🔥Stakettebrain damage

Welcome back to our weekly pick 'em game. We’re putting five $20 gift cards up for grabs for anyone who can correctly pick the winners of five NFL games. 

Click here to lock in your picks for this week. 

Share this link to your fantasy group chat, Tinder date, your boss…. whoever you want.

⚾️ The World Series picture is starting to take shape. The Dodgers look a lot like a team that’s committed $1.5 billion on players the last two offseasons (who needs a salary cap right?), beating the Brewers in three straight. After taking a punch in the mouth at home, the Blue Jays have taken the last two games from the Mariners in Seattle to even up the series. 

• We love that it’s competitive, but if we’re being real, this ALCS is just a battle to see who will be embarrassed by the Dodgers in the World Series. 

🏈 Cam Skattebo and Jaxon Dart have revived Giants football. They may interact with each other like two pitbulls meeting for the first time, but the rookies have now led the Giants to two massive upset wins in just three games together. 

• The only thing that can stop them? Well, the 1-5 New Orleans Saints for starters, a CTE evaluation (probably), and more than likely, a ninth grade math test.
  

• Coach Brian Daboll is just grateful these two saved his job for another season. 

💰 LIV Golf is absolutely bleeding money. The Saudi golf league that lured top players with nine-figure paydays is losing money faster than its golfers can spend it. LIV lost over $590 million last year and has lost $1.4 billion in the last 3 1/2 years. 

• The revenue that LIV brought in all year didn’t even pay for the prize money they gave out at events. Add all those $300 million salaries to the equation, it’s not a pretty picture. 

🎾 Speaking of the Saudi’s, they just paid a tennis player $1.5 million to play for less than an hour. Germany’s Alex Zverev took home a cool $431 per second that he spent getting spanked by Taylor Fritz at a Saudi Arabian tournament. Not a bad day at the office.

🏒 The Senators are already selling discounted tickets at Costco. You know it's gonna be a rough year when your team is selling marked down tickets next to $1 hot dogs and bulk packs of diapers. 

• Oh, and Sens captain Brady Tkachuk is already out for a month with a hand injury. At least the team’s 1-3 to start the year. Good times in Ottawa. 

🤦 Justin Fields just put up the worst quarterback performance in 27 years. The Jets QB posted -10 passing yards in the team’s loss on Sunday, the worst passing performance in Jets history and the worst by any NFL team since 1998. 

• Head coach Aaron Glenn then scoffed at a reporter that asked whether he was considering a QB change. Maybe it’s just me, but that seems like a pretty fair question after your guy has the worst football game in three decades. 

👴 Aaron Rodgers and Joe Flacco faced off in the Unc bowl. The 41-year-old and 40-year-old quarterbacks went head to head last night in what Steelers’ Cameron Heyward called the ‘Icy Hot Bowl’. Something tells me these guys used something stronger than Icy hot to get those bodies playable.

🏀 The Celtics coaches demolished the team’s beat reporters in a pick up game. The Celtics media typically play an annual game against each other, but this year, Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla decided the coaching staff should take them on. The final score? 57-4. 

• Kind of a genius move. I can't imagine trying to ask a tough basketball question to a guy that dropped 30 in my face and watched me air ball half my lay ups. 

Cam Ward is finding out the hard way that it’s nearly impossible to be good in the NFL when you're playing for what one rival exec called the worst team he’s seen in 25 years. 

The Tennessee Titans’ rookie quarterback and No. 1 overall pick in last year's draft has had a tough start to the year. 

The Titans are 1-5, Ward has been sacked a league-high 25 times, and he ranks 30th in passer rating. Thanks to his putrid O-line, he spends more time trying to avoid a concussion than throwing the ball downfield. To put the team’s performance in his own words: “We ass”. 

The team just fired head coach Brian Callahan (not shocking) and have cycled through two GMs in less than three years. In this volatile of a situation, there was a 0% chance Cam Ward was going to turn this ship around.

This is far from an isolated incident. Ward’s struggle is just the latest example of NFL teams screwing over promising rookie quarterbacks by expecting them to win immediately with a dumpster fire roster. That almost always leads to either the QB or head coach getting axed. 

In fact, each of the last four No. 1 overall picks at QB have seen their head coach fired in their rookie season.

• Brian Callahan was fired after 6 weeks with Cam Ward.

• Matt Eburflus was fired by the Bears after 13 weeks with Caleb Williams.

• Frank Reich was fired by the Panthers after 12 weeks with Bryce Young.

• Urban Meyer was fired after 14 weeks with Trevor Lawrence (though that might’ve had more to do with his habit of getting caught on camera drunkenly dancing with women at bars.) 

Now, look at one of the few organizations that have done it the right way: The Green Bay Packers. 

Rookie Aaron Rodgers sat behind Brett Favre for three years, then Jordan Love did the same and backed up Rodgers for four seasons. They gave their QB’s time and surrounded them with a team they could win with. 

It’s not an accident that the Packers haven’t had a QB problem since 1992 — six years before Jordan Love was even born. 

Bottom line: This is all partly a symptom of having the No. 1 overall pick: Your team is already bad. But still, before franchises give up on head coaches or rookie QB’s, they might want to have a look around at what they gave them to work with.

@luizzonee22 hit one of the most absurd bets we’ve seen on the app, hitting a 10-leg baseball parlay to 50x his money. In a game that ended 13-4, it’s safe to say it was a good night to take all the overs. 

Check out the full parlay here

🎞️ On this day in 2009,Tom Brady threw five touchdowns in the second quarter against the Tennessee Titans, breaking the NFL record for TD’s in a single quarter. What makes it even more impressive: It was in a blizzard. Brady and the Pats went on to win the game 59-0. 

Alright, that’s enough yelling for one Friday.

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