NFL 2018 Week 10 Recap

Back before the internet was a thing and we could all win money gambling on NFL, everyone would have their phone numbers written down on a sheet on a paper, or if you had enough friends, you’d have a small address book with all the numbers written down. It was Sam Malone from the hit NBC TV show Cheers that popularized “little black books” containing a full listing of all the girls’ phone numbers you had, (as well as all your boys’ digits, of course).

Sammy’s book was known to be pure fire and he had a never-ending parade of sexy 80s ladies from around the entire world visit his boudoir each episode. I believe the youth of today refer to this as, “toxic masculinity” or “reinforcing gender roles” or something like that.

Anyway, when you had a girl over to your place in high school and she saw your little black book (LBB) she would grab at it like a monkey reaching for a cigar – she just had to see who else was in there and if you had written anything beside her name. You only had to learn this lesson once before you knew you had to hide it every time before a girl came over. She wanted to feel special and didn’t need a physical manifestation of your drunken addiction to phoning up surly chicks with daddy issues.

However, this was the early 1990s and everyone hated everything, (we were nothing like the over-loving, Snowflake youth of today), so even when forgetting to hide the book, most of the time they didn’t care. They usually had more boyfriends than we had girlfriends so it all worked out in the end. To be honest, everyone just wanted some physical company and there was obviously nothing wrong with that.

Now just because you had a book of phone numbers, that certainly didn’t mean you actually had the means to call anyone. This was basically during the time of Zach Morris brick phones and the only people who had money for those were either dealing drugs or on TV. So what did this mean? Well, it meant you would have to phone a land line like a caveman and usually have to speak to the girl’s mother before she would pass you on to her.

The mothers were the Gate Keepers of their daughters’ virtue and if they didn’t like your tone, choice of words, the squeaking of your pubescent voice, or any combination thereof, you were not getting through. “She’s busy. Bye.” Sadly, I heard that phrase numerous times until I learned to be polite, use proper grammar, and have a bit of decency…or a sense of humor.

So it wasn’t, YO!! Whasssup G? Natasha in da house?

It was, Good evening! I’m hoping to speak to your daughter, Natasha – is she at home at the moment, please?

Some mothers made you talk longer than others before passing you on. The worst were middle or upper class mothers who tried to sniff out your parents’ income over the phone, or at least what country club they were members at (the irony being their daughters were the wildest ones in school).

The best mothers to talk to were single moms busy trying to get laid themselves and just wanted you to make plans with their daughters as quickly as possible to clear the phone line for when (if) the dude they met at the donut shop earlier in the week called. Or just to get them out of the house so they had it to themselves in case Donut Boy actually wanted to come over and get busy. It kind of felt like a sick scene in the moment, but it was the early 1990s and it somehow all just felt “right”. It turns out looking back through adult eyes, we were all just humans being human.

So how did you get in touch with someone during the weekend and you were already out of the house and at the mall or hanging out in the streets? Well, we weren’t high rollers then, we had something called “pay phones” – physical booths with a telephone inside them requiring (in my day) 25 cents per call, and this was a huge expense when you’re 16 and trying to get enough money together for a $6 bottle of 30 proof wine. So before you could even get to the woman who was protecting the girl you were trying to hook up with, you had to deal with another female to get the call placed.

It was routine for us to call the operator and say, Hello! How are you? Sorry to bother you but this phone just ate my quarter and it was my last one! What do I do?!? The kind hearted soul on the other end would always say, Oh that’s ok dear, just give me the number and I’ll put it through for you. Mission accomplished: free call activated.

However, 9 times out of 10 this just led to more problems because now it’s Friday night and there’s 6 other dudes trying to get with Natasha, presumably all calling from various phone booths around the city, so now her faqing phone is ringing busy. And you don’t even know if she has a double line and is talking to two holmies, or if her parents are cheap and only have a single line. And you just burned a free call you could have made to some other girl – 1st world, early 90s problems, I tell ya.

Halfway through high school the problem wasn’t, “Natasha has too many gentlemen callers”, it became, “every nice operator that literally started their job in the 1950s is now retiring and being replaced by bitter women in their mid 40s who just got divorced to be replaced by the waitress at the local pub”. And believe me when I tell you these dragons did not want to help a young man place a free call to someone younger and hotter, and who also had their whole lives in front of them. This was a real crisis amongst my cheap group of alcoholic friends.

So then in 1991, right around the time Ice Cube was dropping the amazing Kill at Will ep, we were watching rap videos and all had a flash of genius: let’s get pagers! Let them come to us – beep me your number and I’ll holla back, baby.

Although this sounded amazing when we hatched the plan, only a few of us had the $25 a month to keep service going once the paging plan was up and running. The new scam du jour was getting our hands on as many wallets as possible – not to buy crap on their credit card, (remember this was pre-Amazon), but to use their drivers licenses to get Motorola accounts to get pagers. Then the dudes who lost their IDs would complain their wallet was stollen a few months later when they got the bill, and Motorola would void the whole thing. It was a victimless crime!

Now bein’ on my own is a factor
So I become, the neighbourhood jacker
Gimme your car, run your jewels
Makin’ a livin’ robbin’ fools

Obviously this ended up with 15 dudes with pagers but only 3 who could actually receive beeps – all because the heartless bastards over at Motorola weren’t offering student rates. Do you know how depressing it is to have a perfectly good pager sitting in your hand that can’t get beeped? It’s like having a bottle full of Viagra in your pocket while stranded on a deserted island – it’s bloody useless.

So in what seemed like 3 days, the entire city somehow worked out an elaborate set of codes for everything from, “is your mother home?” to “do you know anyone who’s selling weed tonight?” In addition, everyone got personal numerical codes so their boys could receive beeps for them. Clearly “007”, “69”, “001” and “80085” were the first to be snapped up, but in the end everyone got their “personal pin number”. Remember: you could only send NUMBERS and not WORDS at this prehistoric time…yes, it seems unimaginable in 2018.

Anyway, the codes then morphed into full conversations over that virgin cellular network, which was constantly getting abused by beep after beep from lonely, desperate people sending messages to lonelier, more desperate people with pagers. The Wireless Revolution had arrived.

The few codes I can remember off the top of my head are “187” meant “the party / event / whatever got killed – don’t come“. Then “211” meant that “someone ran off the booze/weed/girls – we need to reorganize the evening“. Then there were codes for “I love you“, “come to my house after my parents are in bed“, and “partying my balls off, don’t beep me anymore tonight“. One code for sure was “19” which meant “meet me/us at the golf course“, in a reference to the 19th hole. Ya – my crew used to drink in a golf course sometimes – what?

All of this would be on top of the actual phone number that was doing the beeping because you had to know the house the message was being sent from to put the whole thing into context – where the hell are you now? This of course required everyone in our crew to memorize about 200 different phone numbers because if you didn’t know that 463-3333 was Eddie’s place, you ain’t going to know his parents left unexpectedly and he’s having a party.

So in reality a normal message on a Friday night could be, “462-2222 69 187 19”, which would of course mean, “I’m beeping you from Omar’s house, this is Chuck, the party is cancelled, meet us at the golf course.” Get it? Good.

And this was just the messaging between the boys – imagine the codes, numerical combinations and whatnot once we brought girls in. Because you damn well know that certain girls that ran with the crew got their own numerical code too. My word, the beeps could be a series of 42 numbers that somehow would all make sense to the person receiving it…even after downing 5 tall cans of shitty beer. What a wonderful time to be alive.

Now you’re probably saying to yourself, “Hold up. If you had the phone number on your beeper of where they were beeping you from, why not just call the house phone and figure this all out on a call?” Ya right. Well besides the fact no one had an extra quarter to spare, this is Saturday Night – there is one phone in the house and a bunch of guys drinking in the basement, there’s some fool on it trying to get a hold of the girl he likes, there’s two guys waiting behind them looking at their beepers, there’s 5 guys behind them trying to beep people who aren’t there, and then there’s whoever else lives in the house trying to call or beep someone too. Does it sound like a call would make it through to this place?!?

You got younger sisters hopping on the phone and busting up your rap sessions with girls by screaming out you got chlamydia, you got older brothers busting in the room and beating fools off of the phone so they can ring up their lady friends, and you got the single mother of the household trying to get every damn body off the phone so they can see where their boyfriend and/or drugs are at. This was every weekend night and it was obviously far from a perfect system…yet it worked…

And you have to remember there was a hierarchy of who got access to the house phone first. The rough order was, those who had working pagers, those who knew where the house parties were, those who looked old enough to have fake IDs, then the baby-faced almost-virgins had to wait their turns, (their turns never came). Moms always got the phone eventually – she’s letting us drink in her basement, after all…we just asked her to be quick and open that line back up so we could resume our important adolescent communications.

Who da faq is this paging me at 5:46 in the morning?

All of this was further complicated if you received the page at the mall because again, you didn’t want to waste the 25 cents calling the house just to hear a busy tone or someone’s momma say, “I’m talking to someone. Call Back.” Click. There was never a guarantee you could find the party or the people you wanted to be with, but pagers definitely increased the probability you’d somehow make it. You never wanted to hear that you missed out on a rager at school on Monday morning, missed only because you didn’t want to give the godless monsters at Motorola the $25 you needed to drink with that month.

Anyways, we have a lot of members under the age of 30 and I just wanted you all to know how hard it used to be to meet up with your boys or get some stanky on your hang-down. Respect the Tinder.

Also, SIN won 65% of props in NFL 2018 Week 10.

Game Lines: 1-5 (20%)

Props: 26-14 (65%)

TNF
Panthers/Steelers under 51 L
JuJu Smith-Schuster over 5.5 receptions L
Cam Newton under 42.5 rushing yards W
Greg Olsen under 4.5 receptions W

Sunday
Oakland Raiders +9.5 L
Miami Dolphins +10.5 L
Cincinatti Bengals +6 L
Seattle Seahawks +10 W
Kareem Hunt under 87.5 rushing yards W
Kareem Hunt under 34.5 receiving yards W
Dede Westbrook under 4 receptions L
Leonard Fournette  over 59.5 rushing yards L
Jordan Reed under 4.5 receptions W
Quincy Enunwa over 38.5 receiving yards L
Dede Westbrook over 40.5 receiving yards L
TY Hilton over 50.5 receiving yards W
Taylor Gabriel under 55.5 receiving yards W
Tevin Coleman under 60.5 rushing yards W
Joe Mixon over 59.5 rushing yards W
James White under 5.5 receptions W
Corey Davis under 5 receptions L
TY Hilton under 4.5 receptions W
Jordan Howard under 64.5 rushing yards W
Tre Burton under 3.5 receptions L
Josh Rosen under 21.5 completions L
Marcus Mariota under 29.5 rushing yards W
Randall Cobb over 39.5 receiving yards P
Aaron Jones under 72.5 rushing yards L
Derek Carr over 241.5 passing yards W
Kenny Stills over 2.5 receptions L
Kenyan Drake under 38.5 rushing yards W
Brock Osweiler under 20.5 completions L
Jared Cook over 42.5 receiving yards W
Jared Cook over 4 receptions W
Cooper Kupp under 73.5 receiving yards W
Robert Woods under 5.5 receptions W
Robert Woods under 80.5 receiving yards L
Dak Prescott under 28.5 rushing yards W
Golden Tate under 5.5 receptions W
Golden Tate under 62.5 receiving yards W
Melvin Gordon over 36.5 receiving yards W
Jared Goff under 293.5 passing yards L
Ezekiel Elliott over 26.5 receiving yards W

MNF
San Francisco 49’ers -3 L
Marquise Goodwin over 40.5 receiving yards W
Sterling Shepard under 5 receptions W
Matt Breida under 66.5 rushing yards L

Current Record for 2018 NFL Season

Games Lines: 33-35-1 (48.5%)

Props: 235-180-6 (56.6%)

Thanks again to SIN Member X for sharing his plays with us so we can brag to the world.

Now always remember that when you’re rolling with the Sports Information Network, you are rolling with real life, flesh and blood, old school Gs who have been around the block more than a few times.

We respect truth, winning, and money – in that order. Oh, also cell phones …cell phones are definitely fantastic…we like those too.

I’m like Ma Bell, I’ve got the Ill Communication…

DEDICATION: This NFL gambling recap is dedicated to all former executives at Motorola during the early 1990s who are surely going to burn in hell for cock-blocking me for three solid years during the most crucial time of my sexual life with their outrageous fees. I hope you all rot in a pit of fire for eternity you filthy scumbags…