NFL Preview

The first day of any season for any sport offers one thing for every team: optimism. Every team starts on even ground. Despite every prediction, every past record, every player transition, no prediction can accurately measure what the future holds for each team. This is true more so in professional football more so than any other sport. The National Football League breeds parity. Every 3-13 and 4-12 has the hope of a rags to riches story. Every 13-3 or 12-4 team can feel the ground beneath them crumbling, even if they appear to be standing on ten feet of solid concrete. Unlike basketball or baseball, every professional football team has a realistic shot at the Super Bowl. How many Kurt Warner, Tom Brady stories are out there in basketball and baseball? How many running backs emerge from obscurity to rattle off a 1,500 yard, 12 touchdown season? The National Football League breeds parity. In baseball, even though there are teams like the Giants and the Rays who make a run, year in and year out the contenders are always the teams that spend money. In basketball, the notion is that teams need to take their “playoff lumps” and need to learn how to “win” in the playoffs. In football, everything from the past is thrown out and taken with a grain of salt. Random teams make unthinkable runs. Stars are born and stars die with reckless abandon. The football field is a battle field, and mental strength outweighs physical strength.

All 32 teams have a shot at being crowned champion. As unrealistic as that sounds, take the tormented Buffalo Bills, a team that may have finished in the bottom of the pile, but a team that nonetheless went toe-to-toe with countless playoff teams, and the only thing that separated glory from despair is those bad breaks that haunt every unlucky team, and luck goes hand-in-hand with strength. Every team that is able to stick around through the New Year has many instances of the ball bouncing the right way, a fumble bouncing right into the arms of a teammate, a punt resting perfectly inside the 5 yard line instead of squirming into the end zone. It's more than skill that separates the good from the bad, and the cliché “that's the way the ball bounces” rings true in the sport that features such an oblong ball. Lightning doesn't strike in the same place twice can be revamped for football speak into a football doesn't bounce the same way twice.

Is it even important to make predictions for the National Football League? If my predictions ring true is it something I can put on my resume for future sports writing jobs, saying that I've hammered 73% of my predictions year in and year out? In that case I should switch back to gambling on sports, which is something I'm definitely not opposed to now that I have steady money coming into my bank account.

I will say this though, I hope the Patriots win the Super Bowl, so Tom Brady can fully establish the claim as “Greatest Quarterback Ever”, which is something I will fully discuss at the proper time and place. I hope the Colts do terrible and Peyton Manning doesn't play, but not bad enough that they get the first pick and the rights to Andrew Luck. Then again, the Colts weren't very lucky, pun intended, the last time they tried taking the “sure-thing” quarterback prospect from Stanford. I have no hopes for the Vikings, and expect them to win 5 games this year and Adrian Peterson bolts in free agency. I hope Colin Kaepernick gets a chance to showcase the skills I've come to witness at Nevada. Other than that, the only thing I hope for from the NFL is that it continues the trend that it has established over the past decade: that each season is better than the last.