5 NFL teams on upset alert in Week 12
These five NFL teams need to be put on upset alert for Week 12
The Thanksgiving Day games kicked off Week 12 of the NFL season with one of the great traditions in sports, football being played on turkey day. However, the holiday didn’t make any of the three games any different from previous Thursday night games this season as things were a bit off-kilter going into the games and stayed that way once on the gridiron.
The day started out with the Philadelphia Eagles and Detroit Lions doing battle, only that it appeared as if Chip Kelly and the Eagles thought that they didn’t play until Sunday. In a matchup where they should have, at the very least, been evenly matched with the Lions, Philadelphia looked completely inept and got demolished by Detroit.
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Following the destruction of the Eagles was the game between the Dallas Cowboys and Carolina Panthers, a game many people pegged to be the game of the day going in with Tony Romo back in the fold for Dallas. Even oddsmakers were getting crazy about the game inside AT&T Stadium as they had the undefeated Panthers as underdogs on the road. Carolina certainly didn’t look like underdogs in any capacity, though, as they throttled the Cowboys to move to 11-0 on the season.
In the finale of the Thanksgiving Day NFL action, the Green Bay Packers were in Lambeau Field to take on their NFC North rivals in the Chicago Bears. Despite the rivalry, the Packers had every right to just walk right over Chicago in this game. That’s far from what happened, though, as the Packers played sloppily and failed to convert when they needed to and wound up falling to the Bears at home.
Between the Lions and Bears wins and the Cowboys losing handily after being favored, the Thanksgiving games got Week 12 of the 2015 NFL season off to a pretty hectic start. Though Sundays are predictably and regularly more stable than Thursdays have been this season, how these holiday games played out sets the stage for what could be another crazy day in the NFL.
One of the idiosyncrasies of the Sunday and Monday games in Week 12 is that the slate of games features quite a few matchups of teams with similar records squaring off to try to separate themselves from the middle of the pack in the NFL. Subsequently, many potential upsets would simply be underdogs coming up with a victory as opposed to teams with inferior records picking up wins. That’s not universally the case, but it is a common theme for Week 12.
After a wild NFL Thanksgiving, these are the five NFL teams on upset alert for Week 12.
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