The NFL Previewed in Song, Part VII: The NFC North

Welcome back to our preview of the NFL, which today is moving on to the NFC North, a frozen wasteland roamed by three dangerously explosive offensive teams and also the Vikings.

Few people know what it's like to have the weight of an entire town on their shoulders the way Aaron Rodgers does. Green Bay's most famous product is its football team, and Rodgers is the quarterback and most important player on that football team. That means that when he gets injured, like he did last year, the season is lost and Wisconsin winters get that much darker and colder. With him, the Packers are a Super Bowl contender who can steamroll lesser teams and hang 35 or 40 points on the scoreboard with grim regularity. Without him, they're just another humdrum 7-9 team that only fantasy owners looking for running backs care about.

This pressure may be why Rodgers looks so dang bummed out all the time. Most top-tier quarterbacks have a recognizable personal style: Peyton Manning shouts orders to his teammates and gestures with his hands like he's directing traffic on the deck of an aircraft carrier, Tom Brady has that evil-jock competitive streak that's on display every time he screams at a call that went against him, Philip Rivers is basically a child who's thrilled at every completion and throws a joyous tantrum every time he wins, Drew Brees glows with Pepsi-commercial charisma… Rodgers, on the other hand, slices apart defenses with the workmanlike efficiency of a door-to-door salesman demonstrating that, yes ma'm, these knives really can cut bread that smoothly. And like that salesman, there's a hint of unhappiness floating around Rodgers, as if he's thinking about something else, some gruesome-but-necessary chore that has fallen to him.

When he goes through his reads, he looks like he's compiling a grocery list in his head. As he throws, his face acquires the mask-like sheen of a career bureaucrat. After games, he looks either wistfully contemplative or devastated by some personal loss. In his official headshot on ESPN, he has the slightly pinched, forced look of a man with far too much on his mind who has been ordered to smile. It's always problematic to psychoanalyze celebrities and athletes from afar, so let's say that Rodgers is probably not actually unhappy with his lot in life—he might have the male version of bitchy resting face or be more naturally guarded than his QB contemporaries.

But whatever is going on in his head, there's no denying that Rodgers never looks like he's having fun, even when he's winning, which he usually is. OK, here we go, again. Take the snap, look off the safety, OK, fine, he's moving, the slot route is good, throw the ball, yadda yadda yadda, catch, first down. Christ, what a day. How many more first downs to go before a touchdown? At least three… Damn. And so much time left on the clock. Fuck this day man. Screen pass, fine, whatever—another first. I wonder if I need to get groceries on the way home.

Hey, whatever works.

Prediction: 11-5

-Harry Cheadle

Grizzly Bear's "Two Weeks" was the song that put the band over the edge in terms of gaining widespread acclaim and appreciation. It was the song that made it possible to jump from playing small clubs to selling out Radio City Music Hall. It's a song about longing, and patience, and it's unabashedly gorgeous. It's pretty Chicago Bears, too.

Bears fans have patiently longed for their team to join the 21st century NFL by acquiring an offense that can throw the football around with precision. Part of the problem was the subpar quarterbacks the team trotted out year after year. Then there was the team's history of horrendous wide receivers. When the team had a quarterback worth writing home about, they didn't have a decent receiving corps, and vice versa. But, like the beautiful "Whoa-oh-oh" harmonies that pepper the Grizzly Bear track, the Bears finally have the same sort of synchronization that Ed Droste and Daniel Rossen do on stage or in the recording studio. Jay Cutler is, simply and objectively, the best quarterback to ever call Soldier Field home and Brandon Marshall the best wideout to honor George Halas on his jersey's sleeve. In ten years, Alshon Jeffery may be considered Marshall's superior. Combine them with Matt Forte, Martellus Bennett, an athletic offensive line, and another year of the TrestCoast offense devised by bespectacled mad genius Marc Trestman, and—for the first time since Sid Luckman—the Bears will be putting up serious points on defenses. Their defense was atrocious last season, but the team invested a lot in free agency and the draft to improve it. They'll probably still end up in a few too many "first one to 30 wins" games to make a legit Super Bowl run, but sitting at the top of the NFC North after Week 17 and looking at a home playoff game is in the realm of possibility. Watching the Bears used to be a routine malaise, to coin a phrase. Now it's anything but.

Prediction: 11-5

-David Matthews

There aren't enough rappers out here trying to have more feelings than anyone else. The Diplomats are famous for Cam'ron's goofy savant dick-suck couplets, the Heatmakerz's chintzy brilliance, and a penchant for bold sartorial choices, but not enough is made of the Harlem crew's mastery of action-movie melancholy. What makes their sensitive thug songs affecting isn't that they're actually sad—genuine sadness is watching Jim Jones coked out of his dome as a guest host on Rap City—but that they perform sadness in the same cartoonish way other Dipset tracks flaunt aggression and ego. Jim Jones's "My Diary," for instance, is a sledgehammer made of stage tears.

The NFL is decidedly in favor of metaphorical sledgehammers. You never watch a broadcast and wonder if the league has a crush on America or if Broncos-Patriots is indeed a clash of titans. It's curious, then, that the Detroit Lions have been criticized over the years for being too amped and not disciplined enough. The wild asshole antics of Ndamukong Suh seem more in line with what the NFL is selling than, say, Russell Wilson's pristine dweebery. You can't have it both ways, Goodell: Either your league is an Iron Maiden T-shirt or it's golf with tackling. The former seems truer to what football actually is.

Perhaps this will change under the stewardship of not-Jim Schwartz, but the Lions were (and, God willing, will continue to be) gloriously unhinged. The Platonic ideal of a Lions game is a 37-35 comeback win in which the defense racks up 80 yards of boneheaded penalties, Matt Stafford gunslings two first-half interceptions, and Calvin Johnson has 28 targets. If the Lions finally live up to their potential this season like a whip-smart but drug-abusing teen who straightens himself out and goes on to become a boring doctor, we will have lost a team whose emotions are so intense that they actively interfere with their objectives. And there aren't enough football teams out here trying to have more feelings than anyone else. Stay Lioning, Lions.

Prediction: 8-8

-Colin McGowan

The workhorse running back is nearly a relic. That's probably for the best, since running back is a position that, much of the time, involves taking the ball and getting slammed to the turf two seconds later. To divide taking the ball and getting slammed to the turf duties among two or three players seems a sensible move, both for the athletes, who would prefer to be able to walk when they're 50, and for the teams, who would like to keep their employees upright in the near term.

Adrian Peterson is anomalously old school. He carries the load like few other modern backs and is something of a guilty pleasure because of that. One fears for his future well-being, but man, is it fun to watch him run over, through, and around 240-pound men who are trying to kill him. While the passing game has some impenetrable magic to it, in the way receivers bamboozle defenders and quarterbacks spin the ball into tight spaces, running the ball is relatively easy to grasp. There's a hole of some meager size. The back's job is to burst through it and meet whatever violence lurks on the other side. Or sometimes there's no hole at all, and the violence floods the backfield. Adrian Peterson is about as good as anyone ever has been at navigating this violence. He even dishes out some of his own, on occasion.

That the Vikings have been habitually mediocre during Peterson's career lends his dominance an existential bent. Minnesota's incompetence is held up as an indicator that "you can't win in today's NFL relying only on a great running back." And sure, that's true, but it misses the point. Peterson is not an instrument wanting for a greater purpose. The purpose is the dude himself, tap dancing atop a riptide, giving a stampede the forearm shiver. He's runnin' up that proverbial hill, and the hill is a little too steep. So what? It's remarkable, and we might not see anything like it again. Lots of worthwhile stories don't have happy endings.

Prediction: 6-10

-Colin McGowan