Jan. 2, 2017Posted by NawFuL
There are few plays in football more dramatic than the Hail Mary pass. In one last desperate act, the trailing team's receivers sprint to the end zone as the quarterback throws up a bomb that he hopes will miraculously be hauled down by one of his teammates for the game-changing score. Occasionally it succeeds. Most of the time it fails. For the first time in three years, the Gehlke Bros. Football championship came down to a Week 17 finale, and with just 4 games separating the brothers and 16 division rivalries on the schedule, the potential of a thrilling upset loomed. Sean, with his back to the wall, needed the NawFuL equivalent of a Hail Mary, and with six splits up for grabs he had his shot.
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Dec. 27, 2016Posted by NawFuL
Christmas came early in the NawFuL this year, and because the schedule makers figured no one would be watching games while opening presents and celebrating with family, they decided to pack a whole Sunday's worth of action into Saturday instead. Think of Thursday Night Football on steroids, with its collection of typically unwatchable games presented in pretty paper and bows and stuffed under the tree like some ugly sweater. It's the gift you have to try on even though you'd rather it had stayed at the store where it came from. Throw in a handful of games with playoff implications as stocking stuffers and you have a recipe for an unpredictable, crazy mess. Do you believe in Christmas miracles? The Junior Bro was hoping for a big one in Week 16.
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Dec. 20, 2016Posted by NawFuL
Peaking at the right time is a critical aspect of sports. It doesn't matter how mediocre a season you've had if you manage to stay in the hunt and can close well. It's something that the New York Giants have done successfully in the past decade, which helped propel them to Stupor Bore titles in 2008 and 2012. (Well, that and playing the Patriots, perhaps.) It is also something the Senior Bro appears to be doing in 2016.
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Dec. 13, 2016Posted by NawFuL
Sometimes it's not what you do, but what you DON'T do that can mean the difference between a good week and a decidedly bad one. If the Senior Bro should manage to hoist the Surfy Trophy high for a fourth consecutive year, he may well look back to Week 14 as the pivotal moment in a season that has seen several of them.
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Dec. 6, 2016Posted by NawFuL
One thing easily overlooked in the 2016 Gehlke Bros. Football season thus far is that the 3-time defending champion has not exactly been dominating the picks. In fact, entering Week 13, the Senior Bro had won just two weeks — Week 3, when he gained two games to take the lead in the Surfy standings, and Week 5 when he widened his advantage to four games. Since then, it has been a battle of mostly inertia with the Junior Bro struggling to chip away at the deficit before a Week 11 breakthrough put him back on top.
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Nov. 29, 2016Posted by NawFuL
In what has become a familiar theme in this season of football games that go down to the wire, Week 12 featured just one split and it was a doozy. It seems only fitting that on Thanksgiving weekend — our first full 16-game menu in two months — one Bro was doing the "giving" and the other said "thanks."
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Nov. 20, 2016Posted by NawFuL
The last time one of the Gehlke Bros. completed a perfect week of picks was... never. In all the years we have been predicting the outcomes of NawFuL football games, the closest anyone has come to running the table is 15-1, which has happened at least a couple of times. For Sean, who has been waiting literally years for a big week to fall his way, he said Sunday morning that he wouldn't mind missing just a single game. And for a while in Week 11, it appeared he might do exactly that.
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Nov. 14, 2016Posted by NawFuL
For a week in which forecasting the results of football games proved as challenging as predicting the winner of the presidential election, the time seemed right for a change in the Gehlke Bros. Football standings. After all, in an unusual twist this season, all the ground gained or lost has come on the heels of a week in which there was no change in the standings: Weeks 1, 3, 5 and 8. The Senior Bro, hobbled by illness that clearly impacted his powers of prognostication, came into Week 10 stubbornly defending a 3-game lead that narrowly held up in Week 9. But with four splits on the line, it would take someone winning three of them to move the needle.
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Nov. 8, 2016Posted by NawFuL
The first half of the 2016 NawFuL season is in the books, and if one thing is clear it's that no one is likely to run away with a Gehlke Bros. Football championship this year. Despite the Senior Bro's current lead in the Surfy standings, every week has been a hard-won struggle peppered most recently by ties and overtime nail-biters.
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Oct. 31, 2016Posted by NawFuL
It used to be that the NawFuL confined its London games to once a season, and back then we all laughed and thought how convenient it was that the league exported its worst matchups overseas so that unwitting British audiences would pay big bucks to be entertained our most yawn-worthy teams. But nowadays they play three games there, and recently they have been anything but snoozers. In fact, we've had two weeks in a row in which the "London laughers" have had major implications for the Gehlke Bros. Football picks.
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Oct. 25, 2016Posted by NawFuL
The Bros hate waking up before the sun rises on Sunday morning, so that is why whenever the NawFuL moves its games to jolly ole England, we try to pick those games a day or two beforehand. When we remember, that is. The Los Angeles Rams aren't the only ones who'd like to forget their Week 7 trip across the pond, after they ran up a 10-point lead on the Giants, only to give up 17 unanswered points in a 17-10 defeat.
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Oct. 18, 2016Posted by NawFuL
There's a new overall leader in the Gehlke Bros. Football standings. For the first time since the season began, Ben has relinquished his spot atop the prognosticating pile, yielding the way for his dad to set the pace — for one week, at any rate. But despite the changing of the guard on a grander scale, the Senior Bro's lead in the hunt for the Surfy Trophy remains steady at four games.
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Oct. 11, 2016Posted by NawFuL
Week 5 was a source of great anxiety for the Gehlke Bros, who both expressed concern Sunday morning that their slate of game predictions would result in personal disappointment. With five splits on the line, one thing was certain: at least one of them would be right.
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Oct. 3, 2016Posted by NawFuL
For a while on Sunday, it appeared that Week 4 might turn into a Senior Bro sweep. With four splits up for grabs and a couple of early wins, Glenn was on the verge of turning what so far has been a tight contest into a serious advantage as the first quarter of the season concludes. But if Jacksonville's and Chicago's ice-breaker wins or Buffalo's blanking of New England should remind us, anything is possible on any given Sunday.
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Sept. 27, 2016Posted by NawFuL
Three is one of the most difficult numbers to come by in the NawFuL, whether it is booting a game-winning field goal with time running out, moving one's win-loss record to 3-0 (or its converse, 0-3), or trying to pull within three games of the Chaos Kid in the Gehlke Bros. Football overall standings. But we saw all three of those things occur in Week 3.
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Sept. 19, 2016Posted by NawFuL
The most challenging part of the football season is not the nail-biting final weeks when the Surfy Trophy is on the line in a neck-and-neck contest, or the muddled middle when the bye weeks inevitably throw logic on its ear; it's the first three weeks when we're still getting to know the strengths and weaknesses of this year's teams, and looking for those sleepers that will be shaping the conversation in the months to come. Dial into those trends early and you just might sail on to victory in January. Guess wrong, and you find yourself where the Gehlke Bros. are after Week 2 — peering through the dust cloud that is being left in the Chaos Kid's wake.
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Sept. 13, 2016Posted by NawFuL
Another season of Gehlke Bros. Football is officially under way, and if there is any indication that this year might not be like the past two, it came right off the bat with Week 1 picks. The Senior Bro led from start to finish in 2015, but he finds himself in the cellar — albeit a shallow one — just 16 games into the 2016 schedule, while the Chaos Kid leads the pack.
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Sept. 3, 2016Posted by NawFuL
It's been an incredible off-season, and the Gehlke Bros. are just about ready for the kickoff of another NawFuL four months of gridiron glory. As usual, we are running behind on website updates, so all those cool features we keep promising every year... will remain unfulfilled for at least another season. But take heart! We'll still have our weekly recaps of all the action as we battle our way to the final second of the final regular season game on Jan. 1. The Senior Bro is going for four in a row, while Junior Bro looks to reclaim the Surfy Trophy for the first time since the 2012 season. And of course the Chaos Kid will play along in hopes of unseating his elders atop the football prognosticating pile. Opening Day is Thursday, Sept. 8. We'll have our game faces on.
