Of course the fan who threw said panties will be ejected from the stadium and banned from attending any more NFL games, according the new NFL code of conduct for fans. The overwhelming success of the NFL’s code of conduct for players must have been the impetus for putting this together. Of course, teams will also be able to add to this code, and I believe Miami is looking at allowing beer bottles to be thrown at fans wearing jerseys of teams within the AFC North, as long as those bottles are plastic. After all, it is probably cheaper for them that way to find a person who can actually hit another person from any distance and give them a tryout for quarterback.

I digress, let’s get to FanYard and the Yardsticks for these games. There is one that really stands out to me, and that is the one that has New England favored by ten points over the Baltimore Ravens. Bill Belichick cares not about the preseason, while the Ravens have a new coach who needs to show he belongs, not unlike the situation we just saw in the Hall of Fame game where Tony Dungy had nothing to prove and the Redskins had a new coach looking to prove his mettle. Don’t be surprised to see the ravens walk away with their heads up in this game.

Oh yeah, and Brett Favre is now a New York Jet, in case you’ve been in a coma and just woke up to find yourself here.

Only four weeks left until football!!!

As far as the Yardstick for the game, it was low, but for the right team, as Washington gave Jim Zorn a first-ever-game-as-a-coach present with a 30-16 win over the Colts. Who called it? Yeah, but this one was really a gimme…and they did win by much more than I thought.

I am looking forward to one day having Brennan on my fantasy football team.

Colts not even making the trip to Ohio for the game, per doctor’s orders are: Peyton Manning, Marvin Harrison, Dwight Freeney, Bod Sanders, Tyjuan Hagler, Ryan Lilja, Tom Santi, Michael Coe and Philip Wheeler.

Redskins not playing include Clinton Portis, Chris Samuels, London Fletcher, Jason Taylor, Carlos Rogers, Erasmus James, Rocky McIntosh, LaRon Landry, Anthony Montgomery, Devin Thomas, Malcolm Kelly, H.B. Blades, Anthony Mix and Rian Wallace.

Although new Skins head coach Jim Zorn says he thinks the game will be fun for TV audiences to watch, and there are other things that bear watching, I personally am looking forward to just one thing: seeing Washington rookie QB Colt Brennan play in his first NFL game!

With his pick of Philly to win by six, The Viking cemented his place at the top of the 2008 AFL Leaderboard for the season, with a total of 2950 points, 120 more than his closest rival this season, Ralph Grunz. Although he actually picked fewer games, The Viking’s overall wins were closer to the actual outcomes and gave him more overall points for his 63% winning picks rate.

A huge congratulations to The Viking for his prowess at picking games even in the adversity that is Canadian television and the lack of choices or possibilities to be had in the Great White (but turning green quickly thanks to global warming) North when it comes to viewing any AFL games.

FanYard looks forward to this battle again next season. Join FanYard and, as The Viking says, “Now for the NFL!”

While one would normally be hard-pressed to pick the Washington Redskins to beat the Indianapolis Colts in a football game in this day and age, in the preseason it is probably in your best interest to do so. Historically, coach Tony Dungy does not put much ephasis on meaningless games - even if they are during the regular season, as Browns fans remember from last year when they missed out on the playoffs with a 10-6 record because Dungy put his backups in to play the Titans in the regular season finale. That game propelled an undeserving Tennessee team into the postseason and left the Browns on the outside looking in.

Another thing to keep in mind is that this will be the first game that the Redskins play with Jim Zorn (below, with new team) as their head coach. It is also Zorn’s first game ever as a head coach…or even as a head coordinator, for that matter. The Seahawks’ quarterback coach from 2001 until Dan Snyder hired him in Washington this past offseason, Zorn will no doubt be anxious to prove his worth right from the get-go, preseason or not. His counterpart, Dungy, has no neither the need nor the desire to prove his mettle in such a fashion.

While the Yardstick at FanYard in these early days of 2008 NFL would call for a 5-point Colts victory, both myself and the people who make odds on games would disagree wholeheartedly. There is nothing from recent years to make me think the Colts will do more than show up for this game. Even so, it likely won’t be a blowout if the Skins do win. With a new system being tested and many second and thrid-stringers of their own on the field, Washington will be tested even against the backups for Indy. While both teams have injuries to some of those who ostensibly would be starters in a regular season game, those players, at least on the Colts front, probably would not have played for any meaningful length anyway. (Check out that last link to Hog Heaven and vote in their poll on the Washington team dropping the name Redskins.”) And join FanYard

Now, welcome to the start of the second full NFL season at FanYard!
The 2008 NFL schedule is now live and ready for you to go and start making
your picks and comments. You can start with the preseason games or go
straight to Week 1. Don’t worry. As always, if something changes before
game time, you can change your pick.

Check out the 2008 NFL schedule at http://www.thefanyard.com/nfl/

I know you are as excited as we are here at FanYard headquarters for what
promises to be another fall of all-day Sunday action and Monday night madness.
Soon, college football will take up our Saturdays too. Me, I can’t wait! We’ve
have lots of new stuff in the works that we hope to have ready before the
start of regular season so I’ll keep you posted as they are released.

As always, have fun making picks,

Blake Butterfield
Fanyard Site and Community Manager
www.thefanyard.com
blake@thefanyard.com

P.S. FanYard is teaming up with FanJack, a cool new fantasy sports site.
Check it out and let me know what you think

http://www.fanjack.com/fantasysports/2007

As a fan of the game with a penchant for the San Francisco 49ers, I know there’s at least a couple games this year that I will actually watch before the regular season starts. As our friend Lee at Football Jabber pointed out recently in his piece about QB camp battles, the quarterback position in the Bay Area is excitingly up for grabs. If Alex Smith loses his starting job to Shaun Hill, he’ll become the most recent poster boy for the argument that NFL rookies need a salary cap, and fast.

In the meanwhile, we await the decisions that will be made regarding Brett Favre’s career and whether or not it is over. Jon Pyle had a funny quarterback comeback piece in relation to this (n)ever-breaking and seemingly never-ending story.

Get your couches cleaned, fans. Stock the shelves. Football season is almost upon us.

Amen.

Ridiculous, according the some famous dictionary, means arousing or deserving of laughter. I’m pretty sure not very many people actually find the whole thing very funny. If anything, it pisses them off. Then again, many of these same people don’t seem to mind at all that movie stars get millions of dollars for each film they do, and many stars make a bunch of films each year. Who knows? Maybe the current thought is that it is much easier to be an athlete than to be an actor. At least athletes are taking some sort of personal gamble each time they suit up.

Whatever the case, the fact is that as sports continue to grow as a money-making enterprise, there is more money that will go to the owners if it does not reach the players. Right now, NFL players make 60% of the revenue brought in by the game they are playing. Owners think that is too much. Players, of course, do not.

All I hope is that they work out a deal before this soon-to-get-very-dirty fight leads to a lockout that cancels a season. It happened in hockey a few years ago and I have not bothered to go back and watch that sport. I am Canadian, and to think I would not watch the game I grew up loving anymore was unthinkable. It was a ridiculous notion; one I would have laughed at. Scoffed even…until the lockout and season cancellation occurred. That was two seasons ago and know what? I do not miss it one little bit.

Listen, if a lost season happens in football, I’ll leave it, too. And that does not strike me as very effing funny at all.

In the meanwhile, you still have FanYard!

Commissioner Goodell, the next time your league has the Rolling Stones play at the Super Bowl, have them start off with ‘Sympathy For The Devil’. Good luck trying to get them to change their lyrics, though. I hear it does not go over so well with them.

If they do bite, here’s a first suggestion:

Please allow me to introduce myself
Soon be a man of wealth and (hopefully) taste
I’ve been around for nary a year
Stole many a team’s soul and faith

And I was around when Mike Ditka
Completely sold out the Saints
Made damn sure that no amount of help
Would soon erase his mistakes

Pleased to meet you
Good luck with ever knowing my name
I’ll puzzle you
With the nature of my game

Yeah. It is the Song of the Unknown Rookie. There is no need for me to go into details; suffice it to say that many - if not most - do not turn into what their respective drafting teams had hoped. And, often, the players that turn into the franchisers are those taken in the later rounds.

For those rookies who are getting paid tens of millions of dollars before doing anything worthwhile in the league that is now yours, I say this, “Relish it, because sanity has finally come to town.”

What other job do you get paid more than many who are doing it well and have been doing so for years just on the off chance that you might one day be better than they were?

Right off the bat, I’d have to say none. Why? Because it makes no EFF-ING sense, is why!!! It seems pretty straight forward, really. If owners are worried about saving money so much that they will trash the CBA, here’s a good start at doing something that might keep millions of their precious dollars from being thrown away: Put a very significant cap on rookies.

Period.

No need then to worry if Alex Smith will be a good QB, even though you have to pay him as if he were the next coming of Joe Montana. If these kids don’t prove worthy, then cut them. BOOM. Problem solved. Back to life, like every other person. Not their fault, nor yours. Just the way things go.

Sure, you may have wasted a draft pick, but better to have wasted a draft pick and be done with it than to have it hanging around your neck like a sailor with an albatross that brings your team down for years simply because of a salary cap structure that acts like an anchor on a cursed ship.

Anyway, I gotta give kudos to Goodell for taking the hard road on athletic fools who choose to think they are above the law and now for being the first person of note to acknowledge the inherent idiocy that comes each year with rookie pay in the NFL.

I honestly did not see this coming. Unlike the rookies who are soon to be, however, I love it!

FanYard should set up a Yardstick for the length of each rookie’s career. Well, maybe just the top few.

JOIN FanYard NOW!

Still shaking my head in disbelief, I resign myself once again to the very exciting fact that no one ever knows how any NFL game is going to turn out, and also to the fact that football and hubris never mix very well for the team that has that label hung around their necks.

The Pats were too confident and cocksure going into the final game of what could have been the most magical season any NFL team has ever had, and the rest of the NFL had best hope they did not learn their lesson. We’ll see.

Now, with the NFL draft done and offseason camps in full swing, we here at FanYard will be gearing up to give our users as many tools as possible to make us the very best site in the world to make and keep track of picks all season long.

Soon, we’ll be showing you the results of how the Yardstick compared with the picks of the experts at ESPN, Yahoo and CBSSportsline. Only one of these experts beat the aggregate picks of our users and that was Mark Schlereth, who was a guard on three Super Bowl winning teams and made the Pro Bowl twice during a great 12-year career with the redskins and the Broncos.

We hope  this offseason is turning into a pleasant and profitable one for all.