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How to Write a Pigskin Preview

By the time the Steelers and Dolphins kick off the 2006 NFL season Thursday night, every media outlet in the free world plus all those in North Korea either has or will issue a detailed preview of the upcoming year, highlighted by the outlet's intrepid predictions as to which teams will make the Super Bowl and who'll emerge as the champion. There may be more useless journalistic endeavors ("Will Hillary Run?" comes to mind), but not many.

Gambling on pro football is a multi-billion dollar indsutry precisely because peering into the sport's future is a fool's enterprise. Pity all the preseason magazines who went to press BEFORE the defending Super Bowl champions' quarterback's near-fatal motorcycle. Pity the sports weeklies who put their previews to bed before Ben Roethlisberger topped that act with an emergency appendectomy.

In other words, medical news will make hash of nine out of ten NFL predictions before Columbus Day. Injuries aside, which is sort of like saying "violence aside" in a Baghdad real estate ad, coaches who know WAY more about footbal than thee and me, including Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick, agree they don't get a real handle on the state of their own teams and the league in general until after Thanksgiving at the earliest. Even then it's a slippery handle. Last Turkey Day, the Steelers were dead, a consensus choice to miss the playoffs.

Just because a job's pointless and impossible, however, doesn't mean you don't have to do it. No football writer is allowed to skip his or her NFL preview any more than a Boston newspaper can skip running Labor Day photos of students moving into Fenway apartments. News is as much ritual as fact, maybe more.

Those of you with blogs, which near as I can tell is every football fan, will be issuing NFL previews of your own. Here are a few tips from the pros, the time-honored formulas that allow professional writers to get this onerous chore done with the minimum time and effort, which believe me is all it deserves.

1. Pick Last Year's Champions.

What happened before will happen again. This is the laziest and hence most typical pigskin preview. Man, those Steelers and Seahawks looked good last January. Ergo, they'll look good again this year. Throw in the Pats, Broncos, and Panthers, and voila, a preview has its lede. All that's left is adding up all the personnel changes and throwing in a few wisecracks.

For the flaws in this approach, see the paragraph on Ben Roethisberger.

2. Pick the Home Team

This approach has several benefits, the best being it cuts down on indignant e-mail from fans. The obvious drawback is it's an option available to forecasters in perhaps 25 percent of NFL markets. A Bay Area sportswriter who picked either the Raiders or 49ers to reach the Super Bowl would be on the fast track to a desk in the office taking sailing agate over the telephone.

But if someone in Denver wants to pick the Broncos this year, they're no more likely to be wrong than anyone else. The same's true here in New England. Only unimaginable catastrophe can keep the Patriots from winning the AFC East. After that, it's all karma. If your Super Bowl pick wins its division, you did a good job.

Amateur pickers avoid the worst drawback of the home team pick. When a local writer picks 'em, the players call it a jinx if anything goes wrong. They also say they were disrespected if they DON'T get picked, but hey, they're football players. It ain't a game big on logic.

3. The Surprise Pick, or "We Got Great Art."

This formula works in stages. Team finishes strong the year before, narrowly making or missing the playoffs. Team goes out and trades for or signs as free agent a big-name player. Add two together and presto! You have an informed surprise Super Bowl pick and a nice photo of a star that'll helpfully sell more papers or magazines or attract more Web hits.

Upside: Pictures of stars do indeed sell more papers, magazines, and attract more Web hits.

Downside: Picks using the formula are always wrong. Always. Most of the time, they're comically wrong. Sports Illustrated just picked the Dolphins as 2006 NFL champs. Somewhere out there, some poor soul, probably more than one, opined that Terrell Owens will put Bill Parcells and the Cowboys back in the Super Bowl. An infinite number of things will happen this season. Those won't be two of them.

4. Keep Trying Until They Get It Right.

Throughout NFL history, there's usually been a team on the verge of championship success, but never quite there. Often this team has its fortunes in the hands of one superduperstar. Forests were killed in the 50s and '6os explaining how Jim Brown would lead the Browns to a title, and in the '80s and '90s doing the same about John Elway. The next winter, an equal number of trees went under the knife for "what went wrong with Brown/Elway" thumbsuckers.

Brown and Elway eventually DID win championships, but only after the forecasters gave them up for dead and moved on. The 1964 Browns and 1997 Broncos were double-digit underdogs in their respective title games.

The Indianapolis Colts and Peyton Manning are perhaps the most obvious "keep trying" pick of all time, and their bandwagon remains crowded. Not by me. I'm haunted by the memory of a sportswriter from a long time ago.

Tex Maule was Sports Illustrated's first pro football writer, and had a more than distinguished career. Maule was the man who named the Colts-Giants 1958 overtime duel "The Greatest Game Ever Played." Maule (remember his nickname) also noted the Cowboys were building a unique organization destined for success when Dallas was a struggling expansion team.

Maule's brilliant insight came with one drawback. Every September from 1963 on, without fail, Maule picked the Cowboys as the next NFL, then Super Bowl champions. After years of frustrating defeats, the Cowboys finally won a title when they beat Miami in Super Bowl VI in January 1972.

By then, Tex Maule had retired.

5. Pick 'Em All, a special bonus for electronic media.

With a half-hour of airtime to fill each night since the opening of training camp, I'm pretty sure the good folks at ESPN's NFL Live have created scenarios for at least 19 different teams to emerge as the winners of Super Bowl XLI in Miami. For fun, check out how many different writers and broadcasters anoint different teams "Super Bowl favorites" after each week of the regular season. There will be at least ten consensus choices. There always are.

My picks? Didn't I explain how bogus it all was? OK, who am I to argue with tradition. I wish CBS would bring back it's "dot-da-da, da-da-DA-DAHH" theme music from the Lombardi era. I'm going to go with a mixture of formulas 2 and 4.

As long as Tom Brady stays ambulatory, picking the Patriots is as vanilla a choice as can be in the AFC. I may be wrong, but I won't look stupid if I am.

The NFC stinks. Rare is the team whose fans hate all their quarterbacks the summer following a division title, but the Bears have managed that feat, and Chicagoans know pro football. The Panthers, however, stink less than most of their Fox-broadcast peers.

I've been picking Carolina to return to the Super Bowl since their last appearance in 2004. They're bound to prove me right sometime-at least before Janet Jackson gets back to one.

posted by Michael Gee @ 9:03 AM