Now toss me the pigskin

9/9/2010 Photo courtesy of Google Images

Yes! The day has finally come!!

Enough of garbage meaningless preseason football, contract holdouts, considerations of moving towards an 18 game regular season, waiting for Favre to inevitably come out of retirement, the new rule to have umpires stand behind the play and its impact on the Colts, er NFL.....enough of all of it. It's time for real football--- time for the players to put their money where their mouths are, time to watch the brilliance of game plans and schemes that the coaches have been devising and hiding until now, time to see if the "we never get any respect" Saints can repeat, time to see if Favre can carry his 2009 numbers into 2010, time to see if Chris Johnson can be stopped. And lucky for you and me, the time is NOW.

This preseason was exceptionally long and drawn out. It's bad enough that the NFL bores us year after year, keeping us tapping our fingers while we wait one full month before we can watch meaningful, action-packed, hard-hitting games. But this year, two major leagues collaboratively worked together to force me and many others to toss the sports section of the newspaper altogether for the last 4 weeks. Our hometown team, the only team in Chicago that matters (enter Sox fan boos here), the Cubs, sucked it up from the get-go this year. It became truly painful to watch this team in July and August--most of us didn't even know the names of the young players that were called up to fill the roster spots. So maybe the rest of the league was more interesting and exciting, I thought. Nope. The entire sport became uninteresting to me as soon as Stephen Strasburg got injured. He alone would've been worth watching had he not thrown his arm out. The guy could have been a phenom. I haven't been this disappointed since Barbaro went down.

Anyway, back to football. How exciting is this year going to be? Very exciting, my friends. We have up-and-coming talent in Arian Foster, Matt Stafford, C.J Spiller, Ryan Mathews, and more. I could go on and on (and I will in a separate post). Tonight, the NFL kicks off with the undefeated Super Bowl champs taking on Favre and Co. The morning line has the Saints to win by 5.5 but I predict that they're going to win by a much wider margin. The Saints, with their high-powered offense is going to be able to stifle the Viking D on opening day. Brett and Co. will be interesting to watch, to say the least. Will Brett be able to move around the pocket and get the ball out his receivers in time with that injured ankle of his? Will AP have better control of the football or will he be fumble-prone again this year? Will Chester Taylor's absence have an effect on the offense? Can Sidney Rice be replaced? My guesses are No, not consistently;He better hope so; Yes, and that's why I'm glad he's on the Bears; and Absolutely. (Are you keeping up?)

We shall see........I'm hoping for a good, close match-up tonight. Either way, we have the rest of the NFL and 16 games left for most teams come Friday morning. Here's to football that matters. Chicken wings, anyone?