lost to them again when their starting QB was out. Also, the big reason why Cowboys point differential against teams outside their division is huge was they got blown out by the Colts. An insanely good team and a team I hope Cowboys don't play in SB if they get there. Also, has to do with the fact most of Cowboys loses to non-divisional teams happen before we got Cooper.

No, it's set to registered users. I believe TGB missed a PM I sent to him as well, so I'm not quite sure what's going on. I'll ask the mods.

First, no, the Giants and Dolphins are not "pretty decent" teams. They were both awful. As I mentioned before, the Giants have the 9th worst defense in the league, and only a middling offense (17th ranked). They posted the fourth worst record in the league. None of that even remotely qualifies for "pretty decent." The Dolphins are possibly even worse, having gone 4-9 over their last 13 games and posting the second worst offense in the league and the fourth worst defense (all by yards allowed). These teams are terrible.

Secondly, you can't simply just build a team to "counter your division rivals." Trying to build a team specifically to counter three different football teams is not only silly, but probably impossible as well. Take the NFC East for example again; the Cowboys, Eagles, and Redskins all relied upon vastly different offensive schemes this year. If you're the Giants, there is no possible way you can draft players to build a scheme that would directly counter all three of those. Even if you somehow could, personnel and schemes in the NFL change so quickly that it'd be impossible to "counter" someone more than a couple years in the future. The only scenario where this possibly makes sense is with teams that have dominated their division for a long time, and so you can try to build a team specifically to compete with them. But as the AFC East has shown, that's a lot easier said than done.

Third, and most importantly, you can use rhetoric all you want, but all the rhetoric in the world doesn't change the fact that the statistics are still in my favor. If division games were supposedly more difficult than games against similar caliber teams outside of your division, we would expect good teams to perform worse in their division, yes? But that isn't the case; again, only ONE division winner this year had a worse record in their division than outside of it, and that's only because they sat their starters for a meaningless Week 17 game. 

Even if you completely disregard the Cowboys' loss to the Colts and don't take it into account, their point differential against out of division teams is still worse than against NFC East teams (+26 vs. +15). There is no statistical evidence to support this claim that division games are significantly tougher.

Just happy to go positive in my overall record. Especially considering I missed a few weeks.

I replied to your message. Did you receive it?

Sent my picks in, don't know if you received them or not though.

I'm afraid I haven't. Check your "sent" folder to make sure the message went through.