Friends in football,

Heading into the week with "Vikings, Raiders, Jags, Bengals, Giants" on your bingo board would have been bold but unremarkable.

Having "down 33-0 but they won, Stanford Band but Bill Belichick, 34-donut vs. Tom Brady, two-armed and full-restriction pass interference but uncalled on the game's biggest play" on your bingo board would have gotten you "are they ok?" text messages behind your back but also maybe a free ticket to Stephen A. Smith's holiday party.

At what point in time do we declare 2022 the weirdest NFL season in the Super Bowl era? Or are we already there?

MAKE YOUR WEEK 16 PICKS

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• Pick deadline: 5:15pm PT Thursday (12/22)

Commish's philosophical question to the NFL powers that be is whether "max chaos" has a shelf life.

It's almost as if Goodell's corporate strategy shifted before the 2022 season to be "anything that generates more social media chatter is good".

We've had countless massive upsets. A record number of down-to-the-wire games. An unrivaled number of legendary QBs seemingly hit their "oh they're not good anymore" wall at the same time.

And, likely most aggravatingly for affected fans, the highest number of games decided by flagrantly bad refereeing decisions that Commish can recall happening in one season.

In most every other year, if someone walked up to me and said "Yo, I CRUSHED it at picking games this year", I'd be like "Great job would you like a Bud Light Lime to honor your immortal genius".

But if someone came up to me today and said the same thing, I'm more inclined to respond with "Do you think the drugs will work in 2023, as well?"

Relatedly, we somehow had four people go a perfect 16-0 in WeeWoo. An incredible feat no matter how bizarre the actual games were.

This week's Christmas slate is our final WeeWoo week at an elevated $5,030. We return to the normal - and nothing-to-sneeze-at - $2K for Weeks 17 and 18.

WEEWOO RECAP

Pick spreadsheet | Game outcomes

We had four brave souls go 16-0 and will each take home their share of the weekly $5,030. Cheers to @YesThereIsAnS, @ToddyKGB, @avimoseson, and @joshd_8. Even though it was an especially wild week, the final scores tended to favor the favorites.

"A win is a win." 

If our WeeWoo champs had parlayed all their picks winning at halftime of each game, I'm guessing a $10 bet would have won them at least $500K. No joke. The Vikings trailed the Cowboys 33-0. The Jags trailed the Cowboys 21-7. The Bengals trailed the Bucs 17-3. All those games flipped, and with the 98.6%-picked Chiefs narrowly avoiding a loss to the Texans, we achieved 16-win perfection for the fourth time this year.

FITZMAGIC RECAP

Pick spreadsheet | Game outcomes | Golden Spreadsheet

We went from 7 to 4 after the Commanders' home loss to the Giants knocked out three.

"Commish is gonna be right on BOTH survivor predictions"

Am I hijacking the narrative? YOU BET I AM. For the first time in SZN history, after Week 10 I boldly predicted when both BFIG (Week 14) and Fitz (Week 16) would end. I nailed BFIG, and looking at next week's brutal schedule (the big favorites have all been entirely picked out by our Fitz survivors), there's probably a 50% chance that Fitz ends in Week 16. I'll take my love letters with BLL stamps, please. What's that? BLL stamps don't exist? WHO KNOWS THE POSTMASTER GENERAL?

Stat of the week: FiveThirtyEight's NFL model now has the Detroit Lions as the team likeliest to snag the 7th seed in the NFC playoff field. The formerly 1-6 Detroit Lions.

Yours in football,
The Commish