This week, Brett Favre and his Jets (I’m still having a hard time getting used to saying that) face off against the surprising Bills. The tough thing with the Bills is you just don’t know what they’ll do from week to week. No one probably expected them to do as well as they have this season, or for them to stumble like they did last week. In our Madden 09 sim, both the Bills and the Jets had a little trouble getting started. It was a slow first quarter as both teams adjusted to playing in the cold, rainy condition. The Jets couldn’t get any sort of ground game going, and had a hard time hitting anything through the air that wasn’t to the other team. However, after the first quarter the Jets settled down and started to play some decent football. The key to this game was ball control. The Jets help on to the ball for 14:10 compared to just 5:49 for the Bills. With the Bills defense on the field that long and their offense chilling (literally) on the bench, the Bills just couldn’t get into any kind of rhytm. Favre, meanwhile, finished with 231 yds, 2 TDs, 1 INT and completed 22 out of 29 throws to help led the Jets to a 24-7 win over the Bills. When a team only has the ball for one quarter time wise out of the entire game, that makes it kind of difficult for them to do anything, so the game really wasn’t quite as dominating as the score suggests. The Jets were just methodical and consistent in their drives, very often putting pressure on the Bills to try and score quickly in order to keep pace. A strong third down defense by the Jets got the Bills off the field almost as quickly as they came on. To be honest, I highly doubt this will reflect how this week’s game will really go down, but in the NFL, you just never know.
[Update] Well, there weren’t a lot of people at the office who thought my simulation had any chance of being duplicated in reality. After all, this is the Buffalo Bills we’re talking about, and some think they are the dark horse team to win the Super Bowl this year. Well, never write off a prediction from Madden 09. Sure, it’s just a video game, but it’s one of the most realistic and accurate football sims out there. The Jets did indeed pull out a win against the the big, bad Buffalo Bills (who seem to have had some problems recently). Things didn’t play out exactly like they did in our sim. Favre didn’t have any TDs, but he did have one INT. He hit 19 out of 28 passes for 201 yards which was good enough to help the Jets get a 26-17 win. If you were surprised that the Jets were able to win against the Bills, obviously you don’t read this article…not that we’ve always been so reliable, but you never know.
