Late season NFL can be very difficult to handicap. There are no secrets left in the NFL and the standings and playoff scenarios are common knowledge. Bettors who want to play on teams who are fighting for a playoff berth will pay a premium to back that team. Teams with nothing to play for may or may not give a good effort. A lot of recreational bettors will immediately flock to teams like the Bengals, Steelers, Vikings, Bears, and the contenders in the NFC East under the pretense that they will definitely show up for a must-win game.

Oddsmakers know this as well and may inflate the spread a point or a point and a half to balance where the public money will come in. Games like New Orleans at Dallas, Washington at Philadelphia, Chicago at Arizona, and Cincinnati at Pittsburgh are some of this week’s slate that fall into that category. In theory, the teams with a shot at the playoffs should definitely come out more motivated than their opponents, but that’s not always the case. A team like Washington, for example, who is a young bunch that have not been in this situation before is playing with a lot of pressure, while the Eagles’ players could be playing for roster spots next season when Andy Reid is fired. The Cowboys have stepped on their junk every time they’ve had a chance to win a big game.

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With no progress made and the cancellation of the entire season drawing closer, now is a good time to update where the players listed on the Columbus Blue Jackets’ roster are playing and how the team’s players are doing. Next week will be a preview of the World Junior Hockey Championships, one of my favorite hockey events of the season. All of the U.S. team’s games will be broadcast on the NHL Network and probably NHL.com and it’s safe to assume streams of games from other countries will be posted online somewhere.

As for the Blue Jackets and their roster, I’ll go in alphabetical order by position, just as the players are listed on the Blue Jackets’ official website.

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Face it: 2012 has been a suck-ass year in Cleveland professional sports. But we’re used to it by now, aren’t we? Pleasant surprises were admittedly few and far between—which made it even worse for optimists like me.

One year ago, we posed “12 Questions for 2012” and speculated on their answers. Every December, we like to revisit the year and see how fate answered the questions.

Here are last year’s 12 questions, my predictions, and the eventual truth. As this has become somewhat of an annual chore, you can look for “13 Questions for 2013” in the next week or two.

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I hate the holidays.

Yeah, I said it. You think it too, don’t you? Most of us don’t have the balls to say it out loud. Thanksgiving ends, you’re stuffed full of turkey and all that football-soaked tryptophan-induced bliss goes straight to horror, knowing the next day you get to climb the rickety ladder into the attic and carry heavy boxes down it risking paralysis or death so your house can look like Santa had explosive festive diarrhea all over it. If OSHA had any jurisdiction over your home, that operation would have been fined and shut down long ago.

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