Oh, I completely agree with the what is/what we think thing. There are surprises every year, and one thing that has been proven time and again is that you cannot accurately judge schedule difficulty in advance. You can only use it as a statistic after the fact, once you know how all your opponents "shook out" that year.
As it looks now, though...Bah.[/quote\]
A good example of that is last years schedule for the Niners. When the schedule was being made everyone expected the Rams and Vikings to be cream puffs' ala leaving the Niners games at 10:00am. They didn't risk the Packers or Patriots games and moved the Niners out of those early starts. The end result was the Niners lost to both the cream puffs and won against both GB and NE. Consider if the Niners had to play even one of GB or NE at 10:00am, we would have been the #2 seed.
All that said the thing that bothers me the most is I cannot help but think if the roles were reversed and the Niners were playing Atlanta instead of us, the NFL would have moved that game out of the 10:00am start time. Don't know if it would have helped if they would have played on that Fedex field and lost key players or Gore sprained his ankle like Lynch did but I have no doubt that Atlanta game would not have been an early game.
Unfortunately they are the more profitable team and until we can create a similar fan base and sell merchandise and advertising the way the Niners do we won't get a fair shake. Hopefully Pete and John can overcome this and help us to build a fan base so we aren't the red headed step children of the NFL any longer. Sure would be nice to play in a super bowl where the top story afterwords isn't about the officiating.
