This won't be a regular thing. Don't get used to it. I'll list each game by the winner, and whether it'll be close or not. If I say it'll be close then my guess is less likely to be accurate. Usually.
Steelers @ Ravens: Ravens, not close. This one already happened. I'm fucking prescient. Expecting a good game from Flacco (think 109.3 PR).
Seahawks @ Chargers: Seahawks, not close. Oh look it's a real prediction! But not a hard one.
Patriots @ Vikings: Patriots, close. True, the Patriots just lost to the Dolphins in catastrophic fashion, and true, the Vikings just shit on the Rams. But it's not hard to shit on the Rams, and the Dolphins game was an anomaly. Or, you know, Tom Brady suddenly went from a top-five QB in the NFL to worse than Andrew Luck. The Vikings won't get the same kind of pressure that Cameron Wake (not the Dolphins, just Cameron Wake) got against Brady, and that'll be the difference.
Dolphins @ Bills: Dolphins, close. Cameron Wake.
Jaguars @ Redskins: Redskins, not close. Both these teams apparently suck. BUT FUCK IT I STILL BELIEVE IN RGIII!!! I'm too tired to think of a funny nickname for him. Robert... Griffin. The Third. That wasn't funny at all. Fuck off.
Cowboys @ Titans: Cowboys, close. This is probably the wrong choice. But fuck it. I feel like holding your own against San Francisco is way more impressive than dominating Kansas Shitty. Holy God I'm clever.
Cardinals @ Giants: Cardz, not close. The Giants suck more than... um. Name a porn star. I don't watch enough porn and I don't want to date myself and make the Jenna Jameson reference, but I already said Lexi Belle. Stoya? Maybe. But let's go with Sasha Grey. Who's apparently retired??? What kind of shit is this??? And yes, I did just go frantically check Wikipedia to make sure Lexi Belle isn't retired. I have a soft spot for her. And by soft I mean hard. And by spot I mean
Saints @ Browns. Saints, not close. Is this hard? And by this I mean
Falcons @ Bengals. Falcons, close. FUCK IT, I BELIEVE!!!
Lions @ Panthers. Lions, not close. I'm believing a lot recently. The funny thing about football is that there's so much parody (oh wait) that teams that are good in year n aren't necessarily good in year n+1. So the line favors the Panthers even though lions are on average larger than panthers.*
* It's actually hard to determine exactly how much larger lions are on average. The Wikipedia article gives the weight of newborn lions, because anyone ever has wanted to know that, as well as the maximum size (550 lbs), but it doesn't provide an average. Googling "average lion weight" provides the answer of 430 lbs, although the source is dubious and factually disagrees with the answer Google provides, weirdly enough. Panthers are even more complicated, because there's not actually such a thing as a "panther". The genus Panthera includes such big cats (giant kitties) as the tiger, the lion, the jaguar, the leopard, and the snow leopard. The Wikipedia article on "Panther"s redirects to any of a long list of possible candidates, most notably Panthera; its subfamily (parent) Pantherinae; the leopard (which is the African/Asian panther); the cougar/mountain lion (the North/South American panther); the Florida panther (a subspecies of cougar which is found in Florida); the jaguar (South/Central American panther); the black panther (a variant of leopard, jaguar, or cougar); and the white panther (a variant of the same species (plural)).
My best guess is that the Carolina Panthers are named after the black panther, since the cat on the logo is very clearly dark in color and most of the species I listed are not commonly black. Google says that the average (male) panther weighs between 130 and 160 pounds. But I don't know whether the type of panther affects this measurement, and I very much suspect that it does. It's also difficult to determine with any accuracy which type of panther the Carolina Panthers represent. The possibilities include leopard (~130 lbs), cougar (~137 lbs), and jaguar (220 lbs in parts of South America, sometimes larger). So clearly there's at least a little variance. But I think it's safe to assume that the Panthers would be named after a local subspecies. Wikipedia says that "There are no authenticated cases of truly melanistic cougars... [they] have never been photographed or shot in the wild and none has ever been bred." This implies that the Carolina Panthers are almost certainly Jaguars; although it's not outside the realm of possibility that they named their team after an essentially mythical creature (see: Titans, Giants), it's far more likely that they chose to go with the real, local species.
Jaguars (which, according to Wikipedia, kill their prey by biting "directly through the skull... between the ears to deliver a fatal bite to the brain") generally tend to live in the warmer, more humid climates of South and Central America, and are only listed as living in North America due to occasional sightings in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Jaguars (which are the only living, native North American cat that roars) used to have a considerably wider range in the US, almost certainly including Carolina, but as far as I can tell they haven't lived in Carolina in at least 50 years, which makes the name somewhat misleading. But I still think that the "black panther" jaguar is the most likely explanation for the team's mascot.
Now that we know the species, we can make a more accurate estimation of the size, especially relative to the lion. The range given by Wikipedia is 124-211 lbs, although the larger males are listed as being in the range of 350 lbs. To remind you, the average lion is around 430 pounds, while the largest can reach 550 lbs. I could probably find more accurate data by narrowing down the differences in jaguar size by geographic region, but I'm willing to make a ballpark estimate based on these numbers. If we're comparing average size, the lion will have an advantage of 219-306 lbs, while comparing maximum sizes gives us a 200 lb disparity. I think it's reasonable to presume that both sides are presenting a large--albeit not record-setting--specimen of their given species, so let's call it around 225 lbs for the panther and 490 lbs for the lion.** This gives the lion a 265 lb advantage, making it 2.2 times larger than the panther. (This means that if you listed the lion's weight in kg, like a fucking European, and the panther's weight in lbs, like a proud goddamn American, the numbers would look approximately the same.) I use this data to back up my choice of the Lions to win by a large margin.
** My math is as follows: The average lion is 430 and the max is 550. I'll give it half the distance to account for it being the chosen champion, which is 490. The average jaguar in the range given above is 167.5, and adding 50% of the distance from 167.5 to 350 gives 258.75. Of course, this also means that the jaguar is adding 54% of his average body weight to reach size, while the lion is adding only 14%. That doesn't seem fair or reasonable, even if there is a lot more variance in the jaguar population. To make it look a little more even, I'll bump the jaguar down to only adding 27% of his body weight, which comes out to 25% of the distance between the "average" jaguar and the top jaguar. This gives the jaguar a weight of ~213 lbs, which I rounded up to 225 to make up for stealing his gainz, and because it makes the raw disparity land approximately in the middle of the 124-211 range listed above. My math is fucking weird and arbitrary but it's also absolute and inarguable.
Rams @ Buccaneers: Bucs, close. What can I say? I don't think either team is good, but the Rams... Oh, the poor Rams.
Texans @ Raiders: Texans, not close. I LOVE THE TEXANS THIS YEAR BABY!!! THEY'RE COMING BACK!!!
Jets @ Packers: Packers, not close. It's the Jets.
Chiefs @ Broncos: Broncos, not close. It's the Broncos.
Bears @ 49ers: 49ers, close. I still love the Bears offense. But the 49ers are just a gooder team.
Eagles @ Colts: Eagles, close. I don't believe in either of these teams. But nothing, and I mean nothing, captures my belief less than Andrew Luck. Oh good! We ended with a Luck diss and not my dissertation on panthers.
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