It's Complicated

It’s complicated. How else do you describe Ndamukong Suh’s time with the Lions or his relationship with Lions fans? I decided to write something – I wasn’t sure what it would be, but I knew I had to write something – about all this. I figured I’d sit down and the words would just come flowing out, but the truth is, I’m sitting here and I still don’t know what to write about. That’s because Ndamukong Suh and the era in Lions history that he came to define, is the most schizophrenic, frustrating, bipolar goddamn thing.

It started before he even played a game with the Lions. He was drafted to much fanfare, everyone declared him the savior, a once in a generation kind of talent and all that kind of over-the-top trumpeting, and why not? After all, anyone who saw him absolutely wreck the world at Nebraska could see that this was something different. This was not just a good player, nor even just a dominant player, this was a force of nature, the sort of thing usually seen in disaster movies with little Japanese people screaming and running for a cover that can’t be found. Playing against actual human beings seemed unfair. Ndamukong Suh seemed like he should be off fighting Mothra. So naturally, Lions fans were excited and ready to love him in the way that only Detroit fans can love someone.

It is a love reflective of the city, the state, a sort of wounded love that is all-embracing, protective. We know hard times, and we will love – deeply – anyone who loves us, and is willing to go through it with us. We will fight for them, turn into insane idiots for them, bark like rabid dogs at anyone who dares to fuck with them, and we will hold them close as a symbol of hope, of light in a world that everyone insists is pitch black. It’s an us against the world mentality, a mentality that it would take an entire blog post (or 50) to really explain, so let’s just say this: if you are with us, you are fucking with us, and we are with you. And we really, really wanted – needed – to be with Ndamukong Suh.

You have to remember, when he was drafted, we were still in the early stages of digging out of the wreckage of 0-16, swatting at the Millen ghosts as they flitted around our heads, chasing the Marinelli demons out of every abandoned and ruined place in our hearts. We were in a fragile place, and we needed Superman. That’s not really fair, but that’s what we needed. We needed a goddamn alien Godzilla who would fight all of our enemies, lift our spirits and save little old ladies all at the same time. It’s sappy as hell and clichéd and I am actually wincing as I write this, but damn it, we needed a hero.

And then Ndamukong Suh held out. This is not the sort of thing that heroes do. It is the sort of thing that human beings do, though, especially dudes whose professional windows are roughly the lifespan of a sickly house-fly. I said all this then, implored everyone to recognize that Ndamukong Suh was doing what he had to do for himself and his future, and that we should respect that shit, but it was too late. Sports Radio Hee-Hawers had already decided he was a selfish monster, and that was that. They needed a hero and they got a man, and they weren’t having that shit.

But sports fandom is a fickle and ridiculous thing, and at the heart of it all are two twin emotions, the yin and yang of fandom: Hope and Fear. They are what drives everything else, and I have written extensively about both over the years. Fear drove people to condemn Suh for being a “traitor” before he had even played a down. We were a fanbase beaten down by Failure and Fear, and so any sign that we were just going to get more of the same was just too much for most people, especially since 0-16 had left us with absolutely nothing in the way of emotional defenses. This had to work. We couldn’t take it if it didn’t, and so our new savior holding out was just too goddamn much. Fans wanted a dude who would run to them, who would embrace them and the team before he even thought about money. This was ridiculous and childish, but that’s what fans are, ridiculous children, and Lions fans especially were scared, ridiculous children.

But Hope is always there alongside Fear. That’s what keeps fans going even when the Fear and the Failure becomes damn near apocalyptic, and even though Fear caused people to turn on Suh early, to even fight with his sister in the baby days of Twitter (I was there, and it was ridiculous and shameful.) Hope made even the saltiest fan bury that Fear, at least temporarily, and give Ndamukong Suh a chance to be that hero anyway.

And for a moment, it seemed like he would be that hero, that Superman Godzilla, who would keep us safe, fuck up our enemies, and help us rebuild it all – our faith, our confidence, even our city as ridiculous as it sounds. He was going to be the face of the resurrection.

But the thing is, is that trying to turn anyone into a Messiah is a huge mistake. It’s just too much. But again, that’s what we needed. Lions fans were in a position no other fanbase – in any sport – has ever been in. We were broken, shattered, and we had to create ridiculous heroes, invent Messiahs, magnificent futures that had little hope of actually existing, just to get through tomorrow as fans. You can’t truly understand it unless you were there, unless you felt the weight of 0-16 and Millen and the 50 fucking years of misery and failure that had preceded even that, constantly pulling, pulling, pulling. Messiahs and Supermen and crazy dreams were the only thing pulling us in the other direction.

Suh’s first season, the Lions went 6-10, which doesn’t sound like much, but it came on the heels of a 2-14 season which itself was the birthing pains after 0-16. And that 6-10 included 4 straight wins to close the season. It was the brightest stretch we’d had as fans in a long, long time, probably going back to the Barry Sanders years. It was the first time since then we had true, genuine Hope, a belief that the future might actually be something that we could love, that we could believe in. Jim Schwartz was a young, fiery head coach who dabbled in chess on the side, and Ndamukong Suh was his avatar on the field, our avatar, something beautiful and different than the misery we’d had to put up with far too long. It was too easy to turn Myth into Reality. It was what our hearts both wanted and needed.

And then that 2011 season started with 5 straight wins, a public execution of the Bears on Monday Night Football, and holy shit, this was actually happening. Ndamukong Suh had done it. He really was our Messianic Superman Godzilla.

Game 6 that season saw the Lions lose to the 49ers and their rookie head coach, a dude named Jim Harbaugh, and after the game, Jim Schwartz went crazy over a handshake gone awry, and even though there were some warning bells going off, most of us loved that shit at the time. This was a dude with fire, with passion, and his team, led by Suh, was the same way. They’d fucking fight you. They were ours and we were theirs, and we were gonna fight everyone gang-style if need be. The thing is, that all sounds great as a metaphor. Real life . . . well . . .

Things would never be that good again. Not really. The Schwartz era unraveled – even in that lone 2011 playoff season, the Lions finished the year 5-7 – and the biggest symbol of that, much to our horror, was our very own Jesus Superman, Ndamukong Suh.

We were all there. We all saw it, and we couldn’t do anything about it. He stomped on a dude here, threw Jay Cutler around like a rag-doll there, and pretty soon, he had a Reputation. We hated it, mostly because we all knew that it was mostly bullshit. Especially at the time. The Cutler thing in particular was ridiculous. Suh was essentially punished for being too good, for being too strong, too dominant. Sure, he stomped on that Packer, but . . . uh, that was just a weird one-off thing. Yeah.

But it wasn’t, and by then it was too late. Our Doom had essentially already been pronounced and the rest of the Schwartz era was essentially a futile battle against prejudices, misconceptions and the Lions – and Suh’s – own self-destructive nature.

It wasn’t fair, especially to Suh. He was picked on by refs, singled out by jackass announcers, harassed by Sheriff Goodell and his corrupt posse, but what really bothered us – or me, anyway, but I suspect a lot of you feel the same way deep down – is that there was a core of truth to all of it. The Lions were fuckups. Suh did do dumb shit at dumb times. Yes, he was picked on. Yes, much of it was bullshit. But he knew it. We all knew it. And he still did it anyway. It’s not fair, but he had to account for that bias and he didn’t. Game over.

Of course, that also meant that he never drew any holding calls, which decreased his effectiveness. He was still dominant, but refs let offensive linemen practically tackle him on play after play, which meant that he couldn’t get home as much as he had to, as much as we needed him to, as much as both the promise of his rookie season and the promise of our wild dreams demanded.

Through it all, Lions fans never really turned on Suh. If you’re with us, you’re with us, after all. But it is also hard to truly love someone who becomes a symbol of a culture of persecution, of someone who becomes a living, breathing reminder of failed potential, of the unraveling of a future that we unfairly demanded to atone for the assorted miseries of the past. I wrote earlier that Suh was an avatar for Jim Schwartz, and that was true right up to the day Schwartz was fired. Suh was the Jim Schwartz era. It was wild, it was ridiculous, it was filled with crazy Hope and broken dreams, and along the way there were adrenaline-spiking highs that left us shaking like junkies in our living rooms and in the stands, and there were absurd lows that left us sneering with disgust and bellowing at the gods. It was beautiful and it was awful, and Ndamukong Suh was the eye at the center of the storm.

Ndamukong Suh was a great player for the Lions. He was a dominant player. He was also a flawed player, fatally flawed as it turned out. There are people who will tell you that he underachieved with the Lions, and they’re not wrong. Suh was frustrating, if only because it always seemed like he was always just a fingertip away from touching paradise, and all he needed to do was reach out and we would all touch it together. In some ways, he was a victim of his own otherworldly ability. He was too strong, too freakishly dominant, and it cost him with refs, with the league, and ultimately with public opinion, and once that damns you, it’s almost impossible to come back. But it also meant that we wondered why he couldn’t be that Jesus Superman on every single play. It wasn’t enough for him to be dominant. He had to be, well, Jesus Superman. He wasn’t. He was just a man. An exceptional one, but still, just a man.

And that man was kind of strange, mercurial and almost impossible to truly know. He wasn’t a ready-made cookie-cutter hero. He was contradictory, passionate yet oddly aloof, profoundly decent and caring yet temperamental and prone to destructive outbursts. He wanted to win so badly it made him break down in tears after the Lions were robbed against the Cowboys in the last game he’d ever play in a Lions uniform, and yet when asked why he left and signed with the Dolphins, he said it was mostly about the money.

In the end, it was just complicated. He was complicated and so was our relationship with him, the era he came to define, and our own feelings in the aftermath. It’s all just so complicated. As a fan, you wait a lifetime for someone like Ndamukong Suh to come along. We’ve been absurdly lucky to have that happen three different times as Lions fans in the last 25 years. First there was Barry Sanders, then there was Calvin Johnson and finally, there was Suh. Hell, two of them played together. There are very, very few fanbases that have ever gotten to enjoy that level of transcendent beauty, that once in a lifetime mastery of skill and the “other” that we simply we can’t describe. We got it three times. And we have one playoff win to show for it.

Shrug.

Yeah. It’s complicated.

Today, Ndamukong Suh put on a cap as a member of the Miami Dolphins for the first time, and the era he defined is over. At least symbolically. But that’s all eras really are, anyway. Symbols. His was, well, let’s say it again, complicated. Now that it’s over, those two twins, Hope and Fear, have begun to wrestle again. I’m scared of a Lions team without Ndamukong Suh because how do you replace someone like him? You can’t. You can try. Haloti Ngata is an awesome start, but he’s still not Suh. He is not an avatar for our dreams. That’s what Suh was, and now that he’s over, we have to dream new dreams. Only this time, maybe we don’t channel all those dreams into one dude, into one Jesus Superman. Maybe that’s the better way, the healthier way. Maybe this is all what needed to happen in order for us to finally get over 0-16, to move on. I don’t know. I’m just starting to ramble now, but that’s because this is . . . yeah, it’s complicated.

I will miss Ndamukong Suh. I won’t really miss the Ndamukong Suh era. I hope that makes sense. I get it if it doesn’t. I’m ready to dream a new dream. I needed to dream the Suh dream. We all did. But now we need something else, and that’s okay, I think. That’s okay. I still don’t entirely know what to say about Suh, or how to properly eulogize him now that he’s effectively dead to us as a Lion, but that’s okay too. He’s gone and that’s that.

Loving the Bad Guy

The NFL needs villains. It always has. Those Raiders teams of the ‘70s are as big a part of the fabric of the NFL’s identity as any other great team, from that era or any other. They were mythic biker renegades from the grungy part of Valhalla, sent to terrorize mortals and pistol whip squares. They were glorious, and they perfectly captured an era – dirty, long hairs with drunken love in their hearts and iron hate at the end of their fists. They were the ‘70s in all its savage, ugly, stinking beauty – decaying monsters dying even as they fought like hell to live for just one more frenetic, glorious second, human supernovae at the heart of a cultural supernova.

I’m starting to get carried away here. The point is that the NFL needs villains almost more than it needs heroes, and if you can’t tell by my rapturous intro, to some people - a lot of people – those villains are actually the heroes of the story. After all, the Cowboys were America’s team. But those Raiders were America’s team. I won’t explain what that means because you either understand completely what I’m saying, or you don’t and not even God can help you sort it out.

These days, the heroes and villains of the NFL are more sordid than ever. And that’s only all too appropriate given the strange and terrible times in which we live. No one knows who’s evil and who’s good until someone gets tossed out of an elevator unconscious. Everything is magnified and under the magnifying glass everything gets distorted, myths are laid bare and all we’re left with are bullshit narratives. It’s easy to vilify someone like Ray Rice, but it gets harder when someone like Ndamukong Suh gets busted by the Great Eye In The Sky stomping – or gently stepping, depending on your perspective and rooting interests – on a fallen Golden Boy.

Everything becomes slippery then, and that word – perspective – becomes all that matters, and when that happens, nothing really matters. You pick your sides based on what you want to believe, and really, nothing could be more fitting in this twitter age of deep tribalism and outrage for outrage’s sake than that.

But it also reinforces that weird NFL world in which heroes are villains and villains are heroes and nobody really knows what the hell is going on. That is when the NFL is both at its best and its nauseatingly worst. The noise gets turned up, Joe Buck starts hooting like a chimp on angel dust, and the only thing you’re left to conclude is that everyone is secretly an asshole or a monster, and in that decayed wasteland of the human condition, you just pick whichever monster you like best and hope he doesn’t embarrass you by maiming a loved one or, you know, deflating footballs like a coward.

And that brings us to the strange case of the New England Patriots, who exist in that sort of zombie purgatory between good and evil. Everyone hates them, and why not? They do scandalous shit that isn’t even cool, they win all the goddamn time and they have a quarterback who seems like some sort of golden ice king, untouchable and terrible, both easily mockable and somehow infallible. And the whole thing is led by some ogre in sack-cloth who holds everyone in the world, from the media to the fans to his players to his own family, in open contempt. It is a weird situation and I understand why people don’t like it. The Patriots are easy to hate, and so most people do the easy thing and hate them.

But the Patriots are fascinating to me, and I don’t hate them. I am totally biased here, largely because I am a huge Michigan dude and thus for tribal reasons, Tom Brady is my guy. That is the easy take, and you’re not wrong. But where everyone else sees a model-boning, Uggs-wearing, frost-prince, I see a dude with an almost sociopathic need to win, a heart of fire beneath the frozen surface that never stops beating, burning him up from within and making him into a psychotic jackass on the field. But he’s the good kind of psychotic jackass, I think, the kind that wins and the kind that wins simply because he has to, because he can’t not. I can respect a man like that even if nobody else does. I get it, I do. He is not an easy man to love because he looks like everything you’re supposed to hate these days and he’d rather chill in a wine bar in Aspen than hang out at Lowe’s with Peyton Manning.

But he’s also a dude who wins and keeps on winning even though the Patriots seem less and less talented every year. Every year seems like the End for the Patriots, doesn’t it? Everyone licks their chops, sneers and waits for Brady to meltdown or get his knees chopped off by some crusader of justice, but it never happens, and every year that he survives, that he thrives, it seems like he gets crankier on the field, both his sneer and the fans’ sneer grows and everyone hates him even more. But I can appreciate and respect a man like that, a man whose sneer says “Fuck you, come at me, bros . . . you will miss.”

And everyone does miss and Tom Brady goes to another Super Bowl. I think I like him the more people hate him, tribalism aside, probably because I’m a contrarian, but also because people are dumb. Tom Brady is great because he wants this shit more than you’ve wanted anything in your lives. I see him and I see those Raiders teams of the 70s. Beneath all the noise, beneath the biker gang mystique, beneath the Uggs and Giseles, there is an almost psychotic need to win, and for me, that trumps everything else. Because they don’t care whether you love them or hate them. You are beneath them, and they are just there to win. Get with the program or get the fuck out of the way.

But it’s not just Brady. It’s also Bill Belichick. Together, they are what make the Patriots truly fascinating, fitting villains for our times. Brady is the golden, smooth exterior, the rich veneer hiding a decaying interior, dragging the Patriots to glory even while the rest of the team struggles to rise above the barest mediocrity, living off the reputation of those that came before, depending on Brady to carry them through one more game, one more season. And Belichick is the ugly, Dick Cheneyish ogre behind the scenes, keeping things going with ruthless and grim precision. He is a monster, a human being utterly without redemption, shuffling along in his hobo sweatshirts, scowling at everyone and everything, from the media to the sun and the moon and down to his own shriveled heart. He is easy to hate, and he doesn’t give a fuck.

There is something admirable in that, though, isn’t there? It’s easy to hate people who don’t care if you hate them. It’s easy, but who cares? There is no worth in despising people who actively ask for it.

Compare that to someone like Peyton Manning, a dude who desperately wants to be seen as both a winner and a good guy, but whose true colors come out whenever he fails. He’ll throw anyone and everyone under the boss – remember his “our liquored up kicker” line when he was with the Colts? – and then he’ll go right back to shaking hands and doing his middle-manager at Lowe’s routine that the Nascar masses lap right up. That is the sort of dude who is easy for me to hate.

And then you have dudes like Ndamukong Suh, who end up neither deserving my hate nor my love, because they become almost tragic figures, deserving something closer to pity. They can’t decide whether they want to embrace being the hero or the villain. Suh seems like he wants to embrace his villainous nature, but he can’t let himself truly run with it, and so he sort of vascillates between that “Fuck you, so what?” attitude and the “I’m really a good guy, I swear…” attitude, and the result is a sort of mushy incompetence, an ass-kicker who never really embraces the “Win or Die” attitude that is so essential to becoming a truly successful NFL villain.

I’ll take dudes like Brady and Belichick, who understand they are the villains, but don’t give a fuck. That’s what those old Raiders teams used to do, and that’s what these Patriots do.

I know that comparison sounds ridiculous, but think about it. The Raiders used to do all manner of petty shit to gain an edge – remember Fred Biletnikoff’s stickum? – and that’s what the Patriots under Belichick have done.

The Raiders used to grease their jerseys. They had bowls full of amphetamines in the locker room. Their trainer shot dudes up with adrenaline extracted from the glands of corpses (!!!) They did whatever they had to win, no matter how petty or crazy. Sound familiar?

Sure, Belichick isn’t shooting his dudes up with corpse adrenaline (probably not, anyway) but he will deploy spies, he will deflate some footballs. They are schemes that seem almost hilariously incompetent, almost Austin Powersish in their parody of super-villainy, and who knows if they actually help? But Belichick doesn’t give a fuck. He does it anyway because even if there is only a .00001% chance that they help him, it’s worth it to him. And why not? After all, he doesn’t give a shit if he gets caught. The NFL will slap the Patriots with some symbolic penalty, Belichick will shrug and shuffle back to his lab to cook up something heinous with Brady. They just don’t care. Either what the NFL thinks or what you, the fan, thinks.

I, for one, actually find that refreshing. The NFL sucks. It is a horrible organization and anyone who tells it to fuck off is okay by me. The enemy of my enemy and all that. And most fans are drooling idiots, obsessed with horse’s ass talk-radio bullshit. Always remember, the Dallas Cowboys are the most popular team in all the land. Fuck what the fans think.

The Patriots are cheating jerks, but they own that shit. All they want to do is win. Everything else is just noise, and I’m good with anyone who understands that. That’s what those old Raiders teams knew, and that’s what Brady and Belichick’s Patriots know. That’s why I’ll be rooting for the Patriots in yet another Super Bowl and why, damn it, I’ll say it . . . I’m a Patriots fan. Fuck you.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

The NFL has always been a cesspool of idiocy and arrogance. At least to anyone paying attention. The Lions getting boned by incompetent refs in the 4^th quarter, leading to lynch mobs being formed, blood orgies in the streets and one dude even calling sweet, gentle Ty Schalter a fucking retard (Excuse me, it was actually YOU ARE A FUCKING RETARD) for daring to suggest that the Lions probably could have played a little better despite the dicking they got from the refs, was just the latest in a long line of examples of the NFL’s rotten bullshit.

The truth is that it has been there for everyone to see for a long time now. Lions fans are already intimately familiar with it. Just go back to the Process of the Catch nonsense that stole an obvious touchdown away from Calvin Johnson in Chicago. That’s what makes this so hard for most Lions fans, I think. It’s not just a revelation of a combination of incompetence and arrogance by the NFL, but a confirmation. And it happened at both the worst possible time, and the time when long-suffering Lions fans expected it to happen. That is a terrible combination that leaves grown dudes and lady dudes shivering and shaking like broken junkies, sniping at each other bitterly and imagine dark deeds involving Emperor Goodell and a trash compactor.

It’s not just the incompetence. Refs in all sports suffer from that particular malady, and hey, we all make mistakes. To err is human, blah, blah, blah. But it’s the NFL’s almost unbelievable arrogance that is at the core of this rotten business. It manifests itself most obviously, and most publicly, when something like this happens. Or something like the Process of the Catch ruling. The NFL obviously fucks up, but instead of owning up to it, they just try to remake reality to fit the horrible New World that they have created with their inanity. It’s why I’ve compared the NFL’s rulebook to a Necronomicon. It’s a dark wizard’s tome that only fell sorcerers and wicked magicians can read. The Emperor clears his throat as the rabble starts to get out of hand, and the Minister of Propaganda, Mike Pereira, rolls his bones, smears cow blood on the face of a baby, watches the pigeons for signs and then declares the NFL’s obvious misdeeds just.

But it also manifests in other, more insidious ways. It can be as simple as the NFL fining dudes for not wearing Official NFL Merchandise during press conferences. Years ago, back when Jon Kitna was with the Bengals, they fined the dude for wearing a hat with a cross on it during a press conference. Kitna, for those who don’t know, is big into the Jesus thing, which… whatever, that is his deal and you have to respect that. But the NFL didn’t give a shit. They fined him because it was not an NFL Licensed and Approved cross, which… that’s some shit, isn’t it? I mean, that’s some straight out of the Bible money lenders in the temple kind of shit. That’s old school wicked fairy tale villain kind of nonsense.

And then there’s the Ray Rice incident, or any number of off the field incidents over the last several years, which have finally laid bare the arbitrary and ridiculous nature of Emperor Goodell’s punishments. He’s set himself on the throne and just arrogantly waves a dismissive hand at anyone who bothers him, offering barely thought out dictates that people are not allowed to question. It all depends on his mood, whether or not he’s paying attention and what he thinks he can cover up. It’s arrogant and stupid, and, well, those two things often go hand in hand. Hell, next season he’ll probably decree that a contract dispute can only be resolved by cutting a baby in half.

But it’s not just the NFL. No, the NFL is just the root of the problem, the festering poison that effects anyone else who spends too much time around it. NFL insiders soon end up exhibiting the same diminished mental faculties as a dude who fell asleep in his running car with the garage door closed.

All you have to do is look at how NFL insiders dealt with Jim Harbaugh’s move to Michigan. Their arrogance and lazy dismissal of what was happening right in front of them was almost shocking. It was a mirror image of the attitude of the league that they love and cover. While Michigan insiders were adamant that something big was happening, never wavering in their coverage of the deal for weeks and months, the NFL insiders refused to even acknowledge the possibility because no one leaves the NFL.

That shit is chilling. That’s a rotten, fucked up attitude right there, the sort of thing normally seen only in cults. NOBODY LEAVES THE NFL. That was the refrain heard from countless reporters who couldn’t imagine a better world outside of their twisted utopia. It was arrogant and stupid at the same time. Sound familiar?

Of course, they were wrong, just like the NFL is so often wrong. And just like their beloved NFL, they immediately tried to reshape the story to fit their bullshit narrative. It was pretty clear that Harbaugh and Michigan were a match made in heaven all along. The insider stories that have come out make that clear. But oh no! That doesn’t fit with the NFL’s vision of the world. They say the world is flat, so fuck you, Columbus. First, it was Harbaugh is never leaving the NFL for college, then it was Harbaugh turned Michigan down but changed his mind after a desperate Michigan made a last minute offer of a bajillion dollars that no one could match, then it was Harbaugh will still stay in the NFL because he’s only using Michigan for leverage (an idea which never made sense given that Harbaugh pretty much had his pick of jobs in the NFL, he didn’t need to use Michigan – a lowly college team according to NFL insiders – when he had several NFL franchises ready to try to outbid one another), and then when he finally took the job and made them all look like fools, it was that Harbaugh only did it for the money, and when that was proven to be bullshit (Harbaugh is making the same amount he made with the 49ers) they turned around and said that it was because he couldn’t find a job in the NFL, which… what the fuck? That level of intellectual dishonesty is staggering, usually only seen in, well, the NFL.

But the NFL can’t change reality, no matter how hard they try. And neither can its slappies, those Defenders of the Shield who have allowed themselves to be coopted and perverted into little more than propagandists, mouth-pieces for a corrupt regime intent on greedily raking in as much money as it can and glorifying its own image at the expense of everyone else, from the fans who make its existence possible to the dudes who concuss themselves into an early grave for a few tosses of the coin from the Emperor and his minions.

The NFL won’t acknowledge reality, and will try to change it to meet some alternate-universe bizarro-world that they’ve cooked up for themselves like meth-heads in a dirty trailer. They’ll tell you that somehow that bullshit call against the Lions was justified. It’s gotten so bad, though, that even Mike Pereira can’t bring himself to lie and twist the truth for his Emperor. He admitted it was a bad call, which probably means he’ll be hauled away for electro-shock treatment and “reeducation” by the Emperor’s goons.

The NFL will still try to twist it, to somehow make all their bullshit “true,” and if they can’t, they’ll just try to sweep it under the rug and pretend it didn’t happen because fuck your memories, peasant. The Emperor makes reality.

And doofuses like John Clayton won’t acknowledge reality either. They’ll still say shit like Harbaugh took the Michigan job as a “soft landing” because the NFL which was so hot on his trail only hours before, so hot in fact that one dude tried to claim that the Raiders would give him $16 million a year (no, really, an “insider” actually “reported” this) suddenly had no room for him and he was forced to lick his wounds with a lowly college team. (A college team that routinely draws over 100,000 fans, has an alumni and fanbase that any NFL franchise would murder small children for, is laden with tradition and is a financial powerhouse that can pay their coach whatever they damn well please, but… okay, sure, it’s just the Minor Leagues) But why wouldn’t the insiders do this? Why wouldn’t they lie and twist and play intellectual shell games? The world that they live in, the world of the NFL, has made those things into virtues. They are merely doing what daddy taught them.

But anyone with eyes to see and a brain to think can see reality, can see just how rotten and absurd the NFL has become. It has been this way for a while now, and you can even make the argument that their arrogant bully tactics are at the heart of the league, interwoven in its origins and its staggering growth through the years, much like a crime family. But regular people are starting to see this shit. The Emperor has no clothes and while his advisors and the Baghdad Bobs who cover him and his kingdom insist that he’s got on the finest of furs and the best silks from all across the world, the peasants can see him standing naked in the window, his doughy ass hanging out for all the world to see.

The NFL isn’t going anywhere. It’s too big and its sheer momentum means that it will remain the Big Boss in the sporting world for years to come. But that doesn’t mean that I have to pretend that it is righteous or good or worthy of my adulation. Fuck the NFL. This isn’t about my team getting screwed or throwing a hissy fit because I don’t like what happened. I blame the Lions for fucking up that game just as much as I blame the refs. Well, maybe not just as much, but I’m certainly willing to say that they could have done a lot more to make sure that call would be little more than an unfortunate and irritating footnote.

I say this because I want you to understand that this is not the result of irrational anger of the lynch mob variety a la what we saw on twitter while it was all going down in real time. No, this is the result of years of arrogance, of heavy-handed megalomania, of having the NFL’s bullshit shoved down my throat for far too long. I see you, NFL. I will always see you. You are too big to miss. I am not going to make outrageous claims about burying my head in the sand and pretending that you’re not there. That would just be letting you get away with it. You see, I am a football fan. And you are fucking with that, and I don’t like it. You will not drive me away from being a football fan because you are not football. You are the NFL, and there is a world of difference between the two, and it’s about time everyone sees that.

The NFL is not football. Football is football. The NFL is a corporate wasteland of rotten souls and diseased brains. I am a football fan. The NFL can go fuck itself.