2019-20 NFL Predictions Part Two, Sorta...

This is going to be a tough year, with probably a bunch of low-quality shit football on the professional level being played.

And I think it comes from the matter that there is abjectly no consensus as to what teams are much of any good.

For one example, I give the Green Bay Packers.  At least one ESPN analyst has them in the Super Bowl.  Another ESPN analyst sees no way they beat the Bears in two days, and that they would push their August Vegas win total of nine.  (A number I think, because of corporate league reality, they will go under.  If Aaron Rodgers wants another Super Bowl, it will either only be because of the fact the league forecasts another lockdown/strike like when he got his first one (and that would be after next season, not this one), or elsewhere other than Green Bay.)

For another, in perusing the win totals across three different sportsbooks which I gathered on my August trip, no team reaches 12-4 as their number -- and only New England reaches (WH, Caesar's) or exceeds (MGM) 11.

And yet, if you take a look at the major Super Bowl contenders, there are major rigging/storyline/corporate issues with each:

• New England has two major problems, both on the level of misconduct.  It is clear that the Robert Kraft situation has been swept under the rug legally and all that, but at what cost to respect of the league?  It is clear to most that Robert Kraft, on the morning of the AFC Championship Game, was in a skeevy massage parlor in Florida, and who knows what else was going on (and I'm not just talking the hand-job, mind you -- I think there's still significant question as to why the rich and powerful would reduce themselves to that kind of a venue for just about ANY purpose).  That's not a look Roger Goodell would appreciate.
• Nor at least two suspensions in the off-season, a situation under which the league usually views teams which have to pay such Club Remittance penalties rather poorly (see the rig-jobs against Dallas for a number of the previous seasons).
• Los Angeles, and this is for both teams, I think has a very real identified problem with their new venue, it's surrounding Inglewood neighborhood (very justified) and the increasingly tenuous hold of social reasonability in our society.  Would it be a good look for the NFL if their shiny Los Angeles Experiment Mega-Stadium opens in a social situation in which you have the camera panning back as it did during some of the last major LA championships, to people near-rioting and setting fires in celebration?
• Kansas City is a very real discussion, with Patrick Mahomes probably needing to be that marketable to be the league's first $40M/year quarterback.  But the ominous cloud of Tyreek Hill overshadows this season like Kareem Hunt did last.  That, alone, is sufficient to question whether Kansas City is going to lift the Lombardi in five months' time.
• Chicago would be a Ray Lewis Baltimore situation, and how do you sell that in a league which has done everything in it's power to neuter defensive football over the last 5-10 years, wrongly or otherwise?
• I've heard Cleveland being brought about as a dark horse.  Puh-leeze.

So I don't have an answer, or even a GUESS.  About the closest I could think of is New England, with several intimations in the last 6-8 weeks that this might actually be Brady's last season -- which would definitely be worthy of #7.  But then see above, and consider what legacy Brady will be leaving this league with anyway, that same "foolish and wretched one-dimensional ballhog" who's above all the rules and decent precepts (as is his team) as his predecessor in sports demigod-dom in Chicago....