1. Why shouldn’t you fret if your team loses its opener?
The last four Super Bowl champions have been no better than 9-7 the season before they won it all. For that matter, the last four Super Bowl losers have been no better than 10-6 in the previous season.
2. Why should you fret if your team loses its opener?
Since the league switched to a 16-game schedule in 1978–excluding the strike-shortened 1982 season–the winning teams on kickoff weekend are more than twice as likely to make the playoffs.
3. Even if San Francisco players don’t rack up wins, what will they collect?
Lots and lots of frequent-flier miles. The 49ers have been upgraded to platinum this season, considering they’ll fly a league-high total of 35,756 miles (including exhibition games). The Baltimore Ravens, meanwhile, will log a puny 4,650 miles, never traveling farther west than Indianapolis. Hey, didn’t Jamal Lewis run for more yards than that last season?
4. What do Chad Pennington, Giovanni Carmazzi, Chris Redman, Tee Martin, Marc Bulger and Spergon Wynn have in common?
They are the six quarterbacks selected ahead of Tom Brady in the 2000 draft. Only Pennington and Bulger are NFL starters now. Brady, the 199th pick selected by New England near the end of the sixth round, has two Super Bowl MVP trophies to go with his two rings. He is 33-12 as a starter (73.3 percent), joining Hall of Fame members Joe Montana and Roger Staubach as the only QBs to win more than 70 percent of their first 40 starts.
5. Why shouldn’t we snicker when Baltimore’s Deion Sanders says he wants to be a head coach?
One-quarter of the 32 NFL coaches played defensive back in college or the pros: Tennessee’s Jeff Fisher, Carolina’s John Fox, Cincinnati’s Marvin Lewis, Indianapolis’ Tony Dungy, Atlanta’s Jim Mora, Denver’s Mike Shanahan, the Bears’ Lovie Smith and the New York Jets’ Herman Edwards.
There are six former quarterbacks who are coaches: San Francisco’s Dennis Erickson, Tampa Bay’s Jon Gruden, Seattle’s Mike Holmgren, Detroit’s Steve Mariucci, Oakland’s Norv Turner and Kansas City’s Dick Vermeil.
