Politically Incorrect Football: No, I will not predict the 2011 Season

Dear NFL fans,

It's been a long, strange offseason. I have been travelling for work for a solid year, so I haven't had to bear the brunt of the absurdity, but suffice to say that most NFL fans had their intelligence insulted and players before plays and owners finally decided that no, we're not going to forego billions and billions of dollars because we're not getting a big enough percentage of said billions of dollars.

So great, late July comes and we finally get word that the NFL season is happening! The draft went off without a hitch, players are coming in to training camp and now we're a couple of preseason games in... Everything is back to normal! I can start neglecting my imaginary girlfriend on Sundays, and that void in my life that I'd been filling with alcohol will now be filled with football. And alcohol.

Wrong.

I am submitting to you, loyal fans of the most-watched sports league on this spinning blue orb, that the entire National Football League 2011 season will be the biggest fluke in the history of sports. I'm not going to waste the time and energy expounding upon what teams are going to do what because anyone who claims to be making a serious attempt at such an endeavor is selling a plate of shit fit for a TGI Friday's menu.

People forget that this was the longest work stoppage in the history of the NFL. But Murphy, there was no work! It was the OFF-season! Au contraire, nameless Italics voice. We lost free agency, where teams can spend months courting the best suited players to their team. Instead we got three frantic days of grab bag signings, and teams wound up unevenly loading some positions while neglecting others. And while we're at it, there were no offseason workouts, where new players (i.e. those free agents that they normally sign in March) and the new rookie class all get to know each other. This year, the start of training camp was like the first day of high school. Rookies were the freshman and free agents were the transfer students. Only difference is that unlike most American high school students, these guys now have a little future job security. At least until 2021.

Further exacerbating that point, the lack of offseason workouts and controlled team activities will inevitably lead to disastrous injuries across the league. I'd say I feel sorry for the players a little bit, but fuck them, they're getting millions of dollars to do that to their bodies. This is what you fought for, jackasses. So the combination of lack of master planning, lack of team cohesiveness, and lack of conditioning will result in many games this season being played with about the same level of mastery as a land war in Africa.

There is no reason on earth I should be "predicting" what's going to happen. It's like predicting where the Westboro Baptist Church will be protesting next, or Kim Jong Il's wardrobe selection for the day. They're not predictions. They're guesses pulled out of your ass, between yesterday's Taco Bell sampler box and that polyp you should really have checked out.

But the Reverend Doctor Robert Michael Pierre Gustav Toutont Beauregard Finley III, Esquire (aka Beau, the "B" in JB Sports Chat) came at me and insisted I provide some sort of NFL preseason content. And I don't blame him. This is a sports blog. That's what sports blogs do. But fair warning, if you expect anything I predict to actually happen, you shouldn't be watching sports, you should be watching your diet and trying to eliminate paint chips from your daily consumption.

But before I get into that, a quick note to Entertainment and Sports Programming Network: Hey assholes, when I'm overseas for work and the only American station I have to watch is ESPN America, why in the hell would you broadcast the Little League World Series? NFL preseason football, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer... hell, the Canadian Football League. Any college sport. I'd even take high school women's field hockey. But when you're my only link back to the Land of the Free and you're broadcasting me a bunch of 12-year-olds as Aruba faces Japan in the LLWS quarterfinals, all your doing is making me want to blow Bristol, Connecticut and South Williamsport, Pennsylvania off the map. Get your programming priorities straight, dammit!!!

Okay, on with the predictions:

1) Within 365 days of this post, the Jacksonville Jaguars will relocate to Los Angeles. 26 of the 38 Jaguars fans will move with them.

2) The division winners are going to be teams nobody expects. All these smug sportscasters are banally making the safe prediction that the Patriots, Packers, and Eagles will win their respective divisions. This year is going to be a fluke. It will be teams we don't expect, like the Memphis Showboats, the North Melbourne Kangaroos, the Tonawonda Kardex, and the Buffalo Bills.

3) Albert Haynesworth (DT, Patriots) will spend at least one night in jail. And he will fall in love.

4) White people who claim to be 1/16th Apache will be the only people who will continue to be offended by the name of the Washington Redskins. Like the Native American community in America doesn't have bigger fish to fry right now.

5) The underground cult-like fan base for Browns RB Peyton Hillis will bestow upon him the nickname "The Cleveland White".

6) Tony Romo will continue to make the same kind of comical blunders we've come to expect from a Polish-Mexican quarterback.

7) Troy Aikman will once again accidentally say the C-word on the air

8) Tom Brady will sleep with your girlfriend, just because he's an asshole and he can. (Besides... you're not happy with her. It will be a good reason to call it quits with her).

9) An NFL player will do something with a gun that will be even stupider than what Plaxico Burress did. My guess is a Cincinnati Bengal.

10) People in the following cities will have virtually nothing to live for unless their team makes a conference championship: Saint Louis, Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Houston, Phoenix, and Oakland.

LOCK OF THE YEAR: Philadelphia will continue to be the most ironically named city on earth.

Normally at times like this, I'd post some old statistics off of which we might be able to gauge what will go down this year in the NFL. But there's virtually nothing. The only thing I could think of pertains to other seasons with work stoppages... In league history, there have been two other work stoppages. Both of those seasons, the Super Bowl was won by the same team. An unlikely team that many people discounted, and both years that team had an unproven veteran quarterback with little of value on his resume. That's right, the Washington Redskins won the Super Bowl after the 1982 season and the 1987 season, and they are going to win it in 2011. If history can tell us one thing about what will happen in 2011, it's that the Lombardi trophy will be coming back to the Nation's Capital, and nobody will see it coming.

That's all I've got for the preseason, folks. I'm going to go eat a doner kebab. I'll see you in September when I'm back from Germany and done travelling for good.