Looking back now it seems like only a couple weeks since the Super Bowl, dreading the monotony of the off-season. Yet here we are only a week away from the start of pre-season games! Not including the silly Hall of Fame Game on the 3rd.

The pre-season games this year will give new and old players alike the chance to hone their presumption skills before the real season begins and it will give us here at NFLFurs a chance to try out a new prediction format to reduce our manual data entry and increase accuracy. The core will stay the same; you're still picking winners just not in the journal itself anymore.

Before that though I want to try to get a head count of who all may be interested in participating this year. Commenting in this journal does not gain you access to "season 2" nor does it preclude you, I just want to see how many players I might be looking at this season. Last season there were a total of 19 entrants though on average it was only 12-14 per week. This year we want to up the stakes; if, by the end of the regular season we have at least 25 full-time players (for this to be achieved each of the 25 need to have participated in at least 75% of the season, that's 192 games of 256) there will be a prize for the best record at the end of the Regular Season, likely a gift card to, say, the NFL.com store. If we can achieve 40 players then the Playoffs winner will also be in the running for something nice. There are still absolutely no monetary contributions required from you guys and there never will be.

So leave a comment if you think you'd like to participate this year, and tell your furry football friends if they haven't joined already! We'll have another journal up before the first pre-season games.