When baseball antagonized fans with the '94 strike, the sport eventually recovered by juicing baseballs and becoming more lenient with performance-enhancing drugs. And by "lenient," I mean "ignoring them entirely, even as head sizes swelled and sluggers grew quintupleceps." Football's situation isn't nearly as bleak — heading into the 2012 season's first weekend, the NFL remains as popular as ever — but still, the league has never faced anything as potentially damaging as concussions. (I wrote about this topic last April and won't rehash my thoughts here.) If the 32 owners wanted to distract fans the way baseball did, they would probably take the following four steps.

1. Allow their arrogant commissioner to bestow himself with unprecedented power without any real checks and balances.

Oh wait, they did that! Roger Goodell can do whatever he wants. It's amazing. He changes the rules as he goes along like he's the Bachelor Pad producer or something. If the NFL's commissionership worked like the American presidency, can you imagine the attack ads that Goodell's competitor could run during the 2012 election?

Roger Goodell looked the other way with concussions for years and years and years. (SHOW A DAMAGING VIDEO FROM 2008.) Now he cares? (SHOW A VIDEO FROM 2011 THAT MAKES HIM LOOK LIKE A TOTAL HYPOCRITE.)

Would there be an easier incumbent candidate to topple? After the way he handled this Saints debacle, I'm seriously starting to wonder if he's the worst sports commissioner of my lifetime. And that would be saying something because (a) Gary Bettman ran a league in my lifetime, (b) Larry O'Brien ran the NBA while being in a coma, and (c) again, Gary Bettman ran a league in my lifetime.

2. Pull a Joe McCarthy and scapegoat a signature team for being "too violent," whether they have enough evidence or not, just to prove that they're taking things seriously now and stuff.

Oh, wait, they did that, too. (Cut to everyone in New Orleans nodding.)

3. Lowball their officials even though the league makes billions of dollars — literally, billions and billions of dollars — and bring in a slew of inferior replacements so writers, bloggers and talking heads will waste millions of hours venting about shoddy officiating and how "THE LEAGUE NEEDS TO DO SOMETHING!!!"

Oh, wait, they did that, too! I mean … there can't possibly be any other explanation for lowballing your officials when they make a pittance compared to your overall profits and the well-being of your players, right? If Starbucks baristas ever went on strike, would Starbucks respond by saying, "Let's just throw homeless people behind the counter" instead of just increasing their pay from $10 an hour to $12? But that's the thing — it's such a stupid game plan, it HAS to be a distraction. That's the only explanation.

4. Execute their version of "juicing the balls" by doing everything possible to ensure that "5,000 passing yards is the new 4,000" and maybe even have one of their stars flirt with 6,000 yards this season.

Hmmmmmmmmm. I never considered this angle until Sports Illustrated's Peter King wrote about the faint possibility of a 6,000-yard season … but it's pretty shrewd, right? How could the league help us get there? By subtly changing contact rules so only truly talented defensive backs can actually cover somebody. By protecting quarterbacks in the pocket to comical degrees. By overreacting with a massive fine every time a defensive back can't change the trajectory of a tackle at the last possible split second as a receiver is ducking, making all the defensive backs so gun-shy that every game turns into a faster version of the Pro Bow— Oh, wait, they've done all of those things!

Was it intentional? Was there a genuine strategy here? Or am I stringing together circumstantial evidence and running with it like Oliver Stone did in JFK? The answer, clearly, is the latter. And yet, that's going to be the outcome — this was already a Quarterback's League, but now it's a Quarterback's League to a comical degree. And ultimately, 13 of them will decide what happens in the 2012 NFL season. Let's count them down from 13 to 1.

(And no, I'm not including Tony Romo just because he looked good on Wednesday night. You can't make me. I'm betting on Dallas's rug-pooping track record these last 15 years over two good Romo quarters against some third-string DBs. If the Romocoaster comes back to haunt me, so be it.)

13. Peyton Manning

I wanted to leave him off, I fully expected to leave him off, and yet I couldn't leave him off. Even the chance of him morphing back into the old Manning has to be this season's most compelling football story. (Sorry, Every Network Trying To Cram The Jets' Backup QB Down Our Throats.) In my West Coast fantasy auction on Tuesday night, I threw Manning out for two bucks and the room went silent — nobody knew what to expect. He ended up going for eight bucks. Was it a steal? Was it like setting eight bucks on fire? Nobody knew.

The case against Manning's 2012 revival: Shouldn't we worry that he's throwing the ball just about as well as he did two seasons ago, before spinal fusion surgery nearly ended his career … you know, when he submitted his worst season in 12 years and secretly wasn't that good? Or that a man of routine — someone who spent his entire career in the same city, with a stable supporting cast and coaching system, with a weatherproof dome for home games — suddenly got uprooted to a West Coast team that plays outdoors? Or that there's a big difference between Marvin Harrison in his prime, Reggie Wayne in his prime … and Eric "Why the Hell Are You Taking Me So High In Your Fantasy Draft" Decker? Or that no 35-and-over QB truly carried a contender's offense with one exception (Brett Favre with the 2010 Vikings, who was playing indoors with Adrian Peterson flanking him), but Manning would genuinely have to carry the 2012 Broncos for them to accomplish anything? Or that even Manning, at one point, believed there wasn't any way he could actually make it back?

If Manning does regain his old form (or most of it), that would have to rank among the most incredible comebacks in recent sports history. Judy Battista's recent story about him banged that point home: Not only was Manning struggling to throw a basic spiral, his shame led him to play secret games of catch with college friends who weren't even football players. The guy had to think he was done, right? So it's hard not to get swept up in this comeback. I include myself — a die-hard Pats fan and Brady Kool-Aid drinker who sports-hated the Manning brothers so much at one point that I even started rooting against Danieal Manning just out of principle. I missed rooting against Peyton last year, and if you want to know the truth,...