My Final NFL Pick of the 2021-22 Season ...

... is the Bengals to beat the Rams in the Super Bowl.

There's no underlying data to support this pick. I haven't even looked at stats, and my understanding on casual notice is that those stats fairly heavily support a Rams victory prediction.

I'm not going big here. I've got the Bengals at 53% to win.

Why pick the Bengals at all? Three reasons that don't make any sense as a way of producing rational predictions:

1. I hate the fucking Rams. I hate them with a passion. They screwed over my former hometown, St. Louis, leaving in violation of their contractual obligations after the area's taxpayers built them a beautiful domed stadium, because the area's taxpayers declined to build them another beautiful domed stadium before the first one was paid off. Fuck them.
2. I've just got a gut feeling that the game is going to be an all-out quarterback duel and that Josh Burrow is going to out-class Matthew Stafford.
3. My neighbor -- the one who died last week -- was a Bengals fan. Our last conversation was me letting her know which network to turn her hospital TV to to watch the AFC championship. I was pulling for the Chiefs, of course, but I'm glad she got to see her team win a spot in the Super Bowl right before things went downhill in a big way. And if there's an afterlife and, and if that afterlife comes with an NFL Season Pass cable package, I'd like her to be able to watch them win the game.

For the season and post-season up to now, I've got a cumulative score of 83.3 points in FiveThirtyEight's NFL forecasting game, putting me in the 61st percentile among all players. The outcome of the Super Bowl will change that score by a gain of 5.8 points if the Bengals win and a loss of 6.2 points if the Rams win, and that probably won't change my percentile performance much.