Wednesday, August 8, 2018

NFC East Preview


The Eagles are the defending Super Bowl champs, which makes them the obvious favorites in the NFC East, but the problem with that is this: the Eagles, as representatives of Philadelphia, are bound to fuck it all up.

Maybe that’s not fair, and maybe the Eagles win changed an entire city’s psychic energy, but I doubt it. That is a lot of history to have to change. I mean, this is a city that was basically replaced twice over as the preeminent American city: by New York, and then by Washington as the nation’s capital. It’s very history is an inferiority complex. The reason It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is such a good show is because it’s true. It’s the only real show that Philly could produce. Sure, The Cosby Show worked too but that’s because the universe already knew and understood that Bill Cosby was a wild rape-fiend.

All of this is to say that there is something inherent in the character of Philadelphia that causes everyone to fuck-up. Sure, they might transcend it for one beautiful moment, but that just makes the tragedy of it all the more acute. They’re like white trash who wins the lottery and then blows it all on bullshit before ending up worse off than before, being sued by multiple relatives, kids in jail for organizing bum fights or whatever bullshit they think rich people are supposed to do, horrible, horrible.

This transcends the actual football talent of the Eagles, which should be considerable. They have a burgeoning star at quarterback in Carson Wentz, but Wentz also tore both his ACL and his LCL, which famously opened the door for Nick Foles to win the Super Bowl. This seems like it should be a luxury – two good quarterbacks – but it really isn’t.

Start with Wentz, who really only did it for ¾ of a season. He’s not really proven in that sense, and who knows how he’s gonna come back from that knee injury. Foles, meanwhile, is a career journeyman who was ready to retire only a couple of years ago. Yeah, he won the Super Bowl, but that seems like sort of a miracle exception rather than the rule. Relying on him for a full season probably isn’t gonna work out. And then there’s this: Foles winning the Super Bowl means that there will be controversy here no matter what. There is no way to get this kind of psychic energy right. Wentz should be the man, but is he really? Foles was the man for a day, but is he really the man? Both believe they are, both have fans and surely players on the team and in the coaching staff who think they are, and that sort of thing is what leads to Mac, Dennis and Charlie bickering in the bar while Sweet Dee makes a fool of herself and Frank gets caught importing Vietnamese hookers. It’s Always Sunny indeed.

One more thing: no team has repeated as NFC East champion in 14 years. That’s pretty fucking crazy. The last team to do it was actually the Eagles, which sounds like a good omen until you realize that team was the one that ended with Donovan McNabb puking all over the field as they lost the Super Bowl. Now that’s Philadelphia.

So, who will actually win the division if not the Eagles? Well, that’s where things get tricky. The Eagles might still win this damn thing by default. The Giants are fucked. Let’s just get that out of the way immediately. They bottomed out last season in the sort of “let’s just burn this thing to the ground and start over” season that teams have to go through every now and then. It was a transition year, only the Giants insanely decided not to actually transition and kept Eli Manning around instead of drafting a new quarterback. This, uh, this won’t work. Not only is Eli shit from a butt now, but he’ll forever represent the Giants of the past, and as long as he’s around, the Giants will be stuck between two worlds, and in this purgatory there is nothing but misery and despair.

The one saving grace for the Giants is that they drafted Saquon Barkley, who I think is the Real Deal. He’s a physical freak who can do things on the field that are ghostly reminders of, yes, I’m gonna say it, Barry Sanders. Like Barry, he had games where he could never quite get going, but to be honest, I’m gonna blame a lot of that on Penn State’s horrid offensive line. I watched them enough times to know that it really wasn’t his fault. But, like Barry, he also had games where it was clear that he was in another league, that he belonged to a class of athlete that comes along once in a generation – if we’re lucky.

That’s all well and good for the Giants, but here’s the thing: today’s NFL isn’t really geared towards allowing a running back to dominate like back in the day. It’s a passing league, and while Barkley is a great receiver out of the backfield, his impact is limited simply by what the NFL is now. The Giants are sort of like a dude who grows up in the country, say Montana, where there is nothing but open roads for miles and miles. All his life he’s dreamed of owning a Ferrari, of getting out on those roads and blasting off at 220 mph, of transcending the limits this world and society puts on him. He moves to the city, gets rich, and is finally in a position to buy that Ferrari. He does, only now he lives in the cramped city and can’t really drive it anywhere. His neighbors see it and go “Holy shit, that’s amazing!” but all he can really do is pull it out and shine it up for them. Maybe he can drive it to the corner store at 15 mph, but that’s about it and what’s the point? That’s the Giants with Saquon Barkley. He’s a beautiful Ferrari meant for a different place, a different age. He’s a tragedy and he hasn’t even played a game.

The Redskins are an insipid franchise. All name controversies aside – and I know you don’t want me to start Discoursing here – they’re owned by a dude who’s little better than a sleazy used car-salesman, a caricature of a rich dude who spends most of his time looking for ways to fuck over his own fans, most famously illustrated by that time he sued an old lady over her season tickets or whatever the fuck dumb reason it was. Dan Snyder has pissed away a culture, an entire psychic destiny, and replaced it with his own sleazy failure. Raven Mack, beloved founder emeritus of Armchair Linebacker, was completely chased away from football by Snyder. My boy Paul had the same thing happen. The Redskins are doomed as long as Dan Snyder owns the team.

They’re also changing quarterbacks this season. Out is Kirk Cousins, who I have my own hate-boner for, owing largely to tribal reasons. In is Alex Smith, formerly of the Chiefs, who I just said the other day is underrated. But doesn’t this kind of feel like a lateral move? I mean, the only real reason the Redskins traded Cousins is because they didn’t want to commit to him long term. So, they turned around and picked up Alex Smith and then committed to him long term. The only problem is that Smith is almost five years older than Cousins, so unless the Redskins really, really hated Kirk Cousins – certainly possible given my own feelings about the dude – this is a move that seems puzzling. And even if Smith is better, it’s likely to only be fractionally, hence the whole lateral move thing. And since the Redskins went 7-9 last year, a lateral move isn’t exactly a good thing. Maybe they go 8-8 now, but so what?

And then there’s the Cowboys. My God, the Cowboys. I was dreading writing about them – still am – because it’s really hard for me to encapsulate the full terrordome of feelings I have about the Cowboys. I’ll try anyway.

I have always hated the Cowboys. This is because I am a decent human being buried beneath the degenerate surface – hence my charm. This is because they represent a sort of America that is revolting to me, nakedly greedy and repulsive, hidden beneath a clean-faced salesman’s smile. The Cowboys are truly America’s Team in the sense that they have always been the team of the hidden ugliness of America. I know I said the Raiders were the true America’s Team, and I meant it, but to be honest, Las Vegas doesn’t really need the Raiders because it already has a team: the Dallas Cowboys.

The Cowboys are – and always have been – the Las Vegas of teams. They are a team of bright lights, luring people in with the promise and aching memory of the American Dream. But it is a twisted and perverted form of the American Dream. Beneath the bright lights and welcoming exterior, the glitz and the glamor, is a sort of mean, naked greed, the team of an oil baron. Hell, even their cheerleaders are basically just well-worn Vegas showgirls.

Even the team’s own history mirrors a sort of contemptible version of American history. They began small, as underdogs, and quickly rose to power and glory behind a sort of Puritan sociopathy embodied in the team’s head-coach, the cold and repressed Tom Landry. That sort of Grant Wood American Gothic dude appealed to the “plain”, “hardworking” and “clean” image that Americans long-loved to think about themselves. But there is a sort of cold ruthlessness beneath all that, the sort of clinical, almost viper-like way of viewing the world that is the true heart of the American Dream – you take what you can, and you don’t stop taking until you die, and you do it in a way that allows you to clothe it all in a sort of self-righteous missionary zeal. That was Tom Landry and that was the Dallas Cowboys as they became America’s Team.

It is an Americana that I find personally distasteful, ugly and destructive, but eventually the American Dream itself became ragged, frayed by reality, by the Truth that it is rotten and ugly inside. And so Tom Landry gave way to Jimmy Johnson, a sort of slicker, more nakedly ambitious version of America. He fit perfectly with the times. Once the Holy American Mission was exposed for what it really was, the hucksters and the self-righteous, the hypocritical holier-than-thou types simply dropped the mask and became Gordon Gecko, they became Wall Street, and that was Jimmy Johnson. He was just nakedly ruthless, cruel and greedy, and the Cowboys rose again in a sort of corrupted version of the American Dream. It was always bound to end badly, and ugly, because without that “clean” façade, you just had the naked truth, horrible and macabre. And like Gordon Gecko, the need for the veneer caught up with Jimmy Johnson and he was run out of town.

And who replaced him? Barry Switzer, a degenerate hillbilly, corrupt in his own way, who rode the excess of the dying last burst of the American Dream through the 90s, inhaling its fumes and careening without care or understanding that things had gotten Too Fucked Up to further glory. But good times don’t last forever, which should be the lesson of the Clintonian era. Back then, we were just careening towards oblivion with a smile on our faces, without a care, because we were America and America – and America’s Team – has to live forever, right? Nobody cared that it had already been corrupted years earlier, hell that it was born corrupt, and that over the years, the carefully crafted veneer, the con that we played on ourselves forever and ever was stripped away piece by piece until finally it all collapsed, weighed down by naked greed and a fatal misunderstanding of the real thing that made it all great in the first place: regular, hard-working people who were willing to believe the con because it allowed them to dream something greater than themselves, allowed them to imagine a world in which they too could be Tom Landry, rich and clean, strong and powerful, righteous before God and the world. It was a con that said you could have it all without sacrificing your basic decency, your human dignity.

But that’s just not real, at least not in the America that we have collectively built for ourselves, and it’s not real for the Cowboys either, who exist after The Fall as sort of a grotesque caricature of America and themselves. Jerry Jones is the perfect man to own the Cowboys. He is grotesque, a carnie’s version of a success, a slick manipulator who uses his own wealth, his own oil money, which these days is almost literally blood money, to remain in power. It is a gross cartoon of power, though, a poor man’s version of a rich man, a stupid person’s version of a smart man, loud and crass, ruling through naked fiat. Sound familiar?

The thing is that Jerry Jones doesn’t just own the Dallas Cowboys. He owns the NFL. It is his league. He is the most powerful owner – and thus the most powerful man – in the NFL. Roger Goodell is his useful idiot, an instrument, a lever of power that Jones can pull without having to look Trumpian himself. But just look at the NFL. Look at how obscenely gross it has become over the years. Look at how it treats its own players, treats the fans, treats everyone. It is a debased league run by con men, a Las Vegas of a league designed with nothing other than taking your money in mind. It is a Las Vegas of a league run by a Las Vegas of a man in a Las Vegas of a country. This is America now. It is the country of Donald Trump, the country of Jerry Jones, the country of the Dallas Cowboys. After all this time, they really are America’s Team.

Naturally, they’re also losers. They haven’t really won anything in over twenty years – again, sound familiar? – despite all the bellicose thundering and the shrill bleating which only serves to underscore their own failure. Jerry Jones, for all his power, for all his bullshit swagger, is a Failure. He fired Jimmy Johnson because he had to prove that it was all about him, that he was the one who built the Cowboys. And he’s failed. Jerry Jones ain’t shit, and nobody should be afraid of his old, hillbilly ass. Fuck him.

Under Jason Garrett, who is little more than Jones’ boy, the Cowboys have only had three winning seasons, only two playoff appearances, and have won only one goddamn playoff game. Naturally, that win was the game against the Lions – sigh – but even that travesty, in which the Lions were gangbanged into a sort of feral stupor by the NFL’s secret police, AKA Jerry Jones’ secret police, only highlights how pathetic and flimsy that single victory really was. The Cowboys are a team of nothing, ruled by men of no worth, no account, swaggering their way through the world as if they are supposed to matter. The only problem is that no one really believes it anymore.

This season, the Cowboys are relying on Dak Prescott to prove that he’s not just another flash-in-the-pan after spending over a decade watching Tony Romo try to prove the same thing. Not Quite Good Enough is a terrible phrase in the NFL, a painful phrase, and it will kill you. They’re also hopeful that Ezekiel Elliott comes back and runs wild after being suspended for being a piece of trash and beating the shit out of his girlfriend. This is dark, but I suppose fitting for America’s Team in the Year of Our Lord 2018.

If they get both Prescott and Elliott rolling, then the Cowboys will probably win the division. But it will be a hollow victory, owing as much to the Eagles own psychic despair as anything else. And it will be a victory that probably won’t mean anything given the Cowboys inability to do anything at all in the playoffs since Troy Aikman could still read. In the end, the Cowboys will be just good enough, just powerful enough, just rich enough to still pretend. But you have to remember, pretending is all they have left. And everyone knows it.


Final Judgment:
1. Cowboys 11-5
2. Eagles 10-6
3. Redskins 7-9
4. Giants 5-11

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