When the Lions use a QB during the next game, they will be going with Drew Stanton rather than Daunte Culpepper. Stanton will make his first NFL start next weekend against the 49ers and it’ll be an interesting game. With Stanton, you don’t really know what you’re going to get, except from his play a long time ago. Culpepper seems to be down and out this season since he’s not getting the kind of starts that he’s been hoping for. He might not even be having a start this season at all, instead having to sit around on the sidelines the entire time. This team is going to be be without a known quarterback for the rest of the season, it seems, but they’re out of the playoffs, so maybe it doesn’t matter nearly as much.

If the Carolina Panthers had wanted anything else from their season, it was a win against a good team. Last night they got their wish against the Minnesota Vikings. The Vikings have been dominant against all the other teams and it looked like this week might be as big a win as they’ve had. But the Vikings only took a 7-6 lead into the fourth quarter. It became an ugly mess as Carolina went on to score 20 points during the quarter. 26-7 was the way it looked at the end. The concern isn’t that they lost to the Panthers, but that this might signal some kind of awful drop that’s about to happen for Minnesota. They have been worried about Favre for a long time now, that he’s going to fade at the end of the year. We’ll have to see if this is true or just a team living in hubris. But it’s always exciting for these folks!

Mark Sanchez missed last week’s game, but he’s going to be back against the Atlanta Falcons this weekend. He had trouble with his knee before that, but now he’s on his way back to full power. And it’s just in time too. His team is still in the playoff hunt, though not likely going to make it to the top of the division again. They were ridiculously strong at the beginning of the season, going undefeated for a long time. But with him back at the helm, hopefully the team will be able to make this weekend’s battle a real game. We’ll see if his knees can hold out, even with the custom braces he’ll be wearing. He says that he’s completely ready, so we can’t count him out or anything. Expect a tough game this weekend!

With the Vikings vs Bengals, we got to see two of the harder-to-define teams of this year in a great contest against one another. The Bengals were able to hold their own, but Brett Favre fended off the “fading” concern and their receivers were able to keep the team moving fast. Cedric Benson turns out to be a very good player, perhaps even the center of the Bengals offense. The Vikings are going to the playoffs and it won’t be long before we find out that the Bengals are too. They wouldn’t face each other until February (probably not gonna happen), but it’s an interesting matchup. The Bengals, however, have put together a very adept team that will remain a force in the AFC North for many more years, especially given the apparent slide of the Steelers and Ravens inconsistency. It will be interesting to see how Cincy reacts to having a strong team in a major sport for the first time in years!

What has happened to the Steelers this year? They were the Super Bowl winners last year and looked like possible repeats again this year. They haven’t even changed too many of their players since then. There haven’t been abundant injuries and the personnel was on their game for the first half of the season. But they dropped to .500 after last weekend. The death knell came last night, when they were beaten by the Cleveland Browns, possibly the worst team in football this year. They just haven’t performed as you might have expect. At 6-7, the team doesn’t have much in the way of playoff hopes and their Super Bowl defense appears to be over.

The Arizona Cardinals had the evening game this weekend against the Minnesota Vikings. It was a great evening, but not so perfect for Brett Favre. His offense stalled out for a large part of the evening, with him throwing 2 picks (he had 3 all year up to this point) and getting sacked several times. They lost by 13 points. Favre was quick to say that while his team had played well, they will have to do even better as the season goes on, especially since Arizona approached this game like they would have if it were a playoff game. If this is the play that we’ll see out of the Vikings in January, we might not be about to see the Super Bowl champs in action, but instead, someone like the Cards will beat them. The Cards are very close to clinching their division, so it’s a good time for them.

Perhaps the biggest running back in the league, Adrian Peterson was caught by the police last weekend driving almost 110 miles an hour on a state highway in the suburbs of Minneapolis. The possibility exists that he could lose his license for such a display of silliness.  He described it as a “small speeding ticket”, which is an understatement. Many people are trying to hunt down the car that he was driving. Maybe he was running that fast. But the bigger question is: what if he had run into one of his own fans while driving this way? What if he had endangered some local people? Those aren’t serious questions, because obviously he DID endanger them with that speed. And he will probably mostly get away with it. Anyway, the local fans are reaping the benefits of his speed on the field, so why worry about his speed off the field?