Updating Priors

When you read this, the Chicago Cubs will have either tied up their series with the Milwaukee Brewers or start turning the page to a strange offseason.

Expectations for the Cubs weren't great to start the season. Then, right as things kick off, their best pitcher—one of the best in baseball—goes out for the season. What exactly is the point of watching, then? Well, because anything can happen.

Anything and everything did happen for the Cubs, too. They were, at one point, the best team in baseball. It both was, and wasn't, a mirage. Where they've ended up—fighting to advance in the playoff, struggling on offense, rotating through pitchers too quickly because they can't keep up—is where I expected them to be, really.

And yet, there's one at least more goddamn game. What's better than that? There's a little bit of "anything can happen" with the NFL right now, too, which Rob and Patrick spent trying to figure out.

Or, well, not figure out.

Rob: Patrick, I’m not sure I know what to do with myself in a world where the Chiefs and the Ravens have become mediocre teams and the Jaguars are suddenly decent.

I’ve found this season of football more disorienting than most, in part because it’s highlighting how much I’ve relied on teams’ reputation to frame my expectations and understanding of the league as a whole. For years I’ve been able to half-follow the regular season knowing that there were a couple teams who would probably be making it to a conference championship game or at the very least would be a tough divisional round opponent. Likewise, there were teams I just didn't need to think about. The Jags? A punch-line on The Good Place and personified by a Football Fabio underperforming expectations every season. The Steelers? Almost religiously average, a team built to clear the bar of a .500 record and no more. Whatever happens, Mahomes will pull out the necessary wins. The Ravens will be excellent. The Bills will look unstoppable at times. The NFC would continue to exist, its fate mostly dependent on whether it was a “bones” or “no bones” year for the Eagles.

In my head, the Chiefs dynasty is still young and Mahomes, Jackson, and Allen are cutting-edge quarterbacks, not guys approaching the end of their first decade as starters. Likewise, I’ve never had to think about perpetual losers like the Jaguars. I only have one space in my heart for a team like that, and it’s filled by the Bears.

And I think what I’m realizing is I liked being able to just delete a half dozen of the NFL’s 32 teams from my consciousness entirely, and place another three or four of those teams on a shelf labeled “Save for the Playoffs”. This year, however, I feel like I’m following a Bizarro World NFL where the uniforms are all the same (except for those godawful Rivalry jerseys) but everything else is different or opposite to how I remember it. Now, to know what is going on in the NFL I need to watch more games and read about all the teams? And worst of all, apparently I need to discard prior knowledge and expectations and internalize new information? This is awful.

Patrick: I’d say the rapidly changing landscape of the current NFL season would be a reason to inspire hope in what the Bears could accomplish, but we’re writing this less than a week away from the team being forced to head back to Washington to traumatically re-live the moment that broke them last year!

Did the Jaguars win that game or did the Chiefs toss it away? Are the Bills showing weakness or did the Patriots simply take advantage of a misstep game? Are the Ravens actually bad or do they have the worst injury luck in football? Some of what makes football magical is that it doesn’t fucking matter! You have to prove competence over and over and over again in sports like basketball and baseball, which itself is part of what makes those sports statistically delightful over the course of a long season. But one of the reasons football is my preferred sport is specifically because it’s hard to tell if a mirage is a mirage, but at the end of the day, a win is a win and losing a single game in the NFL can be hard to come back from.

Do you think Jaguars fans give a shit if what’s playing out is real? I sure as hell didn’t in 2018, when the Bears put together their best season since 2005. I lapped up every strange victory, every defensive touchdown, because it was my one shot at feeling joy and hope—feelings we do not have very often.