Monthly Archives: September 2020
Previewing the Chiefs-Ravens week three matchup:
We are in for one of the best Monday Night showdowns I can remember in a long time, as I already highlighted this as the best game of the 2020 NFL season when the schedule came out, and there is nothing that should take away from the hype coming in. The reigning league Lamar Jackson and Super Bowl MVP Patrick Mahomes both have their teams at 2-0 and fairly entrenched as the two elite squads in the AFC, ready to battle for the right to stay undefeated.
Two years ago, the Ravens seemed to have this one in their bag, until Mahomes pulled off some magic on a couple of fourth down plays to still turn things around and last season these two teams went up against each other in week three as well, where the Chiefs controlled the game for the most part, but then Lamar tried to manufacture a late comeback, to make the final score 33-28 Kansas City. Baltimore would lose the following week to Cleveland, but then went undefeated the rest of the way, until they lost in the Divisional Round to Tennessee.
This is the matchup everybody wanted and expected to see in last year’s Conference Championship game and it could easily be a preview of what we see in this year’s semi-finals, with crucial tie-breakers being on the line Monday. In this preview, I will break down both offenses and how they match up with the opposing defense, talk a little bit about special teams and two X-factors for each group.
Three statements for each week one NFL game:
Football is back, baby! After an awesome first week of NFL action, which I watched every full game of, I wanted to kind of recap all 16 matchups and come up with three statements for each one. Some of them may be more hyperbolic or could be labelled as hot takes, while others state for obvious facts. You can also listen to my Youtube breakdown of week one, where I just give more of my general thoughts on all these games, while also bringing up some of the points I make in this article.
So here’s what I took away from week one:
Predicting the entire 2020 NFL season:
Now a week away from the season officially being kicked off with Texans @ Chiefs, I’m ready to commit to all these predictions. As I have done for several years now, I am going to forecast all the major season awards, such as league MVP, Defensive Player of the Year and others, before I get into my playoff picks. To do so, I went through the schedule and predicted all 256 games, before putting all of that into playoffpredictors.com – which I can absolutely recommend you check out – to double-check my final seven seeds for either conference. On my first version, I got so complicated with the tie-breakers, that I actually had to contact the host of the page, to get some clearance on an issue, but after I went over it a second time, things became a lot easier to figure out.
With that being, this is how I believe the 2020 NFL season will look like:
Halil's Real Footballtalk 