FanHouse The Prelude

Matt Ufford is the editor of With Leather and a co-founder of Kissing Suzy Kolber. The Prelude is his sincere examination of the coming NFL weekend.

I've fallen into a bit of a depression. Part of it comes from being in Arizona without a defined purpose, without press credentials, and without my digital camera, which was lost to an alternate dimension shortly after I arrived here.

But mostly, it's because the NFL season already feels over. It ended with two terrific weekends of football -- a full weekend of great games in the divisional round, and two memorable conference championships two weeks ago. The bye week killed the season's momentum, and the media crush in Arizona (according to ESPN News, 4,786 accredited journalists were present at Media Day) has sapped away the unbridled joy I used to take in the Super Bowl.

Beginning Monday, we'll have little else to do but look back on another fun and unpredictable season, and the rest of the NFL die-hards can join me in this dark miasma of sadness. But I've never been good at dwelling in the past; I prefer to look ahead. Here, then, is my handy guide to surviving the NFL offseason.

Matt Ufford is the editor of With Leather and a co-founder of Kissing Suzy Kolber. The Prelude is his sincere examination of the coming NFL weekend.

It took Green Bay's shellacking of my beloved Seahawks to help me realize I don't hate Brett Favre.

Last week, I watched Seattle's defense go belly-up in the Lambeau snow in a loud bar with a couple friends. And though Ryan Grant did most of the damage in the Packers' dominating 42-20 win, Brett Favre still did typically memorable Brett Favre things -- from miraculously tripping his way out of a sack on third down then flipping an underhand pass that kept a red zone drive going to throwing snowballs at teammates.

Momentarily disregarding the fury I felt at my team during those moments, I couldn't help but swear at Favre in admiration. He's been making ridiculous plays like that for the better part of the last 17 years, and, honestly, it's fun to watch someone have that much fun.

But then I stopped and asked myself, "Wait, how come I don't hate Favre right now?" And the answer was simple: I couldn't hear the game announcers over the din in the bar.

Matt Ufford is the editor of With Leather and a co-founder of Kissing Suzy Kolber. The Prelude is his sincere examination of the coming NFL weekend.

In this week's Jamboroo, Big Daddy Drew uncovered a staple of NFL columnist wisdom when he picked the Jaguars to beat the Patriots Saturday night:

Since my picks are inherently stupid and meaningless, I may as well go ahead and pick the Jags. If you pick the Jags, you get to boast about it if they win. If you pick the Pats, you're just another guy who made the sensible, correct decision. That's no fun. Far more enjoyable to be brazen and stupid.

Brazen stupidity isn't just fun though, it's rewarding. Columnists take every opportunity to crow about the picks they get right while enjoying a freedom from accountability few members of the work force get. And this is never truer than when it comes to the most brazen and stupid of attempts at prognostication: preseason NFL picks.

I'm not opposed to preseason picks, per se. It's fun to wonder aloud what might happen, and the exercise always generates discussion among fans about what teams have been criminally overlooked or under-appreciated. My problem is that media companies are selling these football writers as experts, when it turns out their conjecture isn't any more accurate than some dumb bloggers' conjecture.

And I can prove it.

Matt Ufford is the editor of With Leather and a co-founder of Kissing Suzy Kolber. The Prelude is his sincere examination of the coming NFL weekend.

I've never been moved by the fresh starts and resolutions that come with a new calendar year. The year just reminds me of those short documentaries playing on loop in a museum: you catch the final ten minutes, watch as people leave, start from the beginning until you reach the point where you started watching, then leave with a feeling of completeness. As with the New Year, it's nice if you can catch the show at the beginning, but not critical.


Sport seasons, on the other hand, have a well-timed narrative: shorter than our too-long years and longer than the too-short hiccups of trends between solstice and equinox. Sports seasons put their feet up on the passage of time. They don't pay rent on the 1st, and they don't worry about deadlines. Super Bowl's in February instead of January? Oh well. Ice hockey in June? Sure thing. The World Series might end after Halloween? What're ya gonna do?

So, this new month doesn't matter to me because it's 2008. It matters because the NFL playoffs are finally here. And that, not a resolution for six-pack abs, is something worth celebrating.

Matt Ufford is the editor of With Leather and a co-founder of Kissing Suzy Kolber. The Prelude is his sincere examination of the coming NFL weekend.

As a relatively informed NFL fan and a passionate devotee of the female form, I've long known that most NFL teams pay their cheerleaders a scant $75 or less per home game. It's the sort of trivium that would come up in a conversation at a sports bar, and I'll say, "Wow, only seventy-five MY GOD LOOK AT THAT WOMAN" as FOX's NFL coverage cuts away to commercial.

But not this week. This week, the slate of NFL games is almost completely devoid of suspense, and I won't be distracted by the bruising hits or plunging cleavage. This week, I'm an activist for women's rights. NFL teams are exploiting their cheerleaders for additional publicity and profits, then returning their hard work by paying them like illegal immigrants. If NFL cheerleaders want to be taken seriously, they need to stop being so thankful for so little, and start organizing a labor movement.

Yes, I'm suggesting a cheerleaders' union.

Matt Ufford is the editor of With Leather and a co-founder of Kissing Suzy Kolber. The Prelude is his sincere examination of the coming NFL weekend.

Every year at this time, a handful of sports columnists and talking heads present an argument for teams that have a playoff position locked up. The argument looks like this: "Team X has no more meaningful regular-season games remaining; therefore, it should sit out its most valuable players and rest its starters." At least, that's what it would look like if today's columnists had the stamina to write a sentence using a semicolon.

This kicks off the most maddening, unnecessary NFL debate of the year:

Concussed retired fullback: They should rest for the playoffs!
Mush-mouthed former tight end: What if the team develops rust?
Fullback: What if key players get injured?
Tight end: What if we argue all day?
Fullback: Sounds great!

The fact of the matter is that there's no conclusive evidence to support either argument, and the dearth of historical examples we have to work with shows that it's essentially a non-issue. This isn't merely an argument that can't be won, it's an argument that doesn't matter.

Saturday night's game on the NFL Network features the 5-8 Bengals at the 3-10 49ers. The Bengals are loaded with offensive talent but are chronic underachievers, while the 49ers may be worse than their record indicates: they just signed Chris Weinke to back up spot starter Shaun Hill after injuries to Alex Smith and Trent Dilfer.


It's the kind of game that becomes commonplace as the season draws to a close: both teams have been eliminated from the playoffs, and neither is bad enough to be in the running for the #1 pick in the draft. Any way you look at it, Cincy-San Fran, like Jim Sorgi or the Motor City Bowl, will be ugly and inconsequential.

Like it or not, this game is a fact of the twilight of each NFL season. It's the other side of the coin, the price the NFL pays for having a playoff system more exclusive than the NBA or NHL. And I embrace it.

Matt Ufford is the editor of With Leather and a co-founder of Kissing Suzy Kolber. The Prelude is his sincere examination of the coming NFL weekend.

I'm not a man of virtue, but I understand the concept of accountability. A few years back, when I had shorter hair and a smaller waist, I stood in front of my commanding officer on a Monday morning. One of my Marines had been arrested for a drunken fistfight while on liberty over the weekend, and the C.O. wanted to know why one of my Marines had tarnished the good name of Company D. The incident had happened about 70 miles away from base, and there was nothing I could have reasonably done to prevent it. "No excuse, sir," I said. "I must have given an insufficient safety brief."


Well, the final gun had yet to sound in Baltimore on Monday night, and already the cry was going out from the Ravens faithful: we got screwed by the refs.

Matt Ufford is the editor of With Leather and a co-founder of Kissing Suzy Kolber. The Prelude is his sincere examination of the coming NFL weekend.


The last time I wrote about Sean Taylor's death, one comment I received stood out from the rest. It said, in essence, "Not to take away from the tragedy, but it's too bad our military members aren't met with same admiration when one of them dies in Iraq."

The sentence struck me as profound. By all accounts, Taylor was a bright, talented young man who was taking steps to distance himself from his troubled past now that he had a family and job security, only to lose it all unfairly in the prime of his life. That background is one I know well: it describes a number of Marines with whom I served.

Many of them, like Taylor, were unfairly cut down: not just in the physical prime of their lives, but after leaving childish things behind.

Like many people who care about the NFL, I've been trying to make sense of Taylor's death this week. Though I'm not a Redskins fan, his passing affected me more deeply than another untimely, high-profile death of an NFL safety: that of Pat Tillman, who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan while serving as an Army Ranger.

Matt Ufford is the editor of With Leather and a co-founder of Kissing Suzy Kolber. The Prelude is his sincere examination of the coming NFL weekend.


Adrian Peterson is sidelined with a torn knee ligament. Priest Holmes is starting for the Chiefs in lieu of injured Larry Johnson. And Ricky Williams was reinstated by the NFL, meaning that he'll be taking the place of Ronnie Brown (gone for the season) in about two weeks.

These three stories surfaced almost simultaneously to reiterate a theme that's been snaking its way throughout this NFL season: even when shown the inevitable future, running backs do not go quietly into the night.

All over the NFL, forces have aligned to strike down teams' exceptional young running backs and prop up aging false idols, giving us bizarre situations like the one in Miami: Williams has done nothing but screw the Dolphins for most of the last four years, yet here he is, coming to take the place of the talented young man who was drafted specifically because Williams left his team in a lurch.