Week 8 Wrap

Mardi takes this week in a big fashion by winning 3 of the 4 disagreed upon games. The score for the week was 7-6 (me) and 9-4 (Mardi). The gap for the season has narrowed to 1 game with the current tally at 75-41 (me) and 74-42 (Mardi).

Houston got off to a slow start offensively at Buffalo on Sunday. The Buffalo defense held Houston to only 6 points at the half to 10 for Buffalo. Jarius Byrd had another big game on defense, picking off 2 of Matt Shaub's passes. Buffalo's only touchdown came on a very nicely executed end-around to Terrell Owens. Houston lit it up in the 2nd half, however, scoring 25 points to win the game 31-10. Steve Slaton's running woes continued this week. A fumble led to his benching in favor of Ryan Moats. Moats made the most of his opportunity by scoring all three Houston touchdowns on the ground. Moats finished the day with 23 carries for 126 yards, which is the best run performance for any Houston RB this season. Matt Shaub had a decent day throwing the ball going 25 of 34 for 268 yards. Houston suffered a big loss on Sunday as TE Owen Daniels went down for the season with a torn ACL.

Green Bay was starting to show promise after the Week 4 loss in Minnesota. I don't know what happened, but Aaron Rodgers seemed to forget all the lessons he learned that week and repeated the same mistakes. As good as he has been so far, he doesn't quite perform as well under pressure and doesn't seem to be able to get rid of the ball. Minnesota got pressure on him most of the game and came away with 6 sacks. The Minnesota offense didn't have a spectacular day, but they did work in a very efficient manner while picking apart the defense. I honestly thought that by learning the lessons from Week 4 that Green Bay would emerge the winner, but that wasn't to be this week. Congratulations on another Minnesota win this week.

How bad do you have to be to lose to a bad team in your own stadium? I'm talking to you, Detroit and Arizona. Vince Young had no impact on Tennessee beating Jacksonville as it was all done on the ground. Apparently the run defense for Jacksonville decided to take the day off. Eli Manning's foot injury may be lingering as his performance over the past few games has gone way down. I was watching some analysis and they showed that even Manning's stance seems to have changed somewhat since the foot injury. And as for Baltimore beating Denver, Baltimore's defense really seemed to click while Joe Flacco started to find his groove once again.

At any rate, those were my surprises for the week. I'll have my Week 9 predictions up in about 24 hours. I would love to hear Mardi's assessment of this week's action.