Quick Slant: TNF - The Battered Ship Sails West
Mat Irby’s Quick Slant * Game Environment * Cowboys * Buccaneers Mercifully, for once, the wind is still, the seas are calm, and the air is quiet. All that remains is the thick white smoke of burnt cannon fire, the ringing screech in every man’s ears, and the hammering. The incessant
Quick Slant: SNF - Wild Carolina: Big Cats on the Piedmont
Mat Irby’s Quick Slant * Game Environment * Lions * Panthers Night falls on the Carolina Piedmont. Summer has come to a close, and autumn trudges on toward bitter winter. Golden strands of sunset peek above yellowing trees and the glassy waters of Lake Wylie. Darkness settles, and the black panther is
Quick Slant: TNF - Still Theseus' Boat
Mat Irby’s Quick Slant * Game Environment * Steelers * Browns According to legend, Theseus, Athens’ great founding hero, sailed to Crete with fourteen young Athenians marked for death, killed a Minotaur waiting in the Labyrinth, and brought the survivors home. Credited with unifying Attica under Athens, Theseus was basically the Athenians’
Quick Slant: SNF - The Third-Place Game
Mat Irby’s Quick Slant * Game Environment * Rams * Broncos To become an astronaut in 1963, you needed American citizenship, a degree in engineering or a physical science, and 1,000 hours of jet flying, all before your 35th birthday. From the tiny pool of people meeting those parameters (an estimated
Quick Slant: TNF - Penix Redux
Mat Irby’s Quick Slant * Game Environment * Falcons * Packers It’s a strange thing to sit in a patch of grass surrounded by 70,000 spectators. A surface with that much traffic isn’t meant for sitting. It feels like stopping in the middle of a busy two-lane road.
Quick Slant: SNF - Hammer, Meet Nail
Mat Irby’s Quick Slant Game Environment Colts Chiefs November 23, 2025, four days before Thanksgiving. It’s 20-9 with 8:43 remaining. The Colts have led all day. They enter 8-2, their record dragging lukewarm preseason expectations toward the realization that Indianapolis might be among the AFC’
Quick Slant: TNF - The Housewarming Party
Mat Irby’s Quick Slant * Game Environment * Lions * Bills Before they made football, Detroit and Buffalo made things. At the eastern end of Lake Erie, Buffalo made steel, cold as a gravestone; grain, gently sleeping under sunshine. They made automobiles and airplanes, chemicals and electrochemicals under the raw weight of
Quick Slant: MNF - The King is Dead, Long Live the King
Mat Irby’s Quick Slant * Game Environment * Broncos * Chiefs “The king is dead; long live the king.” It’s a wonderful sentence, on its face absurd – a juxtaposition of grammatical opposites, a paradox paired to break ground on something strangely profound. Credited to the accession of Charles VII in 1422,