News item: It's official: The wise guys like New England.

According to Antigua-based sportsbook Bodog.com, the odds to win next year's Super Bowl have fluctuated wildly -- and in the direction of Foxboro -- since the Colts walked away with the Lombardi Trophy in February. New England has gone from being the fourth-most-likely team to win Super Bowl XLII in Glendale, Ariz., next February to the most likely. This table shows the teams with the best odds to win it all as of last week, per Bodog.com, and how the Super Bowl odds have fluctuated for those teams since Indy's win:

Observation one: If I'm Tony Dungy, I have my perfect pre-training-camp speech. "No one thinks we're going to win it again,'' he could say. "All you did last year was answer every challenge, and all our major pieces are still in place, and we had a great draft. And the oddsmakers start you at 6-1 to win the Super Bowl, drop you to 7-1 and now you're 8-1? If that isn't the biggest lack of respect I've ever seen, I don't know what is.''

Observation two: 2-1 odds for the Patriots? In this sport in which two injuries can kill a season? I can see 4-1, maybe. But the Patriots still are old at linebacker, might be thin at running back if Laurence Maroney can't be the horse that he's expected to be, and then there's Randy Moss.

I talked to a GM last Friday who knows Moss well. "I'll tell you what'll happen to Moss early on in New England," he said. "Two or three safeties, early in the season, are going to come and try to knock Moss' block off. He doesn't like to get hit, you know. And teams will learn that the way to make Randy very ineffective is to knock the crap out of him early in games.''

Observation three: The betting line suggests it would be three times as unlikely that San Diego would win the Super Bowl as New England. And man, that is nuts. Just nuts. If I were a betting man, I'd pick New England right now. But by a small margin over Indy and the Chargers. Not by a landslide.

News Item: Michael Vick is in increasingly warm water.

I have very little to add to the report by a Virginia TV station that up to 70 dogs -- some of them injured in ways that suggest they were used for dog-fighting -- were found on Vick's property.

We'll let the investigation take shape here, but Vick faces the prospect of a suspension if he is complicit in a ring that trains dogs to fight each other. That's not to say a suspension is certain, but NFL commissioner Roger Goodell will be under tremendous pressure from animal-rights activists (he's already received a letter from the Humane Society of the United States) and plain, decent human beings everywhere to suspend Vick if he's into pit-bull fighting. And if Vick is tangibly involved, he deserves the suspension.