Oh and please note that these scions of smash-mouth, these monsters of macho, gave up 29 fourth quarter points and needed eight field goals to beat the Texans. But I don't doubt their little kicker snarled menacingly after each one. (A twelve-year-old I know claims field goals are totally gay.)

So I have decided to hate the Titans, and that was necessary. Each year I need to have a team to irrationally hate. Last year, I chose to hate the Saints after they turned their home opener into a pathetic celebrity wankfest. This year it is going to be the Titans. Going forward, they officially become "the hated Tennessee Titans." Nothing personal guys, but that's how it has to be.

Oh, and speaking of annoying Australians, what in God's name was Russell Crowe doing in the MNF booth? Where was Jimmy Kimmel when we needed him? "Hey Russell, phone call for you — oh, wait, better let me take it..."

My pointless fetishes aside, and with apologies to Dennis Green, this season has turned into just what we thought it would be. (You have been following along with RJ haven't you?) In fact, it's pretty much been the same for the last three or four years.

In the AFC, the Tom Brady is striding confidently across the landscape, leaving crumpled defenders strewn all over the field like so many pregnant supermodels. The Colts are winning with such regularity that Peyton isn't sure where the commercial script ends and the real game starts. The NFC contenders all remind me of me: talented, but deeply flawed, and hoping to get hot and get lucky at the right time. We are headed for a Colts/Pats showdown in the AFC championship followed by a perfunctory appearance by the NFC champ in the Super Bowl again.

We'll have a full set of mid-term grades next week (and/or the week after), but the most important thing is that we now have a nice, fat set of data to work with for making picks. That's what we're all about here at Thoughtful Fool Orbiting Headquarters, picking winners. To do this we have a couple of strategies, both of which involve using the hard, cold statistical data generated by the HP12c-wielding madmen over at Football Outsiders.

Football Outsiders generates a single statistic, called DVOA (Defense-adjusted Value Over Average), that encapsulates the objective success of an NFL team. It measures play-by-play success and as such, may not correspond directly to win-loss record and certainly won't correspond to popular perception, but that's what we want; we want to shake out all the unexpected occurrences, since they can't be predicted. To get a more detailed description of our methods, I strongly recommend you read The Fool's Errand. It sounds very esoteric, but the bottom line is that we are looking for situations where the gambling line is out of whack with the comparative quality of the teams to make our picks.