Sing hallelujah and be merry dear reader because Thursday night footy is no more for the 2019 season – which is great news for players with niggling injuries not fancying a short turnaround and also for me because it gives me an extra day or so to write this bad boy which is never not a blessing. Busy times that we live in and all that.

Lamar Jackson is breaking records, Michael Thomas is breaking records, George Kittle is breaking tackles, Le’Veon Bell is breaking personal bests (but only at the bowling alley), the Dallas Cowboys are breaking hearts, Patrick Mahomes is breaking defences, and the old NFL picks might just be breaking even.

We’re now fully three quarters through the season and we’re at that stage where teams begin to fall into two distinct categories: playing for this year and playing for next year.

Three games all on Friday and with no more bye weeks we’re now hitting that beautiful long sprint towards the playoffs. Just gotta survive the old turkey gags first from all the telly coverages. Be prepared to see tacky promos from players and their families promoted good old fashioned American Values.

Poor Mitch.

Nah but seriously what a week. There was late drama basically across the board... eleven of the thirteen games finished within eight points and five of those were two or three point games. The drama. The chaos. The absolute carnage upon my picks.

One New York quarterback saw ghosts. The other threw an idiotic interception late in the first half after a black cat had run into the endzone a few minutes earlier. The Giants were up 9-3 when the cat turned up and they went on to lose 37-18.

George Kittle knows what the people want. George Kittle knows what they paid good money to see.

Ah the Chargers. The Chargers who have made a precise science out of losing games they should win. I’ve seen many shockers in the past from this lot. Missed field goals, shocking interceptions, and the like. But nothing that quite compares to what they did against the Titans.

People keep trying to talk up an MVP race with various candidates and I have to keep pointing out that there is only one candidate and it’s Russell Wilson. He’s far and away the most important and the best performing player in 2019. This is the year we’ll look back on after his career as the highlight. Like Brady in 2007 or Rodgers in 2011.

All you need to know about Christian McCaffrey is that at the rate he’s going, he’s on pace to record 2771 yards from scrimmage with 22 total touchdowns in 2019. The all-time record for yards from scrimmage in a season is 2509 yards (Chris Johnson in 2009). That’s incredible.

Here we are at the quarter stage of the season already and still absolutely nothing makes sense. Except for the Patriots, unfortunately. But apart from them we’ve got backup quarterbacks outplaying their starters, we’ve got Green Bay winning games with Aaron Rodgers playing within himself…

Well… I s’pose I’d better talk about Daniel Jones now, hadn’t I? The G-Men rookie staring down a 28-10 deficit on the road with his star running back on crutches on the sideline and the bloody guy only goes and leads his team back to win 32-31.

So no one told you life was gonna be this way / QB’s a joke, coach’s broke, your pass rush DOA / It’s like your offence is stuck in second gear / When it hasn’t been your play, your drive, your game, or even your year…

Week two of the season is always a notorious one, it’s where the overreactions from week one really sizzle and the convictions of those preseason predictions are really tested. The clever pundit will take that first round with a grain of salt – we don’t know the context of those performances yet because we don’t know which teams are good or not. Most tend not to though.

Bit late on the ol’ picks because the Quarterback Rankings took ages to do and hey I’m a busy fella after all. So have a read of that thing first because it’s got lots of words in it. Lots of words and lots of numbers too. Sequential numbers, just the way you like them. Also got a few of them pesky opinions too which is what you’re here for but I used heaps of them up over there already.

The annual extravaganza is back for 2019 and you’d better believe there are fiery takes and wild opinions.

So here’s a thing about some of the major storylines and events that have taken place since the 2018 NFL season concluded (the Patriots beat the Rams 13-3 in the lowest-scoring Super Bowl in history, by the way. In case you’d forgotten).

This is not the Super Bowl that the people demanded. Saints against Chiefs would have had everything this matchup has but with a smile on top. Instead we’ve got the evil twin matchup of that which is the Los Angeles Rams against the New England Patriots.