In case you haven’t been following, I’ve had a bit of a fascination this NFL season with my theory of the Thursday Night Football Quarterback Curse. Basically, with the exception of Thanksgiving and maybe two or three lone performances, every QB that has played on Thursday this season has either been lackluster or just flat out awful. Many of us expected that to change last week when Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos played the Oakland Raiders, but he was just good enough to win.

While actual NFL players and more intense fans might say the fact that he won is all that matters, some of us depend on a little more from these guys for fantasy football. That means Manning only netted us between 13 and 20 points, which made us sad. At least our supermodel girlfriends were there to organize threeways to comfort us.

Can Nick Foles and Andy Dalton snap this incredible trend? Probably. We don’t expect it from them, so they’d be the best candidates. But I hope not, because it’s more fun to believe that a mystical force is making QBs suck.

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If somebody tried to pull off this trade in a fantasy league, the other team owners would veto it so hard. The Oakland Raiders and the Cincinnati Bengals are close to a deal that would send Carson Palmer to Oakland for a first round pick in 2012 and a conditional pick in 2013.

It makes a lot of sense. Jason Campbell broke his collarbone and Andy Dalton has been better than Cam Newton, whether you’ve noticed it or not. Cincinnati is giving a new starting QB to a team it could be competing against for a playoff spot or in the postseason. The Raiders are giving up two high picks for a guy who’s been holding out, hasn’t been great for a while and has an arm that can go from John Elway to Steve Urkel in a heartbeat. ESPN notes that “both sides believed it to be a gamble worth taking”, which is funny, because I was hoping they’d made the trade ironically.

Palmer was willing to restructure his contract, which would pay him $6.9 million for the balance of this season, sources said. The Raiders have about $6 million left under the cap.

The next step for the Bengals should be for owner Mike Brown to hire a General Manager to make the picks for him. The next step for the Raiders should be printing up a few black and silver “quitter” jerseys. You know, just in case.

Welcome to Week 2 of my new weekly Random NFL Thoughts installment. Feel free to join in the conversation in the comments, even if to tell me how completely wrong I am.

If you have the pleasure of following Indianapolis Colts GM Jim Irsay on Twitter, then you know two things – 1) He’s a huge music fan, and 2) He’s possibly a lunatic. Irsay has a tendency of Tweeting random song lyrics in a way that the average person – and especially the average Twitter user – might not catch on to very well, if they even get him at all. In the case of the latter, he comes across as a complete psychopath.

But in between those lyrical Tweets, he openly talks about Colts football with fans, and since the lockout ended, the only topic regarding Indy football has been Peyton Manning’s neck. By all accounts, the guy who just signed a contract that guarantees him close to $100 million over the rest of his career will not be ready for Week 1. Manning hasn’t seen a snap in the preseason, but that should’t really be a problem for one of the game’s elite QBs if he’s actually going to start the season opener. He can just kick off the rust and run with it. Either way, Irsay wants to f*ck with us.

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Detroit Lions tackle Ndamukong Suh is no stranger to trading paycheck money for Blitz: The League 2-style necksnapping and ballpopping. The league fined him $7,500 for his hit on Jake Delhomme and 15K for his forearm strike (or “two-hand shiver”) to the back of Jay Cutler’s sad head.

Friday night’s game between the Lions and the Cincinnati Bengals happened, and Suh did not react kindly to Richie Cunningham in the pocket. Take a look for yourself.

The NFL hasn’t released any official statement on the hit or the fine, but Ndamukong’s Twitter update has given us an important clue. See if you can figure it out.

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