You can imagine my surprise this afternoon when I got an alert on my phone informing me that “Keenan Allen is in the red zone.” Between the five-day weekend the kids had for reasons still unexplained by the school district, and the usual chaos of work, and family visiting from New Mexico, I somehow lost track of time and had been gleefully going about my Wednesday until ESPN reminded me that it was, in fact, Thursday.

Now, this might sound like an excuse for why I’ve failed to produce a weekly recap for the second straight week, and I wouldn’t fault you for thinking that. But I’m sorry—you’re wrong. As any good leader will tell you, losing track of time isn’t an excuse. It could possibly be a reason, I suppose, but I already have a perfectly valid reason for my chronic procrastination of football updates: I didn’t fricking feel like it.

To be honest, the recaps I’ve been phoning in this year have been so generic they probably belong on the Great Value shelf at Walmart. No flash, no humor… just straight scores and stats. And let me tell you something about taking last week’s scores and rearranging them into something that vaguely resembles a weekly league recap: it’s boring as hell. I’ve always loved creative writing—with the emphasis on creative.

So tonight, at halftime of the Thursday night game, I’m sitting down to write whatever’s on my mind. Think of this as less of a recap and more of a meta, stream-of-consciousness ramble about whatever happens to float through the expanse of the brain while, at least peripherally, thinking about football.

Speaking of football, it’s not like I didn’t have plenty of HLC action to write about the past two weeks. We could have talked about the Jay Birds and the Tacos battling for first atop the East. Or the overall aggressively average quality of the league this year: lots of 3-4s and 4-3s. And of course, we could have talked about the one team that dared rise above all that mediocrity: the Lobos, who just kept winning… until suddenly they weren’t.

And who did that loss come at the hands of? None other than the woebegone Muskellunge, who apparently decided last week they were done with the L column and ready to turn up the heat on the number-one team. The Muskies’ win over the Lobos was impressive not just for the upset itself but for the streak they finally snapped—having not won a regular-season game since 2023. Pretty wild stuff.

Also, I’ve been waiting for a chance to use the word woebegone in… anything, since about 2005. I’m fairly certain I’ve never even said it out loud, let alone written it, but I’ve read it more times than I can count—basically every time I use the spare bathroom in our house. Right there, above the toilet, is a framed sports page from the Austin American-Statesman after the Astros beat the Cardinals to advance to their first World Series. Staff writer Kirk Bohls, under the predictable yet charming headline “Houston, We Have a Series,” wrote:

“After one of the worst starts to a season in franchise history and one of their most stunning losses two days ago, the woebegone Houston Astros are finally going to the World Series.”

For twenty years I’ve read that yellowed old paper and thought, you really need to use woebegone in a piece someday. And now I have—four times, to be exact.

As for what happened to those woebegone (five) Astros after that series with St. Louis, I seem to have developed amnesia. I can’t quite remember, though I think it might’ve involved a broom and some baseball club from the south side of Chicago.

Anyway, that’s your Week 7 recap—for whatever it’s worth. Good luck to everyone this weekend. Go Tourists.

Standings

Week 6 Scoreboard

Week 7 Scoreboard