What Will the NFL Look Like in the Future?

The 2013 NFL season hasn't even officially started, but why not look ahead?

What will the NFL look like down the road? Six months from now, who will we be talking about? What will happen a year from now, as we await another year of glorious football?

Beyond that, what might the NFL landscape look like in five or 10 years? Will we be greeting our robot overlords in 25? 

Click through to find out. All of these predictions will come true.*

*Probably none of these predictions will come true.

In Six Months...

Six months from now, we will be lathered about Jadeveon Clowney and the 2014 draft class while Andre Johnson takes the Lombardi Trophy on vacation.

Aaron Rodgers will be polishing his second MVP trophy while Tom Brady wins another Offensive Player of the Year award. J.J. Watt won't mind putting his second Defensive Player of the Year trophy up alongside his first.

The league's top rookie, Giovani Bernard, will be looking up at DeAndre Hopkins for the Offensive Rookie of the Year in a controversial decision. The defensive side will be an easier decision after Jonathan Cyprien does his best impression of Ed Reed down in Jacksonville.

Tim Tebow will be gearing up for his AFL debut with the Jacksonville Sharks, and ESPN will cover it.

Fans will be clamoring for the new league year to open up. With free agency on the horizon, false reports will start trickling in via social media. They will continue to fool some fans.

One Year from Now...

Even though anticipation for a new NFL season seems higher than it's ever been, we will sit here a year from now with an even hotter fever. The only cure is more football.

Rex Ryan will be the new defensive coordinator for the Dallas Cowboys after Monte Kiffin's retirement due to being 73 years old...or at least that's how Jerry Jones will frame it. 

The Patriots will be gearing up for perhaps their final run with Tom Brady and Bill Belichick. Peyton Manning will have announced his retirement following the end of the 2014 season, giving us all something to fawn over for the ensuing six months.

Teddy Bridgewater will be gearing up for his first NFL start with the Oakland Raiders. Jadeveon Clowney will be doing the same for the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Five Years from Now...

The NFL landscape will look almost dystopian compared to today's. Future Hall of Famers will actually be close to eligibility. Guys like Tom Brady, Peyton Manning and even Drew Brees will be out of the league, having finally handed the mantle to today's younger generation.

New England will collapse upon itself into a singularity without Brady or head coach Bill Belichick. Like The Empire, they will have had a nice run, only to be overrun by the rebels—or age, in this case.

The new kings in the NFL? That would be the Indianapolis Colts, in a reprisal of their dominance from a decade ago. What can we say? They got Luck-y.

Indianapolis' archnemesis won't be New England, per the details above. That would be the Seattle Seahawks, who will have wrested control of the NFC West from the 49ers, though the struggle was constant.

The worst team in the league? Still the Raiders. Al Davis' ghost continues to roam the halls of the Coliseum. 

10 Years from Now...

We're getting into true soothsayer territory here. Will the NFL even be around in 10 years? After the massive concussion litigation was settled out of court—pending judge approval, at any rate—it seems the NFL will dodge a silver bullet.

So what will it look like 10 years from now? Will it turn into a flag football league? Will we have an 18-game season? 

Kickoffs will be outlawed, as will hitting the quarterback in any way. Cornerbacks will now be required to give receivers 10 yards of cushion.

A decade from now, Andrew Luck will have more rings than Peyton Manning did with the Colts. The Rams will be in Los Angeles, and the Vikings will have moved closer to their homeland, crossing the pond to land in London. Jacksonville will have sunk into the ocean because of global warming.

The NFL will fully embrace technology like we haven't seen since it began televising games. Chips will be implanted into footballs that will communicate with a network of high-speed cameras, ensuring human error is all but eliminated.

25 Years from Now...

"In the year 3000..."

Like the fabled Nintendo game, Base Wars, football battles will be waged by groups of murderous robots.

Jerry Jones will use experimental technology to steal the youth from his coach, Tim Tebow. He will unwittingly steal his virgin mojo.

Roger Goodell will reveal he is vampire king of the Underworld. Tebow is now powerless to defeat him.

Football broadcasts will be beamed directly into our brains via implanted microchip.

Alright, that's more like 50 years away, but 25 years is a long time of evolution for a game that has come a long way in the past 25 seasons.

The game will likely look significantly different than it does today. We might not have drastic rule changes like an additional player on the field or the use of enchanted broomsticks, but a series of small changes will seem big after 25 years.

Perhaps the football field will be a slightly different size. Maybe the league will go without helmets in an attempt to prevent players from launching themselves at each other.

Whatever it looks like, we'll still be watching.

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