No offense to college football fans, but football’s main event, the NFL regular season, starts tonight. I think this site had one of the most amusing ways of forecasting the NFL season, comparing each team to a Star Wars character. A couple of my favorite metaphors:

The New England Patriots: Emperor Palpatine. Keeps Darth Vader (below) on a tight leash. Used to be terrifying, but now is just old and wrinkled.

The New York Jets: Darth Maul. The threatening apprentice. Knows what he’s doing, but will still end up sliced in half at the bottom of a reactor shaft.

The Cleveland Browns: Jawas. They are small, brown, and constantly trading for junk.

The New York Giants: Princess Leia. Sibling of the chosen one. (Reference to Eli Manning, as this Colts fan site sees Peyton “I’m In Every Television Commercial on During Football season” Manning as the Chosen One.)

“Tiki said WHAT about me?”

The Detroit Lions: Admiral Ozzel, comparing him to Lions GM Matt Millen: “He is as clumsy as he is stupid.”

The Atlanta Falcons: Han Solo frozen in carbonite. You couldn’t be more screwed.

I feel like I have less of a sense of what’s going to happen this year than most, and the preseason really didn’t help shed much light on the offseason questions, what with most starters playing about four quarters over four games. A couple of random thoughts below the fold…

Cam will like this, as New England looks to be, on paper, one of the most fearsome assemblies of talent in the NFL in a long time. But since the offseason in which New England kind of resembled Cam’s hated New York Yankees (signing all the big-name, high-priced free agent talent) the Patriots have looked a little snakebitten. Moss is injured, Harrison is caught using HGH and is out four games, Richard Seymour is out six games. You see enough little nicks, scratches, and potholes to keep a team that ought to be the most fearsome since the 1986 Bears falling short — maybe. Also, every year I make more or less the same prediction, that because just about every player in the NFL had some year where they missed a lot of time to injury, that this year might be the year Tom Brady’s number comes up and he misses some games. (And the Patriots just aren’t the same team without Brady.) The Patriots should win the division, should go deep in the playoffs, should dominate the Pro Bowl… should, should, should.

Don’t know what to expect from my Jets this year. It’s a lot of the same players who went 10-6 and made the playoffs last year, a coach who came out of nowhere to show he’s probably one of the best in the game, a couple of impressive looking draft choices at CB and LB and RB Thomas Jones, who helped take the Bears to the Super Bowl last year. Should be a better team, right? Ah, just kidding, I’m a Jets fan and we have Russian fatalism beaten into us at a young age. The Jets looked very blah in preseason, so I’m wary. I think the Jets will be a good team, I just don’t know whether being a good team with a tough schedule and supremely competitive AFC (The Jets would compete for the title in the mostly mediocre NFC) gets you 8-8 or 11-5.

Buffalo: Every year they look good in preseason, they beat the tar out of the Jets once, and then by late November they’re out of the playoff chase. A weird non-entity. Miami, I suspect, will be awful this year. Lots of fans’ anger over not taking Brady will be justified.

Indianapolis: I’m going to pick them to repeat as AFC champs, even though they shouldn’t with all the defensive changes. I figure, top quarterback, top coach, a division where they can pretty easily go 8-0… they should get home field advantage, once again, and ride that to the Super Bowl. In San Diego, the question is whether an arsenal of talent can overcome having Norv Turner as a head coach. Norv wasn’t terrible in Washington, despite the fans hating him, but he certainly didn’t do much in his second time around in Oakland. By the way, for us Raider-haters, these are glorious days, as only the Falcons franchise is more screwed up. That searing pain is called karma, Al Davis.

The fourth really good team in the AFC is Baltimore, who will probably play well through much of the season and fall just short, much like last year. There just aren’t any gimme games in the AFC playoffs; the fourth best team in football is (with two AFC teams and whoever looks best in the NFC ahead of ‘em) is likely to be playing wild card teams that first weekend.

The AFC has a bunch of teams where you’re thinking, “eh, you know, they could be pretty good this year” - Denver, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh. I mean, Kansas City was a playoff team last year. Any one of those teams could be anywhere from 6-10 to 10-6, and get a wild card slot.

By comparison, the NFC is a wasteland, with a few glittering diamonds in the rough. Like everybody else, I’ll pick New Orleans to come out on top this year. Lots of talent, guys like Reggie Bush who are a threat to score on any play, the feel-good story that has fans across the country. I think last year’s championship game loss was a sign of a young team. This year, with some experience and polish, they’re the class of the division. They only have a few serious competitors — the Bears are very, very good, with a crap quarterback. Sorry, Rex Grossman, but Chicago should have ditched you in the offseason and brought in a real quarterback. Could you imagine what a pretty good, non-bad-decision-making quarterback like Chad Pennington could do on that team? I see the Chicago season ending with a slew of bad interceptions, prompting the Bears to trade for somebody who fits that bill in the offseason.

Who else looks good in the NFC? The East is the pretty good Eagles and three “meh” teams behind ‘em. I never buy into the Cowboys’ hype. The Giants are an aging team at war with their coach and a quarterback dealing with ginormous expectations. And the Redskins fans are strangely quiet this year — it’s as if their faith in Joe Gibbs is hanging by a thread. You’ve got a really bad hype-to-performance ratio in much of this division.

Maybe the Panthers will surprise some people, and Seattle’s always pretty good. But I would say if you switched ‘em to the AFC, either would be lucky to be in the wild card hunt the last week of the season.

Minnesota, Green Bay, Detroit, Tampa Bay… They’re terrible. Atlanta should qualify for federal disaster relief aid. San Francisco and Arizona are perpetually the teams of the future. St. Louis is easy to forget about, and they’re a far cry from their “Greatest Show on Turf” days.

Super Bowl pick? New Orleans over Indianapolis.