7. Thanksgiving football. No disrespect to the Pilgrims and Native Americans who sat down back in the day to share roasted turnips, but let's not kid ourselves: For all practical purposes, modern-day Thanksgiving is more about professional football than it is any symbolic gesture of shared face-stuffing. The NFL has claimed Thanksgiving as its own.

What this means, NFL fans, is that not only is Super Bowl Sunday a holiday in itself, but we've also pretty much taken over Thanksgiving, so we've got two major national holidays where we are actually expected to watch football. Yeah. Be jealous, fans of any other sport in the world.

6. "The League" on FX. From what I understand, "The League" is being drubbed in the ratings by infomercials for giant cupcake makers, and that's a shame. It's a funny show. It's not re-writing television history or anything, but it's funny, it's filthy and it revolves around fantasy football. What more could you ask for in a TV show?

Do me a favor, and go watch an episode or two for free on Hulu. At the very least, check out this 79-second clip (a naughty language warning applies for either link) demonstrating how a child's birthday party can actually be useful for fantasy football purposes.

5. Twitter. I know a lot of you hate Twitter. You think it's part of the dumbing down of America. You think it's for 13-year-old girls telling each other that they just saw Zac Efron in a magazine with his shirt off. You are wrong, and you are missing out.

Open up a Twitter account, and you can get updates from NFL writers, bloggers, reporters, rumor guys, beat reporters, players, official team websites, NFL employees and John Stamos. If you're ignoring it as a possible supplement to your NFL information stream, you're cheating only yourself.

4. Movin' the Chains. The entire SIRIUS NFL Radio channel is awesome, but this show in particular, every weekday from 3 pm - 7 pm ET, raises the bar for sports radio. I don't know if other guys just don't know as much, or they aren't willing to share as much, but Tim Ryan and Pat Kirwan bring the X's and O's like no one else. Listen to one show -- even one hour of one show -- and I promise you that when you're done, you'll know more about the game and the players who play it than you did before you started.

3. The quarterback play in '09. Good quarterback play is what makes the difference between okay games and great games, and the quarterback position right now is better and deeper today than it's ever been in NFL history. There's no doubt in my mind about that.

There are five guys right now with QB ratings over 100, and if that holds, it would be an NFL record. There are seven other guys with ratings over 90. Let's take a look at how that's progressed over the last 30 years. Ten years ago, we had one guy over 100 (Kurt Warner(notes)), and four others at 90 or better (Steve Beuerlein, Jeff George(notes), Peyton Manning(notes) and Brad Johnson(notes)). Twenty years ago, we had one guy over 100 (Joe Montana) and just two others over 90 (Boomer Esiason and Jim Everett). Thirty years ago, we had just one guy over 90 (Roger Staubach) and no one close to 100. Forty years ago, no one got out of the 80s.

We are witnessing the golden age of quarterbacking, right now. Breathe it in. It's the best time in history to be an NFL fan.

2. Rich Eisen and the NFL crew. The gold standard in sports is still Ernie Johnson and the TNT NBA crew, but if there's one group that comes close, it's Rich Eisen and the NFL Network gang. That's the best way I know how to compliment them.

They've got strong personalities in Michael Irvin, Deion Sanders and Warren Sapp(notes), and Eisen just knows how to pull it all together. He knows when to step into the background, when to rein in a conversation, and how to make the set feel like a group of knowledgeable cats just sitting around and talking about something they love. Of all the studio shows, the NFL Network's has the least ego, mugging for the cameras and artificial laughter. It's a breath of fresh air compared to the rest.

1. Today's mobile phone technology. I don't want to pimp for any particular phone company, and obviously, a lot of the phones today do a lot of the same things. But this is my first NFL season with an iPhone, and I'm finding it to be magical. I can do things from my phone that I wouldn't have thought possible even four or five years ago. It's truly baffling, and I'm not sure it's something that we, as a society, even deserve.

I can do all of the following: get constant live updates on my fantasy team, make last-minute lineup changes if I'm already at the bar and Chris Mortensen has some last-minute news, wager small amounts of candy on the outcomes of games, get any stat at any time, listen to radio broadcasts of games, actually watch games at a very acceptable level of quality with the DirecTV app, play Madden, and read the Twitter updates of dozens and dozens of NFL people I like and respect.

I made that list without even thinking about it. There has to be a dozen other useful NFL-related things you can do, too, many I probably don't even know about. I find it incredibly useful when I'm at a bar and sitting in front of eight televisions. Should I happen to get stranded away from televisions on some Sunday, I can't even imagine how useful I'd find it.

Related: NFL League Issues