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We get a lot of requests every week to do FJM-style breakdowns of Bill Simmons’ columns. We largely avoid this because A) Peter King is more fun to poke fun at, B) It takes about seven seconds before Simmons trolls pop into the post and tell you what a HATURRRRRR you are, C) We have Tommy from Quinzee around to serve as proxy for all our Simmons mocking.

So usually we resist. But Holy God, did you SEE this column? Sweet buttermilk titties, it’s terrible. It’s awful. It’s the smuggest smug that’s ever smugged. And it deserves your unbridled scorn in full. Let’s begin…

You may not have noticed. You may not have cared. Hell, you may have thought it was a weekly typo. But through the first six weeks of the 2009 NFL season, your buddy Simmons was enjoying a career year with his picks column.

Fifty-eight wins, 32 losses. Against the spread.

I can’t tell you how happy this made me.

Good for you. Now why in the living FUCK do I care? ZOMG! Someone who likes gambling on sports is on a decent run! That almost makes up for the fivefold number of losing runs they’ve had! IT’S GAMBLING SCIENCE!

I spend more time on this column than you can possibly imagine. It takes me three-and-a-half days to write. I watch every minute of football on Sunday and Monday.

Get the fuck out. You watch football on Sunday and Monday? NO ONE ELSE COULD POSSIBLY BE THAT HARDCORE.

I scour newspapers and TV shows searching for tidbits.

Like that time the Boston Globe published the full rosters of every team. You can’t get that kind of info anywhere else.

I spend two full days writing material, making picks and flipping games around every which way. Three years ago, I even turned my office into a man cave and added four televisions just so I could watch as much football as possible.

Oh, do you not have four TV’s in your man cave? Are you not able to watch the games with Tony Dungy on the Football Night in America set? Oh, then you, poor commoner, simply can’t see the game the way Bill does.

Why did this mean so much? First, I am overcompetitive to a fault. Second, I have been writing this column for 13 years and always felt like there was some magical formula that kept eluding me; if I kept plugging away, eventually everything would make sense.

Stop. Stop immediately. What are you, six?

THERE MUST BE A FORMULA. If I simply find the magic key hidden in a secreted portal in the Pinewood Forest, ALL SHALL BE REVEALED. Take these runes, good sir. Take these runes and place them in a hat. Stare into that hat and soon, the magic formula for picking football games that are inherently unpredictable will come to you, and WE SHALL ALL BE RICH. RICH AS MORMONS.

And third, it’s humiliating to have a lousy picks record in a nationally read column. During the 2006 and 2007 seasons, you might even remember the Sports Gal finishing with a better record than me, and she only knows Brett Favre as the dude from “There’s Something About Mary.” That degradation kicked me into another gear. I had to do better. Things turned last year and finally took off this season. Again, 58-32 through six weeks.

And now you’ll never lose again! EVER! You’ve cracked the code!

Was it just blind luck? Not exactly.

No. Exactly. It was luck.

You might remember my “Simbotics” column from 2004, when I tried to determine a science for picking games in the first few weeks. Bookies are terrified of that stretch for this reason: There’s no ironclad way to distinguish good teams from the bad teams yet. Check out these five lines from Week 2 in 2009.

PACKERS (-9) Bengals
TITANS (-6.5) Texans
EAGLES (PK) Saints
JAGS (-3.5) Cardinals
BRONCOS (-3.5) Browns

Here’s how those lines would have looked if Vegas could re-do those lines after seeing the first seven games of the season:

PACKERS (-3) Bengals
Texans (-4.5) TITANS
Saints (-6) EAGLES
Cardinals (-4.5) JAGS
BRONCOS (-13.5) Browns

Those five lines swung by a combined 40 points. Yowza. This is why bookies hate the first few weeks.

That’s great insight there, until you realize that bookies simply set the line according to how the public bets, and the general public knows exactly as much about how the season will play out as bookies do. So, if everyone loved the Broncos in Week 2, the line on the Broncos would have been higher to get even betting. WHEE! Oh, but Bill KNEW the Broncos would be good, which makes him SMAHHHHTAH than Vegas! Except for when he picked the Rams to be his sleeper team that one year and was wrong. Or when he picked Atlanta to be his sleeper team one year and was also wrong.

But hey, let’s pause here for the Miller Lite Great Call of the Week…

It’s time for the Miller Lite Call of The Week, where I either praise a call I loved or defend a call thought to be previously indefensible.

This week, I’m giving it to myself…

Jesus fucking Christ.

…for a prediction that hasn’t come true yet … but definitely will.

But didn’t.

You already know how great the “Giants-Eagles in the day, Yanks-Phils Game 4 at night” scenario on Sunday is… Anyway, is there any doubt — I mean, ANY? — that whatever happens in the first game will determine the second game?

Yes, there is doubt, because they are separate sporting events that have nothing to fucking do with one another. Hence, the Eagles won, and the Phillies lost. HOW CAN THIS BE? THE COSMIC FORCE THAT BINDS US ALL TOGETHER HAS BEEN BROKEN FOREVERMORE.

Lock it down.

And then unlock it, because that prediction was both stupid and wrong. Back to the column…

My picks record took off only because I correctly assessed the values of those 11 teams, save for one or two misfires. (The Broncos and Saints alone finished 11-0 against the spread in those first six weeks.) Of course, had I been wrong about half of those teams, or more than half of those teams, I would have gotten crushed. Simbotics rewards people who are stubborn and lucky. This year, I got lucky.

So your picks panned out because of luck. Glad you established that mere paragraphs after saying it had nothing to do with luck.

By Week 7 (last weekend), Simbotics had played out, the lines had adjusted and I was on my own. This made me nervous. With so many bad 2009 teams, Vegas was jacking the lines to absurd heights hoping to rope in some underdog money. This made me more nervous. But you know what made me the most nervous? Dozens of readers sending me e-mails that looked something like this:

“Awesome job with the picks this year! I’m riding you this weekend.”

MY READERS THINK I’M AWESOME AND WANT TO BE JUST LIKE ME!

Here’s what I wanted to send back: “No! No! Don’t ride me! Get off! GET OFF! RIGHT NOW!”

I’m too awesome for you! Stay away! I have four TV’s in my man cave and you don’t!

I call this the Ace Mush Corollary. During Sunday football, our friend Ace has a few established habits.

Ace, if you didn’t know, is Adam Carolla. Because Bill has dozens of awesome famous friends with even awesomer nicknames. Hey, have you guys met my buddy Pussyroper? He’s the BEST. (HINT: He’s actually Vincent Kartheiser!)

You can count on him to kill it in this scenario: a few of us deciding to wager on the same team in a late game — say, the Patriots — followed by Ace overhearing this action, then saying to everyone’s chagrin, “Yeah, yeah, I like the Patriots, too, I think I want in on that one.” Every time it happens, you can actually SEE the money flying away. It’s unbelievable. He’s the mush of mushes. We have seriously considered pretending to bet Team A but really taking Team B, then hoping Ace will “join us” on Team A for a classic reverse jinx.

Here’s the point: Last weekend, some of my bad-luck readers combined to pull an Ace Mush on me.

You see, fair reader? It’s YOUR fault that Bill’s prescient picks didn’t come to pass. Please stop ruining his expertise by getting your bad luck herpes on him.

I was doing a little too well.

I’m clearly WAYYYY too awesome.

And they were sitting there going, “Yeah, yeah, Simmons is doing good, I think I want in on his picks this week.” By doing nothing other than successfully executing my job, I became aligned with people who had such bad luck gambling that they said to themselves, “This week, I’m going to trust Bill Simmons, a guy who lost to his wife in 2006 and 2007.”

I’m innocent in all this! I was just sitting there, being my usual genius self, when these dickhead readers had to come in and mooch off me! YOU’VE RUINED THE MAGIC FORMULA, WHICH IS ADMITTEDLY BASED ON SHEER LUCK.

It’s a shame, seeing as how Bill finally figured out the foolproof way to bet on NFL games and totally isn’t going to lose to his wife in picks this year, especially since he no longer publishes his wife’s picks.

In a related story, I suffered my most frustrating week of the season. The Texans blew a 21-0 lead at home because they couldn’t stop Alex Smith and Vernon Davis — that’s right, Alex Smith and Vernon Davis!!!!! — settling for an unsatisfying push. The Vikings choked away a winnable game in Pittsburgh by giving the Steelers’ defense two touchdowns, including a spread-covering one off a deflected screen pass as Minnesota drove for the winning score with three minutes to play. And Miami blew a 24-3 lead to New Orleans, then inexplicably stopped pounding the ball in the fourth and let its lousy receivers decide the game (and they did).

That’s how 9-4 becomes 6-6-1. Bad luck.

It’s also how 9-4 became 9-4 to begin with. But no, let’s go by your theory that your magic formula, which did not involve luck, was helped by luck, and then ruined by the contagious bad luck of others. You know what’s not lucky? HOW INCREDIBLY KNOWLEDGABLE BILL SIMMONS IS ABOUT THE GAME OF FOOTBALL. Even though the Steelers earned both those defensive touchdowns by stripping Favre on the first one and executing flawless return blocking for both scores. Stop making Bill look bad, Steelers, and readers, and everyone who doesn’t make the outcome of games play out the way they ought to! THE PICKS WERE RIGHT! THE GAME IS FLAWED! LUCK SHOULD STOP PROVING ME WRONG.

Anyway, here’s my request for the next few weeks: If you have bad luck, stay away from “borrowing” my 2009 picks.

They’re mine! I only publish them so that you may admire them!

Don’t be the cooler of my column. Let me see if I can keep banging out 10-4 and 11-5 marks every week without you attaching a black cat to my ankles. If you have bad luck and are joining forces with me, that means other people with bad luck are doing the same. How do you think that’s turning out for all of us? Badly. Poorly. Tragically. It wasn’t that I lost on Brett Favre’s line-drive screen pass that ricocheted off Chester Taylor’s face at 200 mph last week, or the fact that Miami’s receivers dropped so many balls against the Saints that I tweeted, “Ted Ginn Jr. finally gives us the answer for what it would be like if someone played WR without arms.” It’s that I absolutely knew dopey things like that would submarine my Week 7. And I knew this because I knew my readers were pulling an Ace Mush on me.

Now, you might think this is the douchiest paragraph ever written. But don’t worry, people. You see, Bill is only JOKING with this whole business. He has a very active sense of humor. He’s only ACTING like a pompous ass, and that’s funny!

Stay away from my Week 8 quick picks. Hands off. Please don’t let them sway you in any way. Thank you. Here they are.

Ooooh! Let’s steal them anyway! THEY’RE TOO GOOD TO RESIST!

Broncos (+3.5) over RAVENS

Wrong.

BILLS (+3.5) over Texans

Wrong.

Browns (+13) over BEARS

Wrong.

Dolphins (+3) over JETS

Correct.

COLTS (-12.5) over Niners

Wrong.

COWBOYS (-9.5) over Seahawks

Hate laying this many points with Dallas

Correct, and yet still kind of wrong.

Rams (+3.5) over LIONS

Correct.

Giants (-1) over EAGLES

Wrong.

CHARGERS (-16.5) over Raiders

Wrong.

Jags (+3) over TITANS

Wrong.

CARDINALS (-10) over Panthers

Wrong.

SAINTS (-11) over Falcons

Wrong. But it was a garbage cover! Points shouldn’t count if you’re trying to come back!

Vikings (+3) over PACKERS

Correct. That’s a 4-9 record for the week. GASP! You BET just like Bill, didn’t you? Admit it! You ruined EVERYTHING. It’s just bad luck for Bill you had to go do that. Nothing but bad luck that in no way dilutes his awesomeness. I bet his bookie returns that money out of respect.