Courtesy of ColdHardFootballFacts.com
 

The final round of exhibition football takes place Thursday and Friday nights, holding out the promise of real-live meaningful football just seven days away.

 

God, could the off-season last any longer? (The 2009 off-season, for the record, is 221 days ... easily the longest off-season in major North American sports.)

 

Of course, we watch football not just for the excitement of the games themselves, but for the on- and off-the-field dramas that unfold each and every season. Certainly, several storylines will emerge that we do not envision right now.

 

But these are the players and characters that we'll definitely follow with our slow, heavy-lidded, troll-like lazy eyes this year. Came, follow our lazy eye:

 

The Cutler Story will be the great drama of the 2009 season.

 

At one end of the spectrum is the big-armed passer’s opportunity to rewrite the Chicago history books. He could change an incredible half century of frustration for an organization that’s traditionally so inept offensively that they consider Jim McMahon the second best QB in team history.

 

At the other end of the spectrum is his opportunity to crash and burn in a fist-fight with the media, Mike Ditka and Chicago’s feisty fans. Cutler seems to operate with the same media relations staff once employed by Ryan Leaf – except he can actually play.

 

If Cutler produces early and the defense dominates and Devin Hester returns to game-breaking form, it could create a mountain of hype and excitement out of the Second City. If he fails to produce early, it could turn ugly fast. Pass the nachos, this will be fun! 

The famous NFL bad-boy – which is a euphemism for waste of God-given talent – was signed this week by the struggling Winnipeg Blue Bombers of the Canadian Football League. Hell, who knew there was a football league in Canada? Color us shocked! We just hope that Elsinore Brewery is one of the sponsors.

 

O.K., so we probably won’t be watching Jones on the field. But we will be watching the off-the-field action, as Jones is likely to shoot up this Canadian prairie town like the Black Donnelly Gang. In fact (true story), BoDog is giving 20 to 1 odds that Jones will get arrested in Canada by Nov. 30.

 

We like those odds. After all, the Mounties always get their man.

 

We’re going to watch Favre this year only because we have a television, we sit in front of it quite a bit, and because, given those two conditions, we will have no other option but to watch Favre over the next four months.

 

By now, you know our take on Favre of recent vintage, on the desperate decision by Minnesota in signing him, and on the nauseating coverage he generates from a compliant media that bows down to him like alcoholic frat boys at the feet of the keg delivery man. The media’s Old Yeller Fever will reach pandemic proportions on Nov. 1, when he walks into Lambeau Field for the first time in another team’s uniform.

 

Given no other option, we’ll enjoy the drama, especially sometime late in the season, when the HMS Favre-tanic cracks up against an iceberg and another promising Minnesota season sinks into the deep.

The Chosen One steps onto the field for the first time in his prolific career with a rookie head coach (Jim Caldwell) and without his binky, the great Marvin Harrison.

 

Granted, Harrison was something of a non-factor, by his standards, over the past two years (combined 80 catches, 883 yard, 6 TD) and Manning still managed to win MVP honors in 2008.

 

And, granted, as we noted earlier this off-season, Caldwell represents continuity more than an abrupt change: he’s been a long-time fixture in the Tony Dungy camp.

 

But these are big changes just the same. And the most interesting aspect of these changes will be how it impacts the sideline dynamics in Indianapolis.

 

The coach-QB dynamic there in Indy during the Manning-Dungy years was always a little bit different than it was on other teams. The quarterback seemed to carry an unusual amount of decisive weight, even when paired with a coach of the gravitas possessed by Dungy. Who could ever forget the image of Manning waving off the punt team on 4th and 11, during a December 2004 win over the Chargers?

 

We expect that Manning will come to dominate the always critical QB-coach relationship ... and what that means for the Colts will be fascinating to follow.

 

Sharper was a long-time fixture in the NFC North, where he played for the Packers and Vikings. The 13-year safety moves on to New Orleans this year as perhaps the most underappreciated defender of our time.

 

Well, people know he’s good – but maybe they don’t know just how good. He’s never generated the hype of a Rodney Harrison, Bob Sanders or Troy Polamalu, for example. (It doesn’t help Sharper’s case that those guys combined to win five Super Bowls this decade.)

 

But Sharper is the active leader in INTs (54) – two ahead of Ty Law, another guy who’s garnered a lot more headlines (but also enjoyed more postseason success). Sharper has also returned 8 of those picks for TDs. With one more pick-six this year he’ll join Aeneas Williams, Hall of Famer Ken Houston, and future Hall of Famer Deion Sanders on the No. 2 spot all-time in this category, behind only 2009 Hall of Fame inductee Rod Woodson (12 pick-sixes).

 

Sharper is also an ironman at a brutal position: he’s missed just nine games in his 12-year career, and none over the past three. Finally, we’ll be watching Sharper because his Saints should move the ball all over the field on offense. The defense needs to step up to make New Orleans a Super Bowl contender. So Sharper will be a critical component if the Saints are to fulfill the promise of their gunslinging offense.

 

New England’s revamped defensive backfield will get tested more often than Lance Armstrong’s urine this year. The tests begin with the Monday Night Football opener against Buffalo and its new star receiver Terrell Owens.

 

It’s critical that this unit perform well – even with Tom Brady back and at full strength the battered secondary needs to improve to give the Super Bowl favorites a legitimate shot at actually fulfilling those expectations.

 

It’s critical that this unit perform well – even with Tom Brady back and at full strength the battered secondary (pathetic 89.5 Defensive Passer Rating last year) needs to improve to give the Super Bowl favorites a legitimate shot at actually fulfilling those expectations.   Put most simply, the Patriots play for Super Bowls when they field a decent pass defense. The Patriots take an early vacation when they do not field a decent pass defense.

• The Patriots have reached the AFC title game five times in the Belichick Era. Their average defensive passer rating in these five seasons was 68.9.
   
• The Patriots have failed to reach the AFC title game four times in the Belichick Era. Their average defensive passer rating in these four seasons was 85.5.

But the schedule looks like a difficult one for any pass defense. After trying to tackle Owens, the Patriots stare down Jets rookie Mark Sanchez and 2008 quarterbacking phenoms Matt Ryan and Joe Flacco in consecutive weeks. The schedule also includes a pair of showdowns with Miami’s Chad Pennington, who historically does well against the Patriots, second meetings with Sanchez and Owens and – oh! – a mid-November showdown on the road against Peyton Manning and the Colts.

 

Colts-Patriots has been the great rivalry of the past decade: Manning has proven that he can abuse a sub-standard New England secondary and the winner of this regular-season battle has had the inside track on the AFC title almost every year since 2001. This will be big.

 

The 0-16 Lions were dead last in many of our Quality Stats last year – Offensive Hog Index low among them. The Lions not only ranked 32nd in this indicator, they ranked 32nd in one of the key components of the indicator: Negative Pass Plays.

 

The Lions suffered a Negative Pass Play (sack or INT) on 12.7 percent of dropbacks – a tremendously poor rate. To put it into perspective, the team with the top Offensive Hogs last year, Denver, suffered a Negative Pass Play on just 4.7 percent of dropbacks.

 

That’s not a good situation to walk into for either veteran newcomer Daunte Culpepper or rookie No. 1 pick Matt Stafford. This decade has already produced one highly touted quarterback (Joey Harrington) who was victimized by the institutional inability of the Lions to field a decent offensive line. We’d hate to see Stafford become the second. But we see little reason to believe that he won’t.

 

We’re not going to sit here and tell you that we’ve watched a lot of Shaun Hill game film over the years. We haven’t.

 

But the performances of this pigskin persona non grata leap off the stat sheet in his brief NFL career (10 starts).

The competition he’s faced has not been particularly stout – the wins last year came against the Rams (twice), Bills, Jets and Redskins. But there is obviously a big difference in the 49ers with and without Hill at the helm.

 

His individual numbers are pretty damn good, too.

Would you take that performance out of your young new quarterback after 10 games? Of course you would. Jets fans, Lions fans, Browns fans – any of them would be ecstatic if Sanchez, Stafford or Quinn put up those kind of numbers through Week 10.

 

So we want to see what becomes of this budding little star. The 2009 season will go a long way toward telling us if Hill is the next Tom Brady – an unheralded quarterback who comes out of nowhere – or just another flash in the 49ers pan.