By Eric Emery
With the 2008 season upon us, I have a very important question to pose: Do you realize that my record on the Over/Under for team wins last season was 6-3-1? That means that I was correct two out of three times. If I was a Major League Baseball player, my batting average would be .667! If I ran for President, I would have won 370 Electoral College votes! If I was on American Idol last season, I’d have received 65,000,000 votes! Unfortunately, I can’t hit for average, I’m too honest to run for president, and a restraining order taken out by Paula Abdul have kept me off American Idol. My only option is to improve on last year’s Over/Under performance. Here we go.
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Team: Jacksonville
Line: 10 wins
Prediction: Over
Comment: Even though the Jaguars have enjoyed regular and post-season success, professional football comes fourth to the people of Jacksonville after college football, NASCAR, and noodling. So they have something to prove.
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Team: San Francisco
Line: 6 wins
Prediction: Over
Comment: Shortly after the 49ers reach .500 for the first time since 2002, Barry Bonds will have returned to his former 165-pound self and sign on as a cornerback.
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Team: Seattle
Line: 8.5 wins
Prediction: Under
Comment: Vegas opens a new line called “Times the words ‘rain,’ ‘fish market,’ and ‘grunge’ are used to fill time while the Seahawks are getting blown out.
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Team: Atlanta
Line: 4.5 wins
Prediction: Under
Comment: Drink every time commentators blame “wasted talent,” “humane society,” and “self-destruction” even though Michael Vick couldn’t help this team win any more games than they will without him.
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Team: New England
Line: 12 wins
Prediction: Over
Comment:In the off-season, Bill Belichick re-engineered his evil cyborg “Tom Brady v2.0” to be 50% more talented, 50% more angry, and 100% less interested in career-distracting hot models.
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Team: Detroit
Line: 6.5 wins
Prediction: Under
Comment: This team is always supposed to find a way to win, mostly because it’s always General Manager Matt Millen’s last chance to show he knows what he’s doing. In an alternate dimension, the Bizarro Matt Millen leads his team to the Super Bowl every year. In this one he finally gets fired.
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Team: Green Bay
Line: 8.5 wins
Prediction: Over
Comment: If you believe the hype, Brett Favre would have cured cancer, balanced the federal budget, and scared Hurricane Gustav away from Louisiana if he hadn’t returned to the NFL. As it stands now, Green Bay still possesses a team-first focus, a young defense, and the Bears and Lions twice each on the schedule.
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Team: Minnesota
Line: 8.5 wins
Prediction: Over
Comment: My mom could play quarterback for the Vikings and lead them to the Super Bowl because she possesses the minimum abilities necessary to say “hike” and hand the ball to Adrian Peterson.
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Team: Your Chicago Bears
Line: 8 wins
Prediction: Way Under
Comment: The good news is that baseball season in Chicago is likely to extend halfway into football season. The bad news is that the schedule gets harder right about the time the baseball season comes to its inevitable inglorious end. The only way the Bears win eight or more is if the NFL extends the season to 20 games and the extra four games are played against Atlanta.
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Team: My Pittsburgh Steelers
Line: 9 wins
Prediction: Barely Over
Comment: The Steelers have one of the league’s hardest schedules. I think one of the games is against the 1998 Denver Broncos. Even though my team will have its troubles, don’t believe for a moment that I would never bet a Bears fan that the Steelers will win at least one more game than the Bears this year.
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For more Emery, see the Kool-Aid archive, and the Over/Under archive. Emery accepts comments from Bears fans reluctantly and everyone else tolerably.
Posted on September 3, 2008