NFC West Preview

Like an abused wife who finally left her shithead of a man, the NFC West is a division in transition. By the way, after my dad left my mom many, many years ago when I was just a little Neil, my mom went to a place called Women in Transition for counseling, and they told her that love was a choice and that she could just choose not to love my dad anymore, and anyway that’s not relevant to anything here, I just have always thought that was impossibly dark and fucked up, and maybe helps explain why I’m still a Lions fan, I don’t know.

Ahem. Anyway, let’s start over. So, yeah, division in transition. This is because one team is basically starting over, another is close to having to do it, a third is trying to claw its way out of the ashes and a fourth improbably finds itself ready to take over. But all of this is fragile and unknown and there is a very real possibility that all four of these teams find their actual fates to be radically different, sort of like a woman who gets married and has a couple of kids and thinks her life is set only to have her husband decide he’s fuckin’ out of there and leaves her scrambling to pick up all the pieces, and also maybe it fucks up the kids pretty bad too, and . . . wait, what was I talking about?

Los Angeles Rams

Why They’ll Win: The Rams are that surprise team that improbably finds itself ready to take over the division. They went 11-5 last season and won the NFC West after not having a winning season since 2003, and they did it just after returning to the perpetually twilit insanity of LA, which would make people of a certain mindset suspicious that the whole thing was a work like pro wrestling, but we won’t think that way here, for this is supposed to be the positive section of the preview and I am nothing if not a law-abiding man who adheres strictly to the rules, especially when it comes to writing.

Anyway, the biggest thing the Rams have going for them is that they actually have a quarterback, and not just any quarterback, but one who looks like he’s on his way to being a true franchise quarterback in Jared Goff. The former number one overall pick, Goff made the Pro Bowl last season while leading the Rams back to LA glory. He should be good for a long time, and if he is, he gives the Rams a solid floor that may be higher than the ceilings for the rest of the division. This is a good situation to be in.

But it’s not just Goff. The Rams also have maybe the NFL’s best running back in Todd Gurley and just traded for Brandin Cooks, who should give them the number one receiver that they lacked last season. And on defense, they still have Aaron Donald, maybe the best defensive tackle in the league, and have decided to take their shot this season by adding Ndamukong Suh and Marcus Peters, all of which makes them one of the most talented and best – on paper, anyway – teams in the entire NFL only a couple of years after being the worst of the worst. Why does this happen to every other team, but not my own? Why Lord, why? Is it because I am a sinner? Yes, but what of divine grace? What of it, Lord? What of it???

Why They Won’t: Like I said, the Rams are only a couple of years removed from being utter shit, which is a lot of psychic misery to have to shed in a very short time. That is the sort of thing that usually requires years of failed reaching, of scratching and clawing and playoff heartbreak to truly overcome. The Rams have barely just begun and this could easily spin out of control on them.

Not only are they not used to it, there are a lot of warning signs that this spin isn’t just possible but maybe even likely. I already touched on the vast psychic reservoir of shit that they are sitting on, but add in the fact that they are in Los Angeles, which sucks and fucks men’s souls like some great insatiable street whore, and there is a lot that could go wrong spiritually here. I’m not saying that Jared Goff is gonna end up doing porn or Todd Gurley ends up trapped inside the vagina of a Kardashian like poor Jonah and that whale, but I’m not not say that either. LA is a strange and terrible place and nobody really knows how it will affect them. It’s glitz and it’s glamor with parties in the Hills with kindred souls, and it is the ocean and it is the West, the end of the Great American Journey, home to wanderers and dreamers and lost souls who went west and kept going west until they all ended up there because there is literally nowhere further to go without walking into the ocean and drowning yourself. LA is paradise and LA is hell, a chill place and a desperate place at the same time, a paradox of a city, of a people, literally straight out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. In short, it is a horror story, a human horror story, which are the scariest of them all.

So . . . yeah, LA might fuck with the Rams a little bit. Even if it doesn’t, if somehow the Rams players are all able to resist turning around like Lot’s wife and being turned to pillars of salt as they gaze upon the burning madness of Sodom and Los Angeles, these sorts of super teams, built for winning Right Now, have a way of not working out. Especially when they’re built with Problem Cases and Rejects and Assholes like Suh and Peters, who both ended up in LA pretty much because their old teams were sick of dealing with their bullshit.

That sort of personality dynamic has a way of taking over like a virus if the team they’re coming to doesn’t already have a strong culture of its own. And as we’ve talked about, the Rams culture is basically a newborn baby lamb struggling on shaky legs to stagger out of the town dump. There is no chance that Suh or Peters respect Goff. No chance. One or both of them will act out at some point and cause this whole thing to collapse in on itself.

And then there’s Goff himself. Yes, he was the number one overall pick, and yes, he was a Pro Bowl quarterback in his second season, but let’s not forget that his rookie season was a rancid butt. It was cut short after only seven games, but in those seven games, Goff was awful. One metric that I looked at – I won’t name it or link it because I am both lazy as hell and I can’t remember exactly which one it was, I’m very professional – shows that Goff had negative value as a rookie, meaning the Rams would have been better off replacing him with a drunk Jim Everett or James Vanderbeek based on his performance in the award-winning Varsity Blues. Yeah, things got better – waaaaay better – last season, but this is as about a shaky foundation as you can get.

San Francisco 49ers

Why They’ll Win: Like the Rams, it looks like they finally have a quarterback. After trading for Jimmy Garappolo, the 49ers looked like an entirely different team than the one that has gone 13-35 since throwing a baby fit and walking away from Jim Harbaugh.

Garappolo seems to have that cocky dick mentality so necessary to being a winning NFL quarterback. His very presence famously threatened Tom Brady in New England, who ran him off like a Karate Kid villain, and then he immediately started winning after landing in San Francisco. Add in his cover boy looks and you have a dude that the NFL will be determined to make a Star, and when the NFL wants something, the NFL usually gets it.

Why They Won’t: There’s that whole 13-35 thing. That’s, uh, that’s pretty tough to turn around right away. Plus, the NFL’s history is littered with dudes who make a meaningless mini-run at the end of a season and convince everyone that they’re going to be The Next Big Thing only to crap out the next season when the games actually mean something.

But really, it’s all about the culture here. I already mentioned the 49ers are only 13-35 post-Harbaugh, which is only natural because they hadn’t made the playoffs in the decade before he arrived. He led them to three straight NFC Title Game appearances and a Super Bowl against the Ravens and his brother. Getting rid of him was fucking nuts, and yet here we are.

But it was only fucking nuts out of context. In the context of the 49ers overall culture – and the dude responsible for it, owner and CEO John York - it makes perfect sense. This is because John York is a spoiled megalomaniac, the sort of idiot born into wealth who inherits his team like a toy and then throws a hissy fit if anyone tries to tell him how to play with it.

York couldn’t stand the 49ers being Harbaugh’s team. Like Daniel Snyder or Jerry Jones or the Davis vampires, York had to make sure everyone knew this was his team and no one else’s. The only problem with that is that York is an incompetent bozo. He’s the sort of dude who holds stupid wine tastings and then spends hours bloviating about shitty wine facts that no one cares about and that are blatantly false. Meanwhile, all his sycophants nod along and sip their wine and smile their fake botoxed smiles, almost literal Halloween masks, and wait for this empty-headed asshole to finish his bullshit. And then when he’s done, he smiles like a Good Boy who just got an A on his presentation and waits for the Halloween Masks to tell him how smart and interesting he is. Meanwhile, he doesn’t know that the people hired to cater the event pissed in the wine because he was a dick to them. That’s John York. That’s who he is, and as long as he owns this team and continues getting in the way, that’s what the 49ers will be too.

Maybe Garoppolo can salvage that, but also, maybe Garoppolo is a dude who’s only started five games in his entire career – all of them meaningless, after the 49ers were long eliminated from contention – and also, maybe he is not just a confident dick, but a problem dick, the sort who insists that he was about to take Tom Brady’s job. That is not confidence. It is delusion, which makes me think that maybe Jimmy Garoppolo is a dude who fits right in with John York’s wine party of a world.

Seattle Seahawks

Why They’ll Win: Russell Wilson. Really, that’s about it. I know it gets boring with me constantly citing the quarterback, but that’s the NFL these days. If you have a quarterback, you’re probably gonna win. If you don’t, you won’t. Exceptions exist, obviously. Like say having a quarterback but constantly getting fucked by the NFL’s Necronomicon of a rulebook when Sheriff Goodell and his spokesman, the Lizard Man Pereira, find some dark passage and demand its recitation on air so the Lions, er, I mean, some random team have to take it like they’re Goatse (google it.) Let’s just move on.

Why They Won’t: The Seahawks are sort of like the Patriots in that having a legit killer at quarterback has caused the rest of the team to degenerate. Let me explain what I mean. When you have a dude like Brady or Russell Wilson who’s capable of winning games all by themselves, it’s easy to give into the temptation to cut corners elsewhere. After all, the NFL is a hard-capped league in which teams are constantly being asked to make choices about who to keep and who to throw to the wolves despite still having value. And so, year by year, coaches and execs break apart the team around their franchise quarterback, forcing him to assume more and more of the load. And if he’s like Brady or Russell Wilson, he does, which only encourages further whittling until finally you find yourself in the Super Bowl throwing for over 500 yards like Brady and still losing because the rest of your team is pulled from the Arena League.

This is what is happening to Russell Wilson now. The Seahawks aren’t the same Seahawks, with their badass defense and Beast Mode running game, that they were when this whole run started. It’s almost a mirror image of what the Patriots under Brady went through. Remember, when Brady started, he wasn’t The Man. He was just the man who filled in for Drew Bledsoe while the Patriots kickass defense and running game carried the team. It is an eerie parallel, only the Seahawks haven’t been there for as long, and Russell Wilson isn’t quite Tom Brady.

This is not a good situation. Richard Sherman is gone (to San Francisco, by the way, which I should have mentioned, especially because it will turn out hilariously brutal given that Sherman is already old in NFL terms, had already lost a step, and is coming off a fucking torn Achilles, and given that he’s Richard Sherman, he’s not exactly going to slow down with Grace and Dignity) along with a lot of the other Names who made the Seahawks what everyone thinks of them as. If Wilson goes down, or struggles at all, then this will get ugly fast, and it’s all too easy to see Pete Carroll just saying fuck it and heading back to college, isn’t it? He doesn’t need this. He’s already proven himself. He’s not gonna stick around for a rebuild, even if he’s the dude responsible for it.

Listen, even Tom fucking Brady couldn’t do it all completely on his own – he almost did, which is incredible – and I doubt that Russell Wilson can do it on even a smaller, divisional level. Then again, maybe he can. That is the power of having a truly elite quarterback. But the Seahawks have basically signaled that they are trying to cheat, that they want to rebuild but want to use Wilson as cover to do it without too much pain. My bet is that Wilson gets this, resents it, and that is not a good place to be in. My bet is also that this is it for Pete Carroll with Seattle, and Wilson or no Wilson, the Seahawks are in that shitty, terrible, no good place of needing to bottom out before they can recover and rebuild, only they aren’t to that place yet and everyone knows it. That is a sort of horrible purgatory that can feel worse than the actual bottom. I’m a Red Wings fan. I understand these things.

Arizona Cardinals

Why They’ll Win: Fuck if I know. Maybe all the other teams collapse, Jared Goff does get into porn, Wilson says fuck this and takes the season off and Garoppolo ends up drinking piss wine while mutually jerking off John York. That is about the only thing that will give the Cardinals a shot here, and even then maybe not.

Why They Won’t: The Cardinals are in full transition. That means that they stink. They don’t have a quarterback unless you count Sam Bradford, but who would do such a thing? Josh Rosen is the hotshot rookie, but he’s supposedly an asshole who no one likes, so what do you do without a quarterback and a new head coach? Nothing. You fucking lose. That’s all there is to do and hope that the draft fortunes smile upon you. Go with God, Cardinals fans, because no one else is gonna go with you this season.

Final Judgment

1. Rams 11-5

2. 49ers 7-9

3. Seahawks 7-9

4. Cardinals 4-12