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2008 Pro Football Preview

Jesse Livermore, the Great Bear of Wall Street, always preached that you can see the picture better when you see it from a distance. That’s stock market talk…chart patterns and trendlines and 200-day moving averages. It works in football, too. The discipline of swatting the flies and gnats of preseason minutia. And so I present a big picture forecast of the upcoming 2008 season – from a distance.

AFC EAST
New England Patriots (12-4): The last time we saw this team under live fire, Tom Brady was being pummeled by a vicious Giants’ pass rush in the Super Bowl. Yet Josh McDaniels, the Patriots’ first-year offensive coordinator, refused to send his quarterback any additional protection, choosing to stick with those slick multi-wide formations that brung ‘em there. So down went Tom Teriffic, over and over. And down went the unbeaten Patriots. A flash of arrogance from McDaniel? The price of inexperience? You can’t help but think that the young coach learned something after that humbling February eve in the desert.

New York Jets (10-6): Bret Favre lends instant credibility. A softie schedule sets the table. And, boy, the temptation is great to now call this a headliner team, to blaze up the big marquee. But it’s never that easy in the NFL, is it? OK, I’m buying the story for now, that there are enough pieces in place for a quickie playoff run. Yet I still hear the creaking, that Bret is 38 and out of his element in the big city. I hear the words of T.S. Eliot – “The young feel tired at the end of an action; the old at the beginning.”

Buffalo Bills (8-8): A blah team. An eight-dollar bottle of wine team. The occasional surprise – last year’s heroic surge against Dallas comes to mind – but nothing really gets the blood pumping. Scored over 20 points only four times last season, yet no major tweaks to the offense. Hmm. Can yet another year of aging, another year in the barrel, really be the fix?

Miami Dolphins (5-11): I remember the old John Madden...