Truth be told, we're not really that fond of season predictions.

 

Like they tell you to do in the NFL, we take them one game at a time. When you live and die by the Cold, Hard Football Facts, making long, sweeping assumptions based on supposition and hearsay makes little sense.

 

We hate supposition and hearsay. What are we, People Magazine?

 

Of course, we do expect our picks to be as rock-solid as any in the business. Quite honestly, we'll put our track record up against anybody's. But we don't even have to size up our picks. King Kaufman of Salon.com did it for us last year at this time. He found that our 2005 picks bested those of every single major and minor sports web site out there. Here, read it for yourself: "Another victory over the 'pundits'". Not sure how we stacked up in 2006, but we'll let you know if Kaufman comes up with a look back at last season's "pundits."

 

With that said, we're not at all sure we'll do better than a prognosticating monkey, a video-game console, or the most respected voice in sports journalism.

 

The monkey is Bonzo, an idiot savant primate and media darling (read about Bonzo in the Wall Street Journal here). We keep him on the payroll for his ability to randomly pick outcomes that sometimes top the experts (like he did in 2005, when he beat every single CBS Sportsline expert picking games against the spread).

 

Freakin' monkey hasn't cashed his checks for two years, and the ladies in bookkeeping are pissed. Bonzo made his preseason picks by drawing records and team names out of a checkered houndstooth fedora. This took quite a long time because of Bonzo's addiction to shit-flinging, but we were able to keep him focused long enough to add his playoff picks before dozing off in his cage, fitfully.

 

We love the goofy little bastard, even though he managed to pick the Patriots to finish 3-13 and likes the Giants and Falcons to take the top seeds in the NFC. Only in a monkey's world? Or magical apery? We'll see. 

 

While Bonzo was resting, our 16-year-old intern Melvin kept begging to bring his Madden 2K8 into the mix, offering to run a season of simulations, with the real NFL rosters and coaching strategies, and record the outcome. We told him that video games were for little kids, then realized he was one. But he talked us into it -- hell, if you brought Madden 2K8 back in time to the pre-Beatles era, you'd probably be hung for witchcraft. It's pretty amazing, the Madden, and the season Melvin simulated was quite thought-provoking -- Seahawks over Jaguars, in the end, which wouldn't exactly be a dream matchup for NFL marketers.

 

Good job, kid! You might get laid yet, and at the very least you'll get some before we see a Seattle-Jacksonville Super Bowl.

 

Then there's Sports Illustrated, which has been doing this type of thing for five decades. Someone's got to be considered the No. 1 voice, and for our money it's SI. We wish we were cool enough to be known exclusively be our nickname, as "Dr. Z" is. And Peter King, like him or not, is the leading national voice on the NFL. SI always seems to want to go out on a limb a bit (with little success), and this year they go with Saints over Chargers.

 

An interesting pick, especially if you like the phrase "offense wins championships."

 

And then there's the Cold, Hard Football Facts, your not-so-humble channeler of all things pigskin. We picked a Patriots-Panthers Super Bowl in 2006, which might have been right in some alternate universe but not this one. Our pick for 2007 is as boring as a box of rocks: Patriots over the Bears. 

 

It's kind of a trendy pick, even a bit cliche. But in this case the Cold, Hard Football, at least at this point in the year, make it a rock-solid selection.

 

But like we said, we hate predictions. 

 

BONZO'S PICKS   

 

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