Junior Bro makes it three in a row... again

Feb. 3, 2008 — Despite a furious comeback that saw the Senior Bro nearly pull off a late-season upset, Sean held on to the lead in the 2007 Gehlke Bros. Football standings to capture his third consecutive championship.

The victory assures that the golden statuette known as the Surfy Trophy will remain on the Junior Bro's mantel for at least another year, even as the location of that mantel prepares to move from San Jose to its new home in Hayward.

There was no grand ceremony to commemorate Sean's three-peat — his second in the past nine seasons — although the two Bros acknowledged Sean's fete by visiting the "Body Worlds" exhibit at The Tech museum in San Jose on Jan. 12. Seeing so many plastinated corpses in one place was sort of symbolic of the Senior Bro's season, which experienced a slow and tortuous demise after a five-week midseason slump enabled Sean to mount a seven-game advantage before a four-week spurt in Weeks 13-16 shaved that lead to a single game.

But as he so often has managed to do, the Junior Bro rose to the occasion. He won the Week 17 showdown to capture a two-game season victory, his narrowest margin in years.

"I thought you had me in the last week," Sean remarked from the living room of his San Jose apartment. He said he could feel the momentum shifting over the waning weeks. When he was brimming with confidence after stoking his largest lead in Week 12, Sean had speculated he would end the season with a double-digit advantage. Much like the oddsmakers' predictions that the Patriots would blow out the underdog Giants in the Stupor Bore, that lopsided win didn't come to pass, although Glenn did not let the magnitude of Sean's winning ways pass unacknowledged.

"So much of predicting the NawFuL relies on luck as much as it does skill," said the Senior Bro. "But when you can capture Surfy seven times in nine years, that shows you must be doing something right."

2007 weekly results

  1. Week 1 — Would you like a chocolate?
  2. Week 2 — Home field disadvantage
  3. Week 3 — It's hard to be perfect
  4. Week 4 — A NawFuL week for picks
  5. Week 5 — Wherever you roam, there's no place like home.
  6. Week 6 — Why do NawFuL teams deserve a break?
  7. Week 7 — Taking stock in unpredictability
  8. Week 8 — Trick-or-treat, NawFuL style
  9. Week 9 — Jolted back to reality
  10. Week 10 — No happy endings? How upsetting
  11. Week 11 — Sweet 16: Full schedule helps Junior Bro build lead
  12. Week 12 — Turkeys on Thursday to mud on Monday
  13. Week 13 — Football world mourns Sean Taylor
  14. Week 14 — 15-1 an imperfect cure for prognosticating ailments
  15. Week 15 — A Miami miracle and other oddities
  16. Week 16 — Ho, ho, ho! It's a contest after all...
  17. Week 17 — Flying (AFC) South for the winner

AFC South games lift Sean to third straight championship

In a topsy-turvy season that saw Sean amass a 7-game lead over five weeks, only to see it nearly evaporate in four weeks, it is only fitting that the battle for the 2007 Gehlke Bros. Football Picks championship went down to the wire in Week 17. In fact, it went down to the final minutes of the final game of the regular season.

With the Junior Bro protecting a 1-game edge going into Sunday, Sean and Glenn tallied five splits. All but one of the games involved playoff teams or held playoff implications -- one of those intangible factors that played into Sean's favor as most of those who had secured their seedings rested starters.

The Junior Bro got a big lift in the morning as the Texans defeated the visiting Jags 42-28 in an AFC South showdown that meant little to Jacksonville, which was locked into the fifth playoff spot. The afternoon saw Glenn win two of three to even the score, when Baltimore derailed AFC North champ and division foe Pittsburgh 27-21 and Denver held off a furious comeback to dash Minnesota's playoff hopes in overtime, 22-19. But when Arizona picked off visiting St. Louis to the tune of 48-19, that put Sean up by one game with one hurdle left to overcome: the Sunday night finale between the defending Stupor Bore champion Colts and a desperate Titans team that could only make the postseason with a victory.

The Senior Bro was banking on a Colts win to end the Gehlke Bros. regular season in a tie and extend the prognosticating suspense until February. But the Colts, already locked into the second seed in the AFC, rested Peyton Manning and other stars and supplied a porous defense for the Titans to run and pass through. The end result: 16-10 Tennessee, and a third consecutive title for Sean.

In escaping the 2007 season with a 2-game win, Sean wrapped up the week at 12-4. Glenn finished 11-5, while Ben was 8-8. We all correctly predicted New England's historic 16-0 regular season finish and their win over the New York Giants, in addition to wins by Cincinnati, Green Bay, Chicago, Cleveland, San Diego and the New York Jets. No one correctly picked the defeats of Tampa Bay or Seattle, a couple of playoff-bound slackers that rested their starters and paid the price.

* * * * *

Taking a final statistical look at 2007, we find that the Bros (Junior and Senior, anyhow) returned to the top of their games, averaging close to 2-out-of-3 correct predictions over the course of the season. Sean was 169-87 (66.0%) vs. 158-98 (61.7%) for 2006. Glenn went 167-89 (65.2%) vs. 154-102 (60.2%) last season. Ben, however, took a step backward in 2007. He was 134-122 (52.3%), or down 16 games from 2006 when he went 150-106 (58.6%). Although we didn't officially recognize splits this year in the weekly graphics because of the new format, we wound up with 50 of them between Glenn and Sean, with the Junior Bro taking 26. That is 19.5 percent of all games resulting in splits and continues a trend of fewer splits; there were 54 last season and 56 in 2005. Isn't it nice to see so much brotherly agreement as we grow older and (ahem) wiser?

As was the case in 2006, Sean won the war but not the majority of the weekly battles. He had the best record in seven weeks and tied once. Glenn had 8 wins, 1 tie. Ben had 1 win and 0 ties. Sean's best mark was 13-3 in Week 14; his worst, 5-9 in Week 4. Glenn posted a near-perfect 15-1 in Week 14, his best mark of the season, while enduring a 5-9 finish in Week 10. For Ben, 12-4 in Week 16 was countered by a pair of 5-9 finishes, in Weeks 4 and 9.

Over the course of the season Sean led by as many as 7 games and trailed by at most 1 game. We had at least one split ever week, and as many as 5 splits three times: Weeks 1, 13 and 17. Twenty percent of the 50 splits occurred in the first three weeks of the season, with another 20 percent coming in the final three weeks. There were just a pair of Monday night split games, both won by Glenn. We split an even number of games in seven weeks and an odd number in 10.

Want more stats? With luck we'll have a separate page devoted to past season stats soon. Until then, you'll have to wait until next season gets underway in September. We'll have a short Surfy Trophy presentation update in early February following the Stupor Bore. Will the Patriots finish 19-0? Stay tuned...