Category Archives: Sportsball

Sportsball, 2019 Week 5 Preview: Truth to All Rumors

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Sportsball, 2019 Week 5 Preview: Truth to All Rumors

 

Well, most teams have wrapped up a quarter of their games for this season — the last two will be playing their fourth games soon, one early Sunday afternoon and the other Monday night. By this point, you’d expect teams to be starting to settle into patterns, defining who they are and where they are headed (whether that means trending upward or downward). But this season, so many unexpected events — retirements, injuries, disaffected players forcing their way off teams’ rosters (or at least trying to do so) — has made it difficult for many to solidify their identities, resulting in some very topsy-turvy activity from week to week thus far.

Will this fifth week of the season see teams locking into trajectories that will carry them through the remainder of the season? Or are there still more surprises and major shake-ups yet to come? Rumors currently seem to favor the latter, and as we all know, there is at least some truth to all rumors. What rumors are you hearing, and do you believe them or not? Let us know in the comments section (below). And as always, head on over to Twitter to complain and argue, up to 280 characters at a time.

 

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Sportsball, 2019 Week 4 Preview: Movin’ Right Along

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Sportsball, 2019 Week 4 Preview: Movin’ Right Along

 

Sooo…. this happened:
 

 

Talk is indeed cheap. Enough talk, let’s get straight to those week four game previews! The comments section is always open for business if you want to share your own opinions, or Twitter is a fun place to start some shit. Dig in!

 

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Sportsball, 2019 Week 3 Preview: Drama!!!

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Sportsball, 2019 Week 3 Preview: Drama!!!

 

Well. Good morning, readers. What a long, strange week it’s been, amirite? Feels like half the teams in the National Football League have flipped completely upside-down at some point during the past month, and like half of those happened just within the past seven days.

In this increasingly unpredictable world, today we bring you our thoughts and observations for all of this weekend’s matchups — and just like in the first two weeks of the season, we’re including the predictions for the year-end results based on our current computations and calculations. Although as you may have noticed, all the injuries and roster moves and … drama!!! … across the entire league has really shaken up those forecasts.

Also as before, we start with the Thursday night game — even though this article is actually being published Sunday morning. But we wouldn’t want to skip over that contest, especially since the Thursday night competitors have been the inspiration for our musical selections each week, and this time around will be no different. But naturally at this point in time we already have seen the final results of that game, and — spoiler alert — that outcome did not exactly conform with our predetermined expectations.

Having said that, it will be fun reflecting on all of these predictions after the conclusion of the season, tracking how they changed over time, and how off-base some of them ultimately turn out to have been. Feel free to share your own opinions about how off-base we are down in the comments section, or just tell us we’re a moron over on the Twit machine.

 

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Sportsball, 2019 Week 2 Preview: ARE They Who We Thought They Were??

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Sportsball, 2019 Week 2 Preview Edition: ARE They Who We Thought They Were??

 

Welcome to week 2 of the NFL! Except for Thursday Night’s NFC South contest, we’ll dive into all of this week’s match-ups right here.

This is always the time of year for tremendous overreactions. Some team everyone thought would take things to the next level this year, came out looking flat in week one. Another team that was supposed to be in full rebuilding mode and a few years away from any kind of success, put on a surprisingly adequate performance — maybe they almost picked up a win. This acclaimed new offensive coordinator clearly has no game plan and the team is going completely off the rails this season, but that coach that everyone said should have been fired suddenly has the team completely turned around.

But with just a single sixty-minute excursion (or.. up to seventy minutes in a few cases) in the books, there are plenty of story lines still developing, and plenty of season yet to come. Which begs the question, which teams are really poised to surprise everyone, and which ones are truly what we thought they were?

Feel free to say who YOU thought they were in the comments section, or tell us how dumb you thought WE were on the Twitters.

 

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Sportsball, 2019 Week 2 Preview: Special TNF Edition

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Sportsball, 2019 Week 2 Preview: Special TNF Edition

 

Welcome back, folks! As we discussed last week, we’re trying a new experiment in writing about what’s going on in the world of American football. If you missed it, check out part I here and part II here.

We did promise last week we’d be getting back to writing about music very soon as well — and we’ve got a few articles and reviews in the works. Stay tuned for those. But first, it’s almost time (just another 20 minutes or so) for Thursday Night Football to kick off! As a real quick preview of the Sportsball article for the week, we’re going to try presenting just the Thursday night matchup here, to be followed shortly by the rest of the Sunday/Monday participants. Still playing around with the format — we’ll see how it goes.

As always, make fun of our predictions in the comments section, or tell us how stupid our opinions are on Twitter.

 

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Sportsball, 2019 Week 1 Preview: Part II (Are You Ready??)

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Sportsball, 2019 Week 1 Preview Edition: Part II (Are You Ready??)

 

Hey there, readers. Yesterday we started a brand-new feature here at Valley of Steel, with a preview of this year’s football season. At least, a preview of the first half of the teams playing this weekend.

Today’s article will cover the second half of the slate of games (plus, as promised, the predictions for this year’s playoff teams and Super Bowl teams — based on all the current data out there, and our super top-secret set of algorithms).

Anyway, again, enjoy — and then feel free to yell at me in the comments below, or tell me I’m an idiot over on Twitter. Hooray, sportsball!

 

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Sportsball, 2019 Week 1 Preview: Part I (Are You Ready??)

Posted by valleyofsteel on

 

Sportsball, 2019 Week 1 Preview Edition: Part I (Are You Ready??)

 

First, a quick warning to regular Valley of Steel readers: today we are introducing, in the words of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “something completely different.” While our purpose for existing remains sharing the good word about what’s happening in the world of music, this new feature (which is intended to be a semi-regularly recurring segment) revolves around a very different sort of heavy metal; specifically, the gridiron.

In case that still isn’t clear enough, we will be taking some time today (and tomorrow) to analyse the sport known around the world as amerikanischer Fußball, and domestically (here in the home of the National Football League) called simply football. As someone who has been voraciously devouring football news and stats for years, and as someone who already uses the written word as a way of exploring other lifelong passions, it just feels natural for me to experiment with writing about the sport. Sporadically, at least — if you aren’t a sports fan, don’t worry, maybe just skip this article and your regularly scheduled music news and reviews will continue coming your way very soon.

But for everyone else: tonight (Thursday, the 5th of September) will kick off the NFL’s 100th season, and we’ll be presenting you with a brief preview of all thirty-two teams. The previews are divided up into the sixteen match-ups that will be featured between now and Monday night, in case you want to quickly scroll through to find your favorite team. Half of them are included in this article, and the other half will be coming out tomorrow.

The main point here is to look at some of the major stories and trends that could shape each team’s season, rather than predicting the results of each specific game. However, you may also notice that each team has been listed with their current win-loss record (which, of course, is 0-0 for every team as of right now) next to their predicted record over the full season. These predictions are the result of an extensive series of proprietary calculations and data modelling based on the information currently available — but as the season progresses, the overall predictions will be updated based on new data and information, as new Sportsball articles are published. So just for fun, feel free to check back to see how right or wrong the outcomes in today’s preview (including the current expected playoff picture and Super Bowl teams, which will be included in tomorrow’s Part II) turns out to be!

Oh, and one last thing — as a fundamentally music-related website, I couldn’t help sneaking in a few references, albeit oblique ones, into the blurb about tonight’s participating teams. So anyway, please enjoy this preview, and then enjoy this weekend’s games. Feel free to voice your own opinions in the comments below, or argue over on Twitter like the cool kids do.

 

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