Yahoo! Sports Takes the Release of the NFL Schedule Way Too Seriously

The 2009 NFL season is still five months off, but, as always, a steady diet of draft coverage has kept football relevant among the many sports media outlets.

And in a day and age when keeping up with the Jonses is the name of the game, those outlets continually battle to one up each other, even if it means tirelessly covering topics that hold no entertainment value of any kind.

Enter Yahoo! Sports, an emerging player in the world of diluted sports print journalism, which has followed the likes of ESPN by analyzing the piss out of the newly released NFL schedule.

Who has the so-called most difficult schedule? Which team is guaranteed at least 12 wins?

Who really gives a shit?

The truth is, in an era of the NFL when any team can go from divisional bottom-feeder to wild-card Super Bowl champ overnight, such projections are essentially meaningless.

But that didn’t stop Yahoo! from trying. Among the biggest winners of the schedule’s release? Tom Brady and Terrell Owens, of course. Brady is expected to arise from his offseason of weddings and being dragged around by his Johnson to lead the immortal Pats to another championship run, while T.O. is allegedly prepared for a breakout season even though the Bills don’t have a quarterback worthy of being named an NFL starter.

Oddly enough, however, when it  came to picking one of the schedule’s biggest losers, Yahoo! turned on its partner-in-crime. It chided ESPN for ruthlessly ridiculing the defenseless (and offense-less) Lions and throwing the league’s first winless team under the bus during the network’s schedule special.

The network’s duo of Trey Wingo and Merril Hoge verbally flushed the Lions down the toilet every chance they got during ESPN’s schedule-release special. After awhile, it just came off as crass and unfunny. For what it’s worth, ESPN’s analysts chalked up losses for most of Miami’s games in the network’s 2008 schedule show, too.