I’m doing things differently this week. For each game I’ll do my little write up, then give you my gut pick, my system pick (the patented, super secret Bronzilla system for picking really, really important games), then my actual pick. Then I’ll give a blurb about the strongest factors in that choice.

Rams vs Falcons

Two teams I really don’t care about.

The Falcons are frauds and worthless without QB Michael Vick, who’s a fraud himself, being extraordinarily athletic but possessing the passing ability of a 60 year old man suffering from Down Syndrome.

Thanks to Michael and his extra chromosome the Falcons had the league’s 30th ranked passing game for the ’04 regular season. And even with all that frantic scampering his O line let him get put on the ground 50 times while he passed for just 2412 yds, 15 TDs and 16 INTs.

On he other side of the field you have St. Louis and their 5th rated passing game lead by QB Marc Bulger, whose yardage total of 4253 dwarfs Vick’s, but who threw 22 INTs to go with his ho-hum TD total of 23 and whose O line also let him get body-slammed 50 times.

Atlanta’s running game isn’t especially impressive if left to the actual RBs, but with Vick doing most of the leg work (please take a moment to notice my clever pun) they lead the league with 5.1 yds per carry vs 4.3 yds for the Rams.

Advantage: Push

Defensively the Falcons have the advantage in everything except passing D. But that hardly matters, because Falcons QB Michael Vick isn’t worth a damn as a passer anyway and is at least as likely to take off running as to throw the ball on any designed pass play.

Advantage: Falcons

The Falcons are not a very good team. In fact, they’re solidly mediocre.

They score 21.2 pts per game. They allow 21.1. That’s a recipe for an 8-8 team almost every time it happens.

A heavy dose of luck and Michael Vick’s remarkable ability to run effectively have inexplicably lifted the Falcons considerably higher.

On the other hand, the Rams scored 19.9 pts per game and allowed 24.5, which tells me that they should be much worse than the 8-8 record they finished the regular season with.

The Rams specialize in passing the ball. They rack up a lot of yardage doing that, but aren’t very effective at turning yardage into points. And Mike Martz would rather eat a dingleberry pie than balance his attack with a running game, even though he has the players to make it work.

Since the Rams only chance of winning this game is keeping Mike Vick on the sidelines, and since they need to heavily use their running game in order to do that, I have to conclude that . . .

Gut pick: Falcons

System pick: Falcons by about a FG

My pick: Falcons

This is a partial post. For the full article, go HERE