NFL: WEEK 3 RESULTS; RAIDERS LOSE TO BRONCOS // MLB: END-OF-THE-LINE LEADERS; COLORADO ROCKIES, EMBLEMATIC OF ABOVE-THE-MARGIN BASEBALL, IN SPITE OF LOSSES.

FOR MORE ANALYSIS, GO TO "MILE HIGH SPORTS RADIO," AM1510 or FM93.7, and to Denver’s best sports blogging team, milehighsports.com. SPORTS NOTEBOOK posts its columns Tuesday and Friday of each week. Ed. & Publ., Marvin Leibstone; Copy & Mng. Ed., Gail Kleiner. . . // . . . NFL: WEEK 3---WEEK 3 has resulted in seven franchises owning the stratosphere, that of the perfect record. These three wins/zero losses (3-0) teams are the National Conference West’s Seattle Seahawks, NC North’s Chicago Bears, NC South’s New Orleans Saints, and the American Conference West’s Denver Broncos and Kansas City Chiefs, the AC East’s New England Patriots and the Miami Dolphins. Meanwhile, Week 3 put seven NFL teams at the two wins/one loss (2-1) position, the NC East’s Dallas Cowboys, NC North’s Detroit Lions, AC East’s New York Jets, AC North’s Cincinnati Bengals and Baltimore Ravens, the AC South’s Houston Texans and Indianapolis Colts. Week 3 also delivered 11 franchises to the one win/two losses (1-2) level, the NC West’s St. Louis Rams, San Francisco 49ers and Arizona Cardinals, NC East’s Philadelphia Eagles, NC North’s Green Bay Packers, NC South’s Carolina Panthers and the Atlanta Falcons, the AC West’s Oakland Raiders and San Diego Chargers, AC East’s Buffalo Bills, and the AC North’s Cleveland Browns. And, six franchises are still where prairie dogs sleep, zero wins/three losses (0-3), the NC East’s N.Y. Giants and Washington Redskins, NC North’s Minnesota Vikings, the NC South’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers, AC North’s Pittsburgh Steelers, the AC South’s Jacksonville Jaguars. Were the 32-team NFL being compared today with another 32-organization professional football league, it’d be under .500, a losing establishment (not counting the one team in Bye Week). However, that comparison is not in Football Planet’s reality destiny. What is sadly real are the Week 3 surprises, that even at this early juncture of the NFL 16-game regular season some teams that were expected to have been explosive and at the top are having trouble sucking air, i.e., hot teams of last season thought to be leaders by now, e.g., the 1-2 Falcons, 1-2 Packers, 0-3 Redskins and 0-3 Giants. And, hey, the Chiefs and Dolphins, at 3-0? Along that popular scale of one through ten, roughly “the Expected” gets a seven, and ballpark thinking gives “the Unexpected,” a three. So, though with some “same ol’ same-o” amidst, the NFL still isn’t a Groundhog Day enterprise. . . // . . . RAIDERS, BRONCOS---ABOUT the best that can be said regarding the now 1-2 Oakland Raiders as they lost to the currently 3-0 Denver Broncos last night, 37-21, is that they were able to witness a nearly perfect offense “up close & personal.” Before their eyes, an offense led by Broncos quarterback, Peyton Manning, performed that near-perfect attack role, only a few loose threads in the weave, the Manning readings and receiver responses to the Raiders defense surely a narrative of best options executed for “intended results.” Possessing the football for more than half of game time (approximately 36 minutes), the Broncos offense set up 73 plays and 31 first downs that became 536 total net yards, averaging around 7.3 yards per play, 35 of these yards gained from rushing (4.7 average yards were gained from these Broncos rushes), with average yards gained from each pass play above 9.0. QB Manning passed for 374 yards, completing 32 of 37 passes, three for touchdowns. To date, Manning has thrown for 12 TD’s, thus 84 points of the 127 put up by the Broncos during Weeks 1 through 3. . . Yet the Raiders did score 21 points, and they held the Broncos to just three points gained in the game’s third quarter, and Raiders wide receiver Denarius Moore gained 124 yards, second best in the game to Broncos WR Eric Decker’s 133 yards, suggesting Broncos defense vulnerabilities. Commendable, however, is that the Broncos vs. Raiders defense was almost a B-team operation, in that A-listers Von Miller, Champ Bailey and others have been sidelined from injuries or, as in Miller’s case and putting it mildly, from behavior issues. Week 4 and subsequent weeks will address the Broncos offense endurance, its consistency of skills for securing a now perfect record. With the eventual A-list defense in play, that job could be easier for Manning & Crew, and yet the defense surrogates have been better at their tasks than Broncos primary defense squads of recent seasons. Next week, the Broncos will face a team of the more formidable offense and defense than that shown by the Raiders last night, the now 1-2 Philadelphia Eagles (QB, Michael Vick). . . // . . . MLB: SEVEN MLB clubs that are already playoff bound or very close to it have won more than 90 games apiece, the NL West’s Los Angeles Dodgers, NL Central’s St. Louis Cardinals, Cincinnati Reds and Pittsburgh Pirates, the NL South’s Atlanta Braves, the American League West’s Oakland Athletics, the AL Central’s Detroit Tigers and the AL East’s Boston Red Sox. The Red Sox are leading both MLB leagues from 95 won games and 62 losses, with an opportunity to be the only team to win 100 or more games during the 2013 season. Best re. number of wins in the NL are the NL East’s Atlanta Braves and Cardinals, both with 92 wins. . . Among the seven top teams, five are leading their divisions, the Reds and Pirates being back of the Cardinals each by two games. . . The NL West’s Dodgers are the leading team with the biggest lead over a second place club, 10 games ahead of second place team, the Arizona Diamondbacks. Looking back to last year and end-of April 2013 results, the more surprising and disappointing situations belong to last year’s World Series winning club, the San Francisco Giants (72-64), the Seattle Mariners (68-88), the Baltimore Orioles (81-75) and the Colorado Rockies (71-86), all fourth and last place teams within their respective divisions. Worst record to date belongs to the Houston Astros, only 51 wins, the only club with more than 100 losses—106. . . COLORADO ROCKIES: THE Rockies are about to leave the MLB-2013 regular season below .500, in last place of the National League West, today tied as fourth worst in the National League along with the Philadelphia Phillies, each having won only 71 games, both fourth worst within both leagues along with the American League East’s last place team, the Toronto Blue Jays, also with but 71 wins. Even so, the Rockies have remained emblematic of a solid MLB team, for example, the Rockies have accumulated 155 home runs, seven of the team’s primary line-up contributing with double digit HR totals, LF Carlos Gonzalez leading with 26, SS Troy Tulowitzki with 24, C Wiln Rosario, 21, RF Michael Cuddyer, 20. And not to shrug off is that nine Rockies batters have 109 or more hits each for the season thus far, Cuddyer highest with 158, Tulowitzki second with 135, Rosario third in this category with 131. And three of the Rockies line-up hold batting averages above .300 for more than 350 at bats, Cuddyer in the lead at .334, Tulowitzki second at .316, Gonzalez third, .302. Rosario comes close---.292, and no other Rockies primary line-up batter has a batting average below .240. Commendable is second C Yorvit Torealba’s .239 batting average for but 176 at bats. Also, this line-up+ substitute players have produced 1,470 hits as of today, which includes 275 doubles from 11 batters and 37 triples from 10 batters. However, and here’s a rub, the number of runs yielded by this acceptable batting data has yielded but 690, a less than 50 percent success rate, which speaks to a lot of runners left on base as half innings closed, in NFL language weak red-zone efficiency, weak third down efficiency. Still, the accumulation of runs would have placed the Rockies in a better position today were the team’s number of hits per most games played able to offset the runs given away by the Rockies starter rotation, which had performed well enough in April, then sank from May through July, improved in August, sank again in September. Only two Rockies starting pitchers can claim double-digit wins today, LH Jorge De La Rosa with 16 wins, and RH Jhoulys Chacin with 14. RH Juan Nicasio follows these two with 8 wins. Still, the losses that these pitchers are tagged with add up to 24 of the Rockies 86 losses, so we have the Rockies three best starters purchasing a fourth of the team’s total number of losses. Atop this is that only two of the Rockies relievers have winning records, LH Rex Brothers (2-1) and LH Josh Outman, 3-0. So, and summarizing, the Rockies have owned a line-up delivering a large number of hits but too often has been unable to advance enough runners to home plate before a third out in order to offset the runs given up by the Rockies starting rotation and follow-up relievers. In spite of the team’s many above-the-margin players with high stats, which describes the team as deserving of being within the NL’s top half, the team’s low percentage of runs relative to number of hits and the pitching staff’s 4.3 ERA have combined to put the Rockies where they are finishing the season, bottom of the pack for a third consecutive season. END/ml