The NFL Thread 2016: New England Patriots Win Super Bowl LI

[Arkaign]

Well, that's one way to look at it. This is how I see it : their offense is TERRIBLE. Their 5 wins were against pretty bad teams. It didn't seem like it early on, but full on basketcase mode Panthers and the Packers at their worst (barely beating the Pack in MIN), are not the quality wins one would like to see. The others are the meh Titans, the Giants when they were at their absolute worst, and the Brock Texans. Not a good pedigree TBH.

The Packers will absolutely overtake Minnesota. Do you realize that Minnesota has just about the worst offense in the league? It's not even Sam Bradford's fault to be honest, that line has come to complete pieces. Rest of their 2016 schedule :

Lions (coin flip)
at Redskins (L)
Cardinals (heating up, so probably an L here as well)
AT Lions (L)
Cowboys (L)
at Jaguars (W)
Colts (coin flip)
at Packers (huge L)
Bears (LOL, what did we just see?. Just to be nice, I'll pencil this as a W)

So maybe 4 wins left. 9-7. Their defense is getting tired of being put on the field immediately following 3 and outs, morale is out the window, the coach is publicly calling them out, etc. GB is getting it together and will take the NFC North.

By the way, of COURSE I didn't say Atlanta's defense was better than Minnesota's, that makes utterly zero sense. What I meant was, the recent Atlanta team that started out red hot and faded early, like the Vikings did this year, only I think the Vikings are less impressive.

Atlanta : spectacular offense, lower-tier defense.
Minnesota : top-10 defense, but not as good as Seattle/Arizona/Denver/Philly, and garbage-tier offense.

Their overachieving defense through the first 5 games was giving their offense ludicrously good field position against troubled teams. Getting early leads simply fed their defense more, as teams were desperate to pass on them. That's all out the window now though.

Vikings O line injuries :

Matt Kalil, Andre Smith (both out for the entire season!), and now Alex Boone for a game or two.

They are done. 9-7 may be optimistic.