Go ahead. You figure out the National Football League.

Pour over the depth charts, injury charts, pie charts and psychological charts. Let me know when you’ve got the whole thing licked. Then tell me who’s going to win Super Bowl XXXVIII so I can begin planning my strategy in the opposite direction.

Pro football is logically bankrupt, and anyone still stupid enough to wager this month’s mortgage money based on some suit-and-tie guy’s “Lock of the Year” deserves to lose his officially licensed shirt.

Full disclosure: Now that I’m on the wrong side of 30, swimming around in various sports pools is one of my few remaining vices, in part because it doesn’t (directly, at least) affect my blood pressure. They’re all not-for-profit ventures headquartered at 104 Park Street and connected either to the NFL or the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

If I were to win one weekly NFL pool, it would pay for the entire year’s activity. It also would be a miracle.

Let’s go, smart guy. Convince me that any of this week’s 14 match-ups is a sure thing.

You say the Patriots can’t miss against Vinny and the Jets? After subtracting the discarded Lawyer Milloy and the injured Rosevelt Colvin from a defense that must find a way to stop Curtis Martin, I’m about as anxious to circle the home team as I would be to spend this afternoon grooving to the entire musical catalog of The Carpenters and Celine Dion.

Kansas City over Houston is a stone-cold cinch? Hey, this is the home opener for the Texans, who were good enough to slow down Ricky Williams. His ex-college teammate, Priest Holmes, isn’t any more intimidating. Plus, His Excellency might sit this one out due to injury, so think again.

San Francisco is poised to send Cleveland to the land of 0-3? We’re talking about the Browns, a team that thrived on the road last season and in pulling out games it wasn’t supposed to win in unforgettable fashion.

Cincinnati, Arizona and Detroit look like sure pushovers? Slow down, buddy. Home field is said to be worth three points, but you can inflate that to a full touchdown in the NFL.

And on it goes. Down the list, one trap door after another.

If there has ever been a season when the self-professed outsider who “knows nothing about football” has an advantage over those of us who can calculate Jake Delhomme’s passing efficiency rating in our sleep, this one is it.

Welcome to late commissioner Pete Rozelle’s dream world. A monument to mediocrity, um, I mean parity in which the moribund have far better than a puncher’s chance against the mighty.

They even made a movie whose title touted the concept.

No, it was “Any Given Sunday,” not “Death Wish.”

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy this modern world in which the gap between the best and blandest is as thin as the Patriots’ depth at linebacker. Watching the Cowboys outlast the Giants on “Monday Night Football” was fun on two fronts. Sure, seeing the Giants uncover a new, creative way to lose brought me exquisite joy, but the main attraction was that, by then, I had absolutely zero riding on the game.

One of my fall passions is something we call the Losers Pool. Rather than a commentary on those playing the game, the name hints at its basic rules. You choose the NFL team guaranteed to lose its contest that week, and you can’t select the same team twice.

Miami wiped out two-thirds of the field in Week 1. Of the eight survivors, four went with Carolina to fall at Tampa Bay, while the others expected Cincinnati to lose royally in Oakland.

Care to guess which side of the fence I was on?

Of course, those who lived to play this week did so essentially because the Raiders could kick a field goal and the Buccaneers couldn’t boot an extra point. Hard to believe there could be such a miniscule margin between the reigning Super Bowl teams and the franchises posting the worst record in the league in 2001 (Panthers) and 2002 (Bengals).

But this is the NFL, where the landscape is much like July weather in Franklin County.

If you don’t like the way your team is playing, wait five minutes. The less you try to analyze it, the better.

And by all means, keep throwing away those $1 bills.

Kalle Oakes is sports editor and can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].