We are now amidst the throes of far and away the strangest NFL regular season in history; so let’s make some outrageous – or perhaps sage, wise and rational – predictions for the forthcoming year.
1. The Seattle Seahawks will win the Super Bowl.
2. Former Washington State Cougar Football QB and all around stud Gardner Minshew will throw for over four thousand yards, and get labeled the next/modern Brett Farve – both are from Mississippi – then receive a multi-million-dollar endorsement from Bud Light by the start of 2021.
3. Lamar Jackson will become the NFL’s first back-to-back MVP award winner since Peyton Manning in 2008 and 2009.
4. After winning eight straight games at the start of the year, Patrick Mahomes will then miss the majority of the rest of the regular season after suffering an injury somewhere below the numbers, while improvising on the fly, rushing the ball, and doing his best Russel Wilson imitation.
5. Cam Newton will take the New England Patriots to the Super Bowl.
6. Once reinstated, and becoming the number three receiver, then perhaps second best later on, Josh Gordon will turn at least 33.3 percent of his receptions into touchdowns.
7. This year, Marshawn Lynch will, once again talk about rejoining the Seattle Seahawks at length and become a hot button topic for talk shows, but nothing will actually come of it.
8. Drew Brees will play an exemplary season. But the Saints will lose in the first round of the playoffs.
9. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers will help prove Tom Brady was not, “just a system quarterback,” and the Bucs will lose a thriller to Seattle in the NFC Championship game and beat the 49ers in the game before their showdown with Seattle.
10. Al Michaels will openly admit, on air, he would much rather have John Madden beside him in the booth, than suffer the incorrigibly innocuous and charmlessly repetitive, but still better than Troy Aikman, former WR, Chris Collinsworth.
11. The last round of playoffs, specifically the conference championship games, will feature not only full attendance statistics at both venues, but record-setting attendance totals too, after a coronavirus vaccine is approved, and mass-produced and administered; and we will hear stories about die-hard fans traveling at least one thousand miles round trip to get their vaccine so they can attend games played in both Seattle and Foxborough.
12. Cam Newton will get Bill Belichick to wear a flowery and elaborately effeminate pink hat on the field after a monumental victory in the playoffs – just like the time Minshew slapped an adhesive mustache onto then Washington State University Football Head Coach, Mike Leech’s face after a similarly rousing and emotionally high triumph.
13. Jadeveon Clowney will record fewer than three sacks for the Tennessee Titans.
14. Richard Sherman will lead the NFL’s cornerbacks in (record the lowest) completion percentage on all passes thrown to his side of the field when he is the primary defender of the intended receiver.
15. Mike McCarthy will lead the Dallas Cowboys to their first playoff victory since their 1996 Super Bowl win.
16. Aaron Rodgers will get traded to the Cleveland Browns.
17. The NFL will cancel as many as but no more than three regular season games due to positive coronavirus tests among players.
18. Rumors of the ever prophetic, analytically aciculate, Tony Romo turning his profoundly adroit commentating into something that resembles a coaching appointment with an NFL team will increase near the end of the season.
19. Larry Fitzgerald will announce at the end of the year, no surprise, he is not yet ready to retire from the NFL.
20. If he remains healthy, Chris Carson will lead the NFL in total rushing yards, rushing TD’s and average yards per rush.