ATTENTION EVERYONE FOOTBALL IS BACK

Yeah, I know. The NFL preseason actually started two days ago and whether or not you consider preseason football to actually be "football" is a debatable concept.

Whatever.

The New York Giants are strapping on their helmets tonight in Charlotte, North Carolina to play the Carolina Panthers and for at least seven minutes of game action or so, there will be an actual NFL football-like substance on the TV, and after going eight months without seeing Big Blue on the tube, I'm pretty excited. Not break out my jersey for the occasion excited, but excited nonetheless.

Tonight will be a spectacular 7 minutes in which some of the Giants' starters will sort of play halfheartedly against a Panthers team that is doing the same thing despite being sort of a minor league outfit to begin with. The final score will be irrelevant and the last 50 minutes or so of game play will feature people that won't even be on the roster come opening day, but it's still professional NFL football, damnit. No one can take it away from me.

The Giants do have some interesting things tonight such as get their first looks at a few players in new positions, namely Mathias Kiwanuka, who is moving back to linebacker. Linval Joseph and Jason Pierre-Paul will also be getting some time on the defensive line that should be worth noting, but on the whole, yes, this game will be utterly meaningless and less than entertaining. But if the Giants want to hear Barack Obama make subtle jabs at the debt ceiling negotiations next summer at the White House, this is where it all starts.

At least at the White House, we can probably comfortably assume the Giants players would all know who the chief executive is.

The other big excitement comes from the first brush with NFL football for rookie linebacker Mark Herzlich, who the Giants signed as an undrafted free agent out of Boston College this summer. Most undrafted free agents aren't particularly noteworthy and the ones that are don't become so until they've defied the odds and become a significant NFL player, such as former Redskins and Giants linebacker Antonio Pierce. Herzlich overcame odds to make it to the NFL, but rather simply being undrafted he also had to beat bone cancer.

Regardless of where you're coming from, those are some pretty significant odds to overcome. Many people have concluded that Herzlich would have been a high-round pick had he not had a run-in with cancer, but now that he's on the field, it'll be interesting if he can play at an NFL-caliber level. Doing so as a mere mortal is difficult enough. Doing so as a cancer survivor exponentially so.

Of course, beyond Herzlich's debut and a few other players getting some time on the field, there is little else of interest going on in tonight's game and I, personally, am unlikely to watch the entire thing, but I will be watching from the beginning. And then possibly into the second quarter. Maybe.

Then again, if the Giants' official twitter feed is to be believed, all of the photos being tweeted must indicate that this is the most important football game ever played. So there's that.

Lastly, in a bit of irony, the Giants' first preseason game happens to start on the opening date of the British Premier League. I'm not sure just how many of you take a keen interest in the other kind of football across the pond, but with ESPN's premier league contract and Fox Soccer Channel, it's almost as if you have as much access to British soccer in the U.S. now as you do of, say, basketball. That's a good thing. Of course, the Premier League may have just started today, but the tier right below it, the Npower Championship, has been going on for a week. And with two games played, look at who's atop the table.

That's right. It's those awesome Southampton Saints. With any luck they'll still be near the top come May. And with some more luck, maybe they won't be the only football team of mine at the top of the standings this season.

They're Still Equivocating And I Can't Take It

There we were on Sunday afternoon, one strike away from having some clarity and relieved anxiety. The Mets were losing to the Yankees in the bottom of the ninth, 2-1, facing the greatest closer in the history of the game and potentially, their season was on the brink. A loss would have given the Mets a demoralizing sweep at the behest of their crosstown rivals, and a fourth-straight loss overall, dampening any of the positive feelings we had gotten from a recent and surprising offensive outburst against the Tigers.

Then it happened.

The Mets rallied off Mariano Rivera, won the game in extra innings, and have since responded with two impressive wins to open their west-coast road trip in Los Angeles, which brings them to a season-high two whole games over .500 (although they've actually lost some ground in the Wild Card, where they're 6.5 back). Either way, the Mets haven't rolled over and died just yet, which is surprising to many for a few reasons and is also making me wonder about a few things.

A) Is this team for real? Like, are they going to make us think they're in the race longer than just the All-Star Break?

B) Is this the real Jason Bay? The outfielder was a disappointment last year up until he spent the latter part of the season, and the first part of this one out with a concussion. But in the last 10 games, he's hitting .359 with 13 RBIs, 8 runs scored, 3 homeruns and 2 stolen bases. Oh and his six homers this season are equal to his total from last year. Maybe the last three years of that contract won't be quite the albatross we all feared it was.

C) Why am I so damned anxious about this team?

That last one is the real question. I'll chalk it up to my Jewish neuroticism, but it makes me uncomfortable to not know if this team is going to suddenly get my hopes up only to dash them again or if I can comfortably ignore what's happening on the field. That's a terrible perspective to take. What I should be saying is, "I expected nothing and I'm getting something. It's all gravy."

And really that's quite true. This is an unexpected joy to watch all things considered. The Mets are a scrappy bunch exceeding expectations that you want to actually root for, which is a pretty stark contrast from years past. And let it also not be forgotten that if the team falls apart in the midst of its three-game series against the Phillies after the All-Star Break, I won't have to witness it first hand because I'll be off in Europe for two and a half weeks.

Yes, on a side note, I'll be off in Europe in approximately four or five days depending on where you want to draw territorial lines. I'm going to be in the Netherlands, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria and Belgium, and it should be a hell of a time and there will be lots of pictures, but the catch is that updates may be few and far between. I'm not sure if you can all manage without my writing a new blog post for roughly three weeks but you're going to have to manage and get your Mets-centric neuroticism elsewhere.

In the interim I should note that while I do plan to take a look at the Berlin Olympic Stadium, site of such events as Jesse Owens' performance at the 1936 Olympics and the 2006 FIFA World Cup, I will not be seeing any sporting events. A bizarre notion considering that I almost always see a sporting event while on vacation and that during my stretch in Europe I will just be missing the 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup, where one team has blamed a loss on lightning -- guess who, and the American Football Weltmeisterschaft in Austria. Oh, how I wish I could see a bunch of men from France and Austria compete on the gridiron so poorly that my high school team could have beaten them.

Well maybe we couldn't have, but at least saying so still isn't the dumbest thing anyone has said in a public forum this week.

At the very least those people are actually playing football, which, I suppose, is still theoretically up for debate in the U.S. this fall what with all that lockout business. Of course, I've never really believed the lockout would last long enough to cancel the season and I figured most of it was harmless sabre-rattling and if you need a curious sign as to why, here you go:



This is a pretty funny little parody here with high production values, but the intrigue lies in that several NFL players, members of the NFLPA, are in this video. So are Rich Eisen and Marshall Faulk, who are commentators for NFL Network. That is to say, they are employees of the NFL, which means that during this lockout, technically, they're not supposed to be associating with members of the NFLPA. But here we are. Why would the NFL approve letting these people associate with the enemy? I suppose in theory it could be because they don't want to take it too seriously or get any bad press for taking protectionism to an extreme, but maybe, just maybe, it's because they all know the lockout isn't really that serious and it's only a matter of a week or two before the big, bad millionaires decide how to appropriately split up their billions.

Either way, I suspect there will be football. Rant over. Back to vacation talk.

The only real sporting connection I can find to my trip beyond the Berlin Olympic Stadium is that the Women's World Cup Final will be Sunday night July 17th, when I will be in Berlin. The game, unfortunately, is in Frankfurt, but with Germany the host nation, favorite and two-time defending champion, I'm hopeful that there will be some fun outdoor square with a public viewing area for us to watch in and feel the crowd. If that's the case, I will write something long and poetic about watching sports in another country.

Kind of like everything else I write. If you take out the whole part of it being poetic.

NFL Picks Week 1: Justifying Ineptitude With An Elementary Gambling Lesson

Happy first day of football season everyone! Yes, tonight is the big night the Vikings and Saints kickoff the 2010 NFL campaign with a rematch of last year's NFC Championship and I, for one, could not be any more excited. For those of you who used to read my old, horrendous Xanga from about six years ago, you know that I have an awful tendency to show how inept I am at predicting football games by making NFL picks every week and then tabulating my record for the course of the season.

This is a terrible idea.

Vegas, you see, sets the lines. And Vegas is awfully good at splitting the action. People often misunderstand the concept behind a Vegas betting line and assume that when the Giants are favored over the Panthers by, say, seven points, which they are this week, that it is an assumption that the Giants are a touchdown better than Carolina and should win by that amount. But in actuality that's not the case. The purpose of a betting line isn't to provide a more-than-likely prediction for the end result of each of Sunday's games. The point is to split the action.

Vegas isn't trying to give you an indication of how much better one team is than the other with any certainty. They're trying to create a situation in which half of the population believes Team A will win by X or more points and the other half of the population believes it will win by X or fewer points. So, really, the Giants aren't likely to win by seven points or more on Sunday. Half of the population just thinks they will.

Of course, half of the population thinks they won't. So, really, it's a 50/50 shot either way, which means that picking any game, with any certainty, at least at the pro-level, is more or less a coin flip.

Now of course there are betting strategies that enable you a better than 50% chance at making money, and various parlays that can help you reap a profit on a more likely scenario than a standard betting line, but for those of us who can't be bothered to really investigate betting with any real intensity or who simply don't care enough to do so, like myself, it is really, really, really unlikely that you're going to do better than 50% over the course of 256 regular season games by any margin that is statistically significant.

And yet, I still make these picks every week, just to open myself to unnecessary criticism. With tendencies like that, it's a wonder I haven't decided to get into politics yet.

So, now that I've prepared you for the explanation of why I'm inevitably going to be wrong nearly half the time this season, I think it's time to talk about all the big games this week, particularly the biggest footy match of them all, the semifinal between Geelong and Fremantle that bounces tomorrow morning at 5:30 ET. After last week's gut-wrenching loss to St. Kilda, the Cats face a win-or-go-home matchup with the upstart Dockers that could send them home or send them one step from another Grand Final appearance.

After a shoddy performance last week, much of the hope lies with young Joel Selwood, who wears the best number in the world, coming back into form and hopefully putting the Cats back on track for a potential showdown with Collingwood next weekend. It hasn't helped that coach Mark Thompson has had to fend off speculation all week that he'll leave Geelong for his old stomping grounds of Essendon, but after an emphatic "No" this week, hopefully that has been put to rest ahead of the biggest match of the year.

Still with me? Probably not. If you are, however, tune into ESPN3.com tomorrow morning when you wake up to watch some breakneck footy.

And now time for my NFL picks -- that is to say, the football you actually care about. Lines are accurate according to ESPN.com as of Thursday morning.

Last Week: 0-0-0
Season: 0-0-0

NEW ORLEANS (-6) over Minnesota
NY GIANTS (-7) over Carolina
Miami (-3) over BUFFALO
Detroit (+3.5) over CHICAGO
TENNESSEE (-6.5) over Oakland
NEW ENGLAND (-4.5) over Cincinnati
Atlanta (+2.5) over PITTSBURGH
TAMPA BAY (-3) over Cleveland **
JACKSONVILLE (-3) over Denver
Indianapolis (-2.5) over HOUSTON
Arizona (-4) over ST. LOUIS
Green Bay (+3.5) over PHILADELPHIA
San Francisco (+3) over SEATTLE
Dallas (-3.5) over WASHINGTON
NY JETS (-2.5) over Baltimore
SAN DIEGO (-5) over Kansas City

**If it were possible for both teams to lose against the spread, that would be my pick.

And there you have it, kids. My almost certain to be completely right in every way predictions for Week 1 of the NFL season. Get ready for the excitement. Kickoff is just nine and a half hours away.

2010 NFL Preview: Starting Off The New Year With The New Year

Those of you who know me know that I am an extremely reform observant of the Jewish faith, which gets its big celebrations underway tonight at sunset with the dawn of year 5771 for Rosh Hashanah, and the wishes of good health in the New Year are coming in from all the right people.

שנה טובה to you all.

This year, in a quirky twist of fate, the Jewish New Year happens to coincide with Thursday night's NFL Opener between the Saints and Vikings. And lest you think of the NFL, like most sports, as being a not-so-Jewish domain, let it be said that there is no endless list of Jews trying to convince you otherwise. One of these Jews happens to be, Marc Tracy, an editor for the Jewish news site Tablet Magazine, which last week had its annual NFL Preview on its podcast Vox Tablet, which included a discussion of, among other things, a guessing game of how many Jewish owners in the NFL there are -- the answer, depending on who you want to believe for Denver's Pat Bowlen is 11.5. Here's a written breakdown if you have no speakers.

That .5 you can credit to my beloved New York Giants, who are owned by the tandem of John Mara, who comes from a staunchly Catholic family, and Steve Tisch, who is Jewish and also holds the remarkable distinction of being the only person to win a Super Bowl and an Oscar thanks to his producer credit for Forrest Gump.

In any event,  most of the podcast circulated around which team should become the official team of the podcast due to its Jewish connections. Unsurprisingly, the winner of the discussion was the Washington Redskins because of the two characteristics that a) it is owned by prominent D.C.-area Jewish philanthropist/control freak Dan Snyder and more importantly b) it's the favorite team of Tracy, the podcast's host. They do note that this essentially only supercedes the Vikings because they recently traded Sage Rosenfels, who is of Jewish descent if non-practicing, after Brett Favre returned for a 20th season. Apparently this is enough to supercede the fact that Vikings owner Zygi Wilf, a resident of my hometown in Short Hills, NJ, is a Jew born in Germany to two Polish Holocaust survivors.

Uh, That's pretty significant, no?

Curiously, the Redskins are somehow more worthy than the Patriots, whose owner, Robert Kraft, is such a major benefactor to the  Israeli Football League that his name is in the official logo (see above), or my beloved Giants, who are a) owned by the already-mentioned Steve Tisch, b) play in the largest Jewish community in the World outside of Israel, c) the Giants once employed Jewish Hall of Fame quarterback Benny Friedmann, who, as charted in the recent book Passing Game, fundamentally transformed the game of football in the 1920s and 30s because he was so good at throwing the ball.

Oh, and the Giants are also the team that acquired Sage Rosenfels. So that's gotta be worth something.

In any event, I've gotten almost excrutiatingly off track here. Just know that it's the Jewish New Year tonight at sundown, and among things I'm thankful for is that my football team doesn't produce Jewish paraphernalia that is emblazoned peculiarly with the symbol of another religion. Yet another reason to be disheartened that St. Kilda knocked off Geelong in the Qualifying Final last week. But I suppose it's ok. Geelong got the better of them last year when it mattered most.

Of course, at this point, I'm fairly clear I've lost you all, so I'm going to go back to American Football. On with the Picks, which, of course, are meaningless.

AFC East

1. NY Jets - The Jets remind me of an SEC team that just complains loudly about how good it is until we all believe it. Then again, they actually are pretty good. 12-4.
2. New England - Tom Brady being uncomfortable with his contract: Surprising. Randy Moss being uncomfortable with his contract: Not Surprising. 10-6.
3. Miami - For purposes of keeping the Jewish theme, I'm still irritated that Jay Fiedler is no longer the quarterback here. 7-9.
4. Buffalo - Welcome to the JV team, C.J. Spiller! 5-11.

AFC North

1. Baltimore - If the Ravens only win that one Super Bowl, I wonder if 20 years from now they'll get the credit they deserve for being one of the League's best franchises for the past decade. Hopefully people will at least remember this.11-5.
2. Cincinnati - Chad Ochocinco says the Bengals are so loaded that there is no excuse for them to not win a championship this season. On a related note, Chad Ochocino is insane. 9-7.
3. Pittsburgh - SI's Peter King picked the Stillers to win the Super Bowl this year. Did no one tell him Ben Roethlisberger is missing a quarter of the season? 8-8
4. Cleveland - Mike Holmgren will get this team turned around. In 2013 or so. 4-12.

AFC South

1. Indianapolis - Does this need any explanation? 13-3.
2. Houston - The Texans had their first ever winning season a year ago and missed the playoffs. I don't care if they get their first berth this season, but I'd love it if they were the best team in Texas. 10-6.
3. Tennessee - You'd think a team with Chris Johnson and Jeff Fisher involved would have better prospects for the season. Apparently not. 8-8.
4. Jacksonville - Only five head coaches have been at their current jobs longer than Jack Del Rio. Jack Del Rio once lost a punter after encouraging players to swing an ax in the locker room. 5-11.

AFC West
1. San Diego - Year One of the Post-Tomlinson era will probably be pretty similar to the last year of the Tomlinson era. 11-5.
2. Kansas City - I know, this is an odd choice, but have you seen how weak the second half of that schedule is? 7-9.
3. Denver - Kyle Orton has a 29-19 record as a starter in the NFL. How is the FBI not looking into this? 6-10.
4. Oakland - But Al Davis will always be No. 1 in our hearts. 2-14.

NFC East

1. Dallas - DID YOU HEAR THE COWBOYS MIGHT PLAY IN THE SUPER BOWL IN THEIR HOME STADIUM OHMYGOD. 11-5.
2. NY Giants - Biased? Sure. Wrong? I don't think so. 10-6.
3. Philadelphia - Hope that whole "trading the most underappreciated player in NFL history while he's still great" thing works out for you. Well, actually, no I don't. 8-8.
4. Washington - I'm very scared of Mike Shanahan turning the Redskins into a contender and making this tough division even tougher. I'm not scared of him doing it this year. 5-11.

NFC North

1. Green Bay - Aaron Rodgers is crazy good people. For serious. He's pretty much the reason you never hear about any other quarterbacks in this division. 12-4.
2. Minnesota - Brett Who? I bet Tarvaris Jackson is running that team by week 3. 10-6.
3. Chicago - The one thing I couldn't stand about living in Chicago was how convinced Bears fans were that each year was their year. At least most of them realized Rex Grossman was, you know, bad. 6-10.
4. Detroit - It's going to be another long year in Motown, but with the pieces they've started drafting, it won't be long before they reach that light at the end of the tunnel. 4-12.

NFC South

1. New Orleans - It's Drew Brees' world. We're all just living in it. 13-3.
2. Atlanta - I'm guessing Matt Ryan bounces back from a rough sophomore season. The key is seeing if the rest of the team bounces back with him. 8-8.
3. Carolina - Sure, losing one of the best defensive ends in the League won't hurt them one bit. 6-10.
4. Tampa Bay - When you type in a Google search for head coach Raheem Morris, the first suggestion that comes up is "Raheem Morris underwear". 3-13.

NFC West
1. San Francisco - The glory of the great Niner tradition is back! Sort of. 9-7.

2. Arizona - Someone asked me recently if Matt Leinart had supplanted Ryan Leaf as history's greatest bust. I'm pretty sure Leinart has done better than Leaf has. Also, he's totally hotter. 8-8.
3. Seattle - I was reminded this week that Shaun Alexander's extension signed in 2006 was eight years long. Did the Seahawks really think their bruising running back would be playing in 2014? 5-11.
4. St. Louis - Apparently Sam Bradford has looked pretty good in the preseason. He also plays for the St. Louis Rams, who haven't looked good in any season for a few years now. 2-14.

AFC Playoffs
(3) San Diego over (6) Houston
(4) Baltimore over (5) New England

(1) Indianapolis over (4) Baltimore
(3) San Diego over (2) NY Jets

AFC Championship
(1) Indianapolis over (3) San Diego

NFC Playoffs
(6) Minnesota over (3) Dallas
(5) NY Giants over (4) San Francisco

(1) New Orleans over (6) Minnesota
(2) Green Bay over (5) NY Giants

NFC Championship
(2) Green Bay over (1) New Orleans

Super Bowl XLV
Indianapolis 35, Green Bay 28

And there you have it kids! I'm taking the Colts to win the big one this year and avenge the ghosts of last season's Super Bowl let down. This doesn't necessarily go in accordance with the Rosh Hashanah theme, but Colts owner Jim Irsay's father was Jewish.

Of course, he was also a fuckcrazy drunk who stole one of the League's great franchises from its historic home. But those are minor details.

Enjoy the season and the holiday everyone. It's time to party like it's 5771.

Reason No. 841 That The NFL Is Superior to College Football

Don't get me wrong. I love college football. Seriously -- I can't get enough of it. As a child growing up I was somewhat ambivalent towards what I considered an inferior brand of gridiron, though I did fancy myself a Florida State fan after watching the 'Noles take a National Championship by topping Nebraska in the 1994 Orange Bowl. But it wasn't until I went to Northwestern and was fully immersed in the weekly craziness of the Big Ten that I truly fell for college football as an institution.

However, the NFL, beyond it's generally superior level of play and far more rational means of determining a champion, would never allow what you see to the right to happen.

I'm no big fashion enthusiast, but a good friend of mine once explained that sometimes you have to push the limits of acceptable fashion so that more subtly progressive advances in style seem less dramatic and thus more acceptable to mainstream society. But they never dreamed up the horrific duds Nike forced the Broncos and Hokies to trot out last night in what was otherwise a phenomenal game with wide-ranging National Championship implications. The only thing more disturbing than these uniforms simply existing is that it's almost impossible to pinpoint what, exactly, is the worst aspect of them.

Do we start with the random dark gray patches on Boise State's jerseys that were inexplicably placed in the worst possible location for an overweight offensive lineman? Why not bring up the peculiar circuit-board designs that made Virginia Tech's jersey numbers look like costumes from the movie Tron? Should I opine on the bizarre grayscaled Boise State logo that appears on only one sleeve and one hip? Or the fact that only one of the sleeves on the Boise State jersey is blue? Or the awkward "B" on the left knee of the Boise State pants?

Compared to all of that, Virginia Tech's shoulder-striping pattern looks downright normal, and I thought I had seen the worst of it with TCU's ridiculously busy outfits this weekend.

The most progressive change in NFL uniforms at any point in the last 20 years or so has been the dramatic changes wrought by the Denver Broncos in 1998. From the typical orange jerseys and blue helmets that they had worn for decades, the Broncos stoked a huge amount of aesthetic debate when they debuted their current dark blue unis and helmets. The dramatic change here came in the orange stripe emanating from the collar, which completely broke the mold of traditional NFL fashion sense.

Of course, it did pay off immediate dividends. Arguably.

Those changes are now considered relatively acceptable, and they're completely tame compared to what Nike is now trotting out for specialty nationally televised games these days -- though it should be noted that Denver's newest version of the logo is, uh, questionable at best. One can only hope that Boise State and Virginia Tech, after putting on a tremendous show last night, opt to keep those jerseys in the closet -- even if Boise State's helmets were kind of cool. At least Northwestern's new uniforms are subtle and tasteful so I don't have to be ashamed as an alum.

Northwestern which is 1-0 on the season, I might add.

In any event, I bring all this up because this is where my mind rambles to when it's that first glorious week of college football, you spend Saturday consuming every moment you can and then prepare for the traditional follow up of the pro game on Sunday -- and there isn't one.

Curse this first, teasing week of college football.

Fortunately, I only have to wait five more days to watch my New York Giants -- in person -- as they open up their new home against the Carolina Panthers to start the NFL season, thus bringing the best time of the year -- fall weekends -- into full swing.

And I can assure you they'll be wearing uniforms far more palatable than what we saw last night.