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Eagles at Cowboys
8:30 p.m. Sunday, NBC
Line: Eagles by 6 ½
Any scenario in which Kyle Orton leads the Cowboys to the Super Bowl also involves the downfall of Western Civilization.
Scenario One has Western Civilization falling in the next two weeks, leaving the Cowboys as the only team to capitalize. The Cowboys survive because Jerry Jones is actually responsible for the downfall of Western Civilization. He built a Hadron Collider under Cowboys Stadium with the help of a team of scientists he personally selected. Next week, he will try to find the Higgs Boson by splitting the atoms of a lap dancer's bustier with subatomic barbecue sauce particles, and -- whammo! -- the Earth's gravitational field starts doing the wobble. The Cowboys are spared because Jason Garrett's meeting room is an anti-apocalypse shelter: surviving and shouldering the blame for the near-demolition of the Earth is actually written into his contract.
Scenario Two has Orton leading the Cowboys through a gauntlet that includes this week's Eagles, some other playoff teams, and presumably Tom Brady or Peyton Manning, despite a defense that could allow 35 points to an aquatic Pilates class. Orton's success leads directly to the Armed Uprising of the Romo Trolls.
So there's a slim chance that the "justify Romo's existence" existentialism has quieted down for the year, but a slightly slimmer chance that it is about to become a turbocharged weapon of planetary annihilation. Suffering a back injury while leading two fourth-quarter scoring drives to keep your team's playoff hopes alive is the ultimate form of choking if you think about it, but please don't: I may just be endearing myself to our soon-to-arrive Romo Troll Overlords.
(Double-deluxe worst case scenario: Orton defeats Josh McCown in the playoffs and Alex Smith in the Super Bowl. All pesky cast-aside veterans are declared better than super-talented starters, and all positions of power and influence in our nation are taken over by try-hard types with firm handshakes, if they haven't been already. Also, if Orton outplays Romo, and Tim Tebow once replaced Orton … the conclusions to be drawn are too horrible to consider.)
If all of this post-apocalyptic talk doesn't make you an Eagles fan for one week, nothing will. But here is the terrifying part: the only quarterback to make the Cowboys defense look good this year was Nick Foles (with an assist from Matt Barkley after Foles suffered a concussion), and the only defense that made Foles look truly terrible this year was the Cowboys. If Chip Kelly has an Admiral Akbar moment and Foles has another poor outing against the Cowboys, the year-long feebleness of the Cowboys defense will be attributed to Romo's remote-control anti-leadership. The fabric of modern society will crumble, and in six months all standard spelling, capitalization and punctuation will be outlawed except RANDOM ALL CAPS to EMPHASIEZ that ROMO CHOAKZ,.,,!
The only force defending human culture right now is the Cowboys defense, which is still bad enough to collapse before the Kelly steamroller and render any Orton heroics moot. Relying on the unreliable to be unreliable is usually a safe bet, but this time there's an awful lot riding on it.
Prediction: Eagles 31, Cowboys
8:30 p.m. Sunday, NBC
Line: Eagles by 6 ½
Any scenario in which Kyle Orton leads the Cowboys to the Super Bowl also involves the downfall of Western Civilization.
Scenario One has Western Civilization falling in the next two weeks, leaving the Cowboys as the only team to capitalize. The Cowboys survive because Jerry Jones is actually responsible for the downfall of Western Civilization. He built a Hadron Collider under Cowboys Stadium with the help of a team of scientists he personally selected. Next week, he will try to find the Higgs Boson by splitting the atoms of a lap dancer's bustier with subatomic barbecue sauce particles, and -- whammo! -- the Earth's gravitational field starts doing the wobble. The Cowboys are spared because Jason Garrett's meeting room is an anti-apocalypse shelter: surviving and shouldering the blame for the near-demolition of the Earth is actually written into his contract.
Scenario Two has Orton leading the Cowboys through a gauntlet that includes this week's Eagles, some other playoff teams, and presumably Tom Brady or Peyton Manning, despite a defense that could allow 35 points to an aquatic Pilates class. Orton's success leads directly to the Armed Uprising of the Romo Trolls.
So there's a slim chance that the "justify Romo's existence" existentialism has quieted down for the year, but a slightly slimmer chance that it is about to become a turbocharged weapon of planetary annihilation. Suffering a back injury while leading two fourth-quarter scoring drives to keep your team's playoff hopes alive is the ultimate form of choking if you think about it, but please don't: I may just be endearing myself to our soon-to-arrive Romo Troll Overlords.
(Double-deluxe worst case scenario: Orton defeats Josh McCown in the playoffs and Alex Smith in the Super Bowl. All pesky cast-aside veterans are declared better than super-talented starters, and all positions of power and influence in our nation are taken over by try-hard types with firm handshakes, if they haven't been already. Also, if Orton outplays Romo, and Tim Tebow once replaced Orton … the conclusions to be drawn are too horrible to consider.)
If all of this post-apocalyptic talk doesn't make you an Eagles fan for one week, nothing will. But here is the terrifying part: the only quarterback to make the Cowboys defense look good this year was Nick Foles (with an assist from Matt Barkley after Foles suffered a concussion), and the only defense that made Foles look truly terrible this year was the Cowboys. If Chip Kelly has an Admiral Akbar moment and Foles has another poor outing against the Cowboys, the year-long feebleness of the Cowboys defense will be attributed to Romo's remote-control anti-leadership. The fabric of modern society will crumble, and in six months all standard spelling, capitalization and punctuation will be outlawed except RANDOM ALL CAPS to EMPHASIEZ that ROMO CHOAKZ,.,,!
The only force defending human culture right now is the Cowboys defense, which is still bad enough to collapse before the Kelly steamroller and render any Orton heroics moot. Relying on the unreliable to be unreliable is usually a safe bet, but this time there's an awful lot riding on it.
Prediction: Eagles 31, Cowboys