Top 10 lame NFL excuses

10) The players aren't ready to play all four quarters in Week One. Um, well, just when the hell will they be ready? It's the best weather of the year, every team still has playoff dreams, most stadiums are sold out, and they don't half a season of car accident level collisions on their bodies. Is training camp that much of a cakewalk for veterans now, that Week One is just more preseason?

9) The quarterback doesn't know the scheme. A favorite of Favre Hags during the New York Era, this one presumes that quarterbacks aren't wildly compensated people who affect the success or failure of their teams more than any other player. If your QB doesn't know the system, your team needs a new QB.

8) The offensive line needs time to jell. Funny, but from where I'm watching, the job mostly looks to be Move And Or Maul That Guy, not Grandmaster Chess. Nate Newton was a successful lineman for many years, and he did time after making huge bank for driving a semi of pot. Let's stop pretending the job requires a Mensa Man.

7) The Wildcat Is Hard To Prepare For. Hmm, let's see. On plays where the Wildcat fails, the defense penetrates the offensive line and brings down the ball carrier before he can do something useful. Gosh, that's totally unlike any other offensive play! How could you possibly prepare for that?

6) The QB needs throws to "heat up" or "get in rhythm." What a load of Grade-A analyst manure. Plenty of QBs start fast; when they don't, it's because the defense is fresh and getting pressure. If any QB can't get untracked early, it's just a concentration problem. (And yes, I'm looking at you, Don McRibs.) Start pretending that pregame warmups matter, ok?

5) A scrambling quarterback puts so much pressure on a defense. So much so that teams with strong running QBs almost never win the Super Bowl, mostly because they get hurt and turn the ball over. Ooh, don't run the ball, Br'er Vick!

4) The home crowd made so much noise, the offense could not hear the snap count. What a lowdown, completely unprecedented dirty trick from those good-for-nothing home crowders! Why, I haven't seen such behavior since that wrestling crowd refused to stand up for the national anthem of Evil Foreign Guy, and then booed him when he yelled at them. Don't they know that every NFL team abides by a gentleman's agreement to maintain a respectful silence during opposition snap counts?

(Seriously, why does anyone use anything but silent counts now? Might as well get used to it. Besides, Road Fan ensures you might not get quiet at home, either.)

3) The wind is making it hard on the kicker / punter / quarterback. Gosh, it's like he's got to actually compensate for something, rather than just do his job in a sterile vacuum. That's totally unfair, especially since the wind isn't blowing when the other team has the ball...

2) The schedule was/is brutal. Here's a crackpot theory of mine; the entire world has the same weather. It's just a matter of severity. Where I live, in central New Jersey, it sucks routinely; humidity is a constant, it rains a lot, there are a million bloodsucking insects and I miss Northern California palpably.

On the other hand, there (probably) isn't going to be a major and massive earthquake in my lifetime that could destroy my home and kill me or my loved ones. So the weather, all over the world, is the same, because in all of the really nice places, there's some mind-bogglingly bad weather.

The schedule is the same. Last year, Pittsburgh was suppose to have the very worst schedule in the history of life, the universe, and everything; it hurt them so badly that they won the Super Bowl.

1) The fans are too negative. This one is the special burden of Philly Fan, who not only gets to eat the turd sammich that has been the last (gulp) 48+ years without a championship, but also that they somehow deserve it by not clapping for Tinkerbell.

Let's just state this for the record: a team's fan base has almost no impact on the performance of a team. If this was not the case, there's no way the Niners would have that many Super Bowl titles, or for the beyond intense Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo fans to be shut out. So please, for the love of simple human decency, stop blaming the victim here..