Welcome to another week of sports ball and boy was it a scintillating one. Lots of trades, and plenty of injuries this football season to make for some interesting news. In the MLB the world series matchup’s have been finalized with game one starting Friday night.
Deandre “Nuk” Hopkins is now a Kansas City Chief. Hopkins got traded for peanuts, Kansas City gave up only a conditional 5th round pick that could become a fourth rounder. Hopkins has been a stud for most of his whole career, while it is safe to stay his best football is behind him he can still provide some major offense for a Kansas team that is desperate for it. Another prolific receiver, Cooper Kupp, has also found his name in trade rumors with the 2-5 Rams sitting lifeless in the NFC west. As a whole the trade market is heating up with the deadline approaching fast on November 5th.
Injuries were also a major factor during week 7 with many stars going down. The Cleveland Browns kindhearted quarterback Deshaun Watson went down with a season ending achilleas rupture leading to cheers at the Browns stadium. The Browns will be forced to use either Dorian Thompson-Robinson, or high-priced backup Jameis Winston for the rest of the year. Additionally, this contract is nowhere close to being over and the Browns pain and suffering is nowhere near over. Other injuries include the Buccaneers losing BOTH of their top 2 receivers, with Mike Evans out for a few weeks and Chris Godwin is done for the season. Another star receiver done for the year is Brandon Aiyuk, leaving the already depleted 49ers offense without another one of its top playmakers.
NFL Week 7
Moving on to recap some of the games last week, starting with our last London game for awhile the Jaguars took down the Patriots 32-16. The Patriots don’t look like a competitive football team, but at least there was one bright spot in Drake Maye having another promising game. For the Jaguars this was a must win game and they came through but with both teams at 2-5 a lot of work is left to do.
The NFC North is the best division in football and even with the Bears on bye week the rest of the division did not disappoint. Minnesota vs Detroit did not disappoint with two of the best teams in the league going at it for four quarters. The Lions ultimately prevailed in a close 31-29 game to move to 5-1 and hand the Vikings their first loss of the season. Meanwhile over in Green Bay the Texans lost a close one to the Packers 24-22. Green Bay won, and almost lost off of Jordon Loves football passing attack, he threw 2 costly interceptions but at the same time threw 3 go ahead touchdowns. CJ Stroud had a horrible day throwing for only 87 yards and no touchdowns.
The Buffalo Bills had a monster game versus the Tennessee Titans winning 34-10. Recent trade acquisition Amari Cooper had a good game catching his first touchdown as a Bill. The Titans were without the meme generator known as Will Levis and had to face the ignominy of making Mason Rudolph throw the ball 40 in a rough loss. The other star receiver on his new team, Davantae Adams and the Jets did not have a good game. Adams finished with three catches for 30 yards. The Jets lost to the Steelers 37-15 in a disgusting loss in a game many thought starting Russell Wilson over Justin Fields would lead to disaster, instead it led to the Steelers improving to 5-2.
The Dolphins lost again this week to the Colts 16-10. If that score makes you think this game was ugly, you would be right it was a bad watch. Anthony Richardson, who for all of his prodigious athletic gifts cant seem to complete most of his passes leading to massive inconsistencies especially with Jonathon Taylor missing his third game. For the Dolphins, things are looking up with Tua Tagovailoa slated to return to playing after his terrifying concussion week 2 of the season.
Two other games this past week approached the amount of bad football that was in the Dolphins game, those games were the Eagles pounding the Giants 28-3 and the Seattle Seahawks shooting down the Falcons 34-14. The Giants look abysmal this year with very little talent on either side of the football and look headed for another long rebuild. Meanwhile down in Atlanta Kirk Cousins had his first dud of the season throwing 2 interceptions and looking unable to string together many solid drives. Seattle and Philadelphia have to be happy playing these cakewalk teams that mask the very real weaknesses both teams have.
The two teams that had quarterbacks go down in week 7 both ended up losing. The Browns lost 21-14 versus a sloppy Cincinnati team. Deshaun Watson went down with an Achilles’ injury that will have him out the rest of the season and perhaps next as well. It is never a good thing for a football player to have his season ended on a freak injury. However, one has to feel a little bit of an exception for Watson who is a bad dude off the field and the Browns fans thought so too, cheering vociferously when Watson went down. Aiden O Connell went down early versus the Rams forcing Gardner Minshew to come in and proceed to immediately throw 3 interceptions to lose the game. Minshew will be forced to start for the foreseeable future due to AOC’s broken finger having an unknown timetable for return.
The Panthers terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year continued with a shellacking at the hands of the Washington Commanders who were starting fellow first round flameout Marcus Mariota. The Panthers are the worst team in the NFL and there is not much to get better, the only bright spot in Jonathon Brooks who is slated to return from injury soon. Interestingly Bryce Young is getting the start week 8 due to a motor vehicle accident involving Andy Dalton. The Commanders stud rookie quarterback Jayden Daniels will probably miss his second start with a rib issue.
Sunday afternoon gave us what could have been a fantastic game with a Super Bowl rematch involving the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs. This game was a de facto injury bowl with the 49ers not having Christian McCaffrey Deebo Sameul (illness) and then proceeding to lose Brandon Ayiuk for the season. Meanwhile the best player in the NFL Patrick Mahomes has more interceptions than touchdowns on the year and has not had Rashee Rice most of this year. The Chiefs certainly didn’t count on father time catching up with Travis Kelce who has yet to record a touchdown this year. The defending Super Bowl champs did make a upgrade trading for Deandre Hopkins in an attempt to boost the offense.
Monday night brought us the Ravens beating the Buccaneers 41-31 in a game that was not nearly as close as the score seems. The Buccaneers took some major hits to their season outlook as mentioned earlier. Simultaneously, the Cardinals and Chargers were playing on the west coast. The Cardinals won 17-15 in a very bizarre offensive slugfest, but some James Conner heroics were ultimately the difference. Curiously this game was streamed exclusively on ESPN+ in a bid to get more people to sign up for it.
Week 8 of the NFL season gives us very little to look forward to with most games projecting to not be close affairs. The Bills-Seahawks game gives some hope. Bears-Commanders could also be a fun matchup between the top two rookies in the class, but the status of Jayden Daniels is uncertain heading into the game.
MLB
Over in the stick and ball world of the MLB, the world series matchups are set. The Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees are set to square off in a thrilling best of seven series. Surprisingly this is the most common World Series matchup with this being the 12th occurrence of them meeting, though it is the first since 1981. Unlike last year’s world series which featured two relatively small market teams advancing from the wild card round to the World Series, this one features both the number one seeds in each league facing off.
The MLB regular season was defined by parity, as not one team won 100 games for the first time since 2014. This World Series is everything on the contrary. It features the two presumptive MVP’s of the AL , Aarron Judge and NL, Shohei Ohtani squaring off. That’s not even getting into the past MVP winners such as Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Giancarlo Stanton, I didn’t even mention Juan Soto but if he doesn’t win a MVP at some point I’ll eat my shorts. We have 2 teams who, more than any others are defined by their star hood and massive payrolls facing off for the first time in 40 years, it all makes for a thrilling October atmosphere.
Overall it is a fantastic week for sports with not just MLB and NFL action but also College football, NBA, and Hockey. That is a glorious sentence and one any sports fan will love.
