I’m very cautiously optimistic about the remainder of our schedule. The Ravens in Baltimore to close out the year could be meaningless, or for the division, or it could decide whether we make the playoffs and entirely meaningless to Baltimore. Completely up in the air.

Our remaining games are:

Cardinals (home)

Patriots (home)

Colts (away)

Bengals (home)

Seattle (away)

Baltimore (away)

The Cardinals/Patriots aren’t “must win” games, but there those kinda games that you sorta have to win to prove you’re not inept. Also they’re both in Pittsburgh. Same with the Bengals round 2. In theory we should be able to win all three. Depends if we shoot ourselves in the foot along the way I suppose.

Colts/Seattle are teams that I feel like we’re relatively evenly matched (although historically we’ve done well against Indy). Historically against west coast teams we’ve done bad playing in Pacific time. I’d call this a split.

Baltimore’s the wildcard. If they’ve got the division or even 1-seed locked up they may rest their starters…but they have a rough schedule ahead of them. Bye, Rams, Jaguars, 49’ers, Dolphins, and then us. The Rams are the easy team on that schedule…

There’s a good chance we end up finishing the year in the 10-7 or 12-5 range. But, before I buy fully into the hopium I want to see the offense display some level of continuity. The Cardinals aren’t great; we had better be able to build upon the performance we put out last week. If we can do that and then follow through against a basically dead-in-the-water Patriots team…we should be looking at a Wild Card spot at minimum.

I need to see the team perform well against two bad teams first…but last week was so exciting to watch, and it hasn’t been exciting in so long.

Pat “on fire” Freiermuth

Hell of a contested catch by Muth there.

There is no time in Ba Sing Se Cincinnati.