Dallas Cowboys Will Beat the Minnesota Vikings, Thanks to Brett Favre

Here is a last-minute football prediction for you: In the game dubbed by many as the Panic Bowl between the 1-3 Dallas Cowboys and the 1-3 Minnesota Vikings, the Cowboys will beat the odds, the crowd and the Vikes.

That's right. You heard it hear last: The Cowboys will win and Brett Favre will be their most valuable player.

Oh, I know. Favre is listed as a game-time decision. There is all of this drama about whether his remarkable consecutive-start streak will finally end. His elbow hurts.

Don't fall for it, folks. This is Favre being Favre. Sure, he hurts. What 41 year old playing in the National Football League doesn't hurt?

Brett will play today. He may not finish, but he will start. And that will be good enough to get the Cowboys that desperation win they have to have in order not to see their 2010 season flushed in week six.

The Cowboys will win because Brett is hurt.

Whatever else Brett Favre may be, he is a gamer. He plays when others won't. That is admirable. He has been called "a quarterback with a linebacker mentality." That he is. But that does not mean the decision to play is always the wisest decision.

Brett's elbow is hurting him. They say he has tendinitis in it. That is not a good thing. Quarterbacks need their elbows not to be nagging them with sharp pains every time they hurl the rock.

The Cowboys will win because Brett is Brett.

Brett Favre is a Cowboy. He is a rootin'-tootin' gunslinger. Watch a video montage of his greatest NFL moments and it will be replete with plays where he scrambled around, bought time, slung the ball down the field, found his man, and completed an impossible pass.

Conversely, you can put together a worst Brett Favre moments video and it will look exactly the same, except, rather than completing the pass to his teammate, he completes it to the opponent in a disastrous play that costs his team the game.

That's just Favre.

The Cowboys, I know, do not have a ball-hawking defense. For all the lauding of Phillips as a talent-evaluator and defensive coordinator, he has a assembled a defense that can make big plays, but never forces a turnover. They never give their offense a short field and an easy score.

Today, they will not have to force anything. They will just have to be standing somewhere in the vicinity when Favre does.

The Cowboys will win because Brett is old.

Brett Favre, like all good narcissists (aka, great players who just cannot walk away), won't leave well enough alone. He keeps thinking he has one last hurrah in him. He thinks he will win that second ring this time.

He is wrong. He doesn't have it in him and he won't win any more rings. Brett is finally breaking down. Sure, he can still sling the ball like few ever have, but his body does not snap back from the pounding and the general grind of an NFL game week to week like it once did.

The NFL is no country for old men.

Brett shouldn't play today, but he will. Because of that, the Cowboys will defeat the Vikings.

Thanks, Brett.