Scratch Offs and Opioids

Every Lions fan who watched Golden Tate catch that last touchdown pass said the same thing: “too soon.” When you’ve lost every way imaginable over the years, you’re able to pick that out, sort of like that old saying (probably bullshit, but whatever, go with me here) about how the Inuit have, like, 1,000 different words for “snow.” We have 1,000 different words for “defeat.”

It started out like a good ol’ ref-fuckin’ sort of game and then evolved into a stolen hope kind of game, and in between, it was an “oh shit, the Lions still can’t stop the run” kind of game, but more than anything it was the familiar “the bad guys win” kind of game because, after all, this is Dallas’ America and in it, the Detroits of the world get fucked.

It is encouraging, still, that the Lions were in a position to win the game with only two minutes left, and had someone just recovered that damn Dak Prescott fumble or at least tackled him after he recovered, or if Glover Quin intercepted that pass instead of just deflecting it, we’d all be talking about sunshine and rainbows right now and about how sometimes the good guys still win, but they didn’t and they don’t, and so here we are.

It is meaningful, though, that things have shifted from No Hope Someone Please Hold Patricia Down And Shave Him to What If, and in that shift lies at least a reason to keep moving forward, to gently shave Patricia instead of holding him down and violently sheering him and yeah, this is weird, let’s just move on.

So . . . the Lions lost. You are used to this, but at least it felt like they lost for potentially fixable football reasons (I say “potentially” because only an insane idiot would believe in “certainty” here) instead of woeful Shaking My Fist At God reasons, the sort born of 60 years of crushing failure and the sort of black hole of misery in which everything seems broken and hopeless. It wasn’t that, at least.

What it was, though, was a defense incapable still of stopping the run, of allowing some degenerate Ohio Ewok like Ezekiel Elliott to run wild and provide with absolute certainty that the Cowboys would get that field goal to win at the end of the game. This is not a good defense, which is disheartening because that’s, you know, Matt Patricia’s whole deal, but we knew that going in.

At least it wasn’t a farce. That’s what I keep telling myself. At least I’m not damning Matt Patricia to hell this time and making plans that don’t include football for the rest of the season or the rest of eternity, which is where I found myself at the beginning of the season.

But it is okay to be critical of Patricia – and Bob Quinn – for not being able to stop the run or the Cowboys when it mattered most. They knew when they started this whole thing that the defense wasn’t good enough, and that it needed a lot of help, especially up front. For that, you need talent, you need players who can actually, you know, play. Instead of going out and getting those dudes, though, the Lions solution was to prop up Matt Patricia and basically say “This Guy Fucks!” as if his presence alone would somehow change things, as if his Staggering Genius would account for all the change that was needed so long as the pissant peasant players would do what they were told.

It’s arrogant, and that’s the one thing I still don’t like about Patricia and Quinn. It smacks of that other fat former Patriots assistant, Charlie Weis, sneering that Notre Dame would win because with him they’d have “a decided schematic advantage.” Notre Dame fired him after he cratered the team to 3-9.

I’m not saying that this is how things will turn out here, which is a nice change from how I felt only a couple of weeks ago. I no longer have that certainty of failure, and sometimes that’s all you need to be able to keep going as a fan. At least I am complaining about actual football things instead of talking about how Matt Patricia and Bob Quinn should be buried up to their necks in a fire-ant colony while I piss on them. That’s something, I guess.

That win over the Patriots is going to linger, which is good. It gives Patricia time to breathe, at least, but in that breath, he needs to actually show that he knows what he’s doing as a head coach, that he’s not just some Weisian egomaniac who believes he can win because he used to hang out on the fringes of Tom Brady’s entourage back in the day.

The good thing, though, is that I think there is something to his whole “get tough” routine, and I think that’s shown itself the past couple of weeks. Again, just like last week, the Lions looked tougher than they have in a long time. I kind of hate that because it is such a subjective unquantifiable thing, like if you want to believe they’re tough you’ll tell yourself that and if you don’t, you’ll find all sorts of reasons why they are weak-willed ninnies, but something just feels different about these dudes. They could have folded, could have collapsed, could have fucked around and then made a meaningless mad dash to the finish in order to make it look more respectable or whatever, which is what we’re used to seeing from them, especially the Caldwell era Lions. Instead, they were never out of this win. Even when they fell behind by ten, they pulled their shit together and came back and took a lead with only two minutes left. They never wilted from it. They simply weren’t good enough to sustain it.

I can take that. I can take “not good enough” instead of “fuck this, I’m going home.” At least for now. Eventually, you have to be Good Enough. That’s really the only thing that matters, but if you aren’t, the only way you’re going to eventually get there is to push yourself to be better, to do better, to be “tough” whatever the fuck that means to you, and I’ve at least seen that the last two weeks.

There was something satisfying, at least for a moment, in watching the replay of Golden Tate score that touchdown and seeing a fleet of fake Cowboys in their nice crisp cowboy hats and their pressed proudboi white shirts, jowls hanging, look on helplessly as Detroit took back its pride, even if it was fleeting. It was satisfying to feel like maybe, just maybe, these ugly fuckers don’t always win, that they don’t have to win.

But then there was the end of the game, the Cowboys lining up to kick what was essentially a gimme field goal, and over and over and over, we got to see Jerry Jones and his pinch-faced ugly bullshit, surrounded by his pinch-faced family, smug in the certainty of their triumph, in the inevitability of their America marching on at the expense of everyone else. Fuck ‘em.

It’s depressing, to know that in the end, those dudes keep winning. It’s depressing to see it happen every day in real life, in ways that matter, and it’s depressing that their ugly hijacking of our entire culture is so complete that it even happens metaphorically, symbolically, in these stupid games of ours. The Cowboys and Jerry Jones winning feels so wretched because in real life, these are the dudes that keep winning despite our angry horror. We feel impotent and broken by it. It makes me sick.

And so, yeah, this sucks. This sucks in a way that is worse than just “normal” losing feels. I really, really wanted the Lions to win this game not just because I’m a Lions fan and want my football team to do well, but because I just wanted something, anything, that could make me feel for only a heartbeat, one meaningless, stupid heartbeat, that I got to be happy, that we got to be happy, while the fuckers lost.

The Lions are 1-3, but I’m not sure if it even matters that much. This season is almost definitely going to be a lost season, and so what we’re left with are moments, in ambushing the Patriots, in taking our best shot at the Cowboy creeps of the world, anything that can help us believe that we’re at least going somewhere, that if we can just get some goddamn players on defense after this season that it might all be okay.

I don’t know. Part of me feels like this is all just rationalization, a survival technique given that the Lions went 9-7 last season and logic would dictate that the next step would actually be, you know, winning, instead of rebuilding from scratch, but logic and the Lions is an absurd combination only counted upon by the terminally insane.

Being a Lions fan is a day to day prospect. If you start trying to grasp the future, if you start looking too far forward and demanding things of the universe, you will break yourself. It’s hard to be poor and to let yourself believe that you’ll be rich one day. It’s hard to love a city that’s endlessly rebuilding, a team always falling on its ass while the Dallas’ and the fake Cowboys of the world get everything they want. It’s fucking hard, and if you don’t slow down and just try to do the best you can, to try to hope that at least today will be a good day, better than yesterday, you’re going to lose your shit. That’s the America we live in, that’s the NFL, and it sucks, but it’s your job to try to find a way to live in the world, to survive, and so you do what you gotta do.

I’m rambling now, but I hope I’m making some sense at least. It’s hard to be a Lions fan, just fucking brutal sometimes, but today, for me anyway, isn’t one of those days, as weird as that sounds, especially given that I just said that I hated losing to these fuckers so much. Today, I’m happy I’m a Lions fan because it’s sure as shit better than being a rotten-souled Cowboys fan. I’m happy that my team isn’t shitting itself today. I’m happy that I at least have reason to Hope that they win the next game, even if I can’t let myself truly Believe it. These are the deals we have to make with our own hearts to survive in this world. Is it rationalization? You bet your ass it is. But when you’re poor, you either find bullshit reasons to believe in tomorrow, whether it’s a shitty scratch-off lotto ticket or a bottle of pills or whatever the fuck gets you by. When you’re a fan of the Detroit Lions, you do the same thing.

Look, this is all more negative than I mean it to sound. The point is that at least I have some reasons to hope, that my pockets aren’t completely empty because the Lions at least feel like a scratch-off ticket or a stray Oxy or whatever. I can be a fan of the Lions today and feel like it might mean something tomorrow, or at least not feel like shit about it for a day.

This all seems weird, I’m sure, given that the Lions lost today, but what can I tell you? I’m a weird dude with weird feelings. I don’t feel bad about being a Lions fan today because while today wasn’t necessarily a good day, and that scratch-off gave me jack shit, I at least feel like I’m in the game. I at least have enough money in my pocket to afford a scratch-off, and while that might seem incredibly pathetic to you, to someone like me, that actually means a lot. To have something, even something that small and that sad, means so much compared to having literally nothing.

That’s all I’m trying to say. Even writing this feels sad, but this is the reality of a Lions fan. That’s how bad it gets sometimes. That’s how bad it got earlier in this season. But right now, I feel like the Lions have at least a dollar or two in their pocket and while that sure as shit won’t buy happiness, it might at least buy Hope. And even if it’s False Hope (it almost certainly is) it’s still a kind of Hope and that’s better than nothing. People will scoff at that and tell you that isn’t true, that False Hope is even worse than nothing, but those people have never had nothing and can fuck off. You live in this world and you find whatever you can to get by, if only for one stupid moment.

I’ve done some impressive gibberish rambling here and to be honest, I don’t blame you if you quit reading about the time I started going on about scratch-offs and opioids. Then again, maybe you understand what I’m trying to get at here. Maybe you don’t. Fuck it.

The Lions are not a good team, but they are not an awful team, and in some weird way, they feel like a better team right now, in the last two weeks, than they felt all of last season, or in just about any of Jim Caldwell’s years. There is no frantic meaningless to it all, no coin flips and bullshit like that. The 49ers game felt like that, and that’s why I hated it even though it was superficially a “close” game. It wasn’t. This one was, and that’s different. The result sucked, but fuck it, I can at least see the outline of something and for today anyway, I’ll take it. At least I can still get up tomorrow.

Living in America

I always get a little fired up whenever the Lions play the Cowboys. This is true for a couple of different reasons, I think. First, there’s the obvious historical reasons: my most cherished Lions memory is sitting in the Silverdome and watching the Lions obliterate the Cowboys for the only playoff win of the last 60 years, of watching Barry Sanders disappear beneath a pile of Cowboys and then somehow emerge out the other end like fuckin’ Houdini and race towards the endzone while everyone in the building lost their collective shit. And, of course, there’s whatever the hell that abomination was in the playoffs a few years ago in Dallas where the Lions should have had their second playoff win of the last 60 years only for the refs, fate and the sheer awful Lionsness of it all to combine to fuck it all up.

But second, and deeper I think, is that the Cowboys – and the city it represents – are everything venal and awful about this country, the exact opposite of the Lions – and the city it represents.

Dallas is a huckster’s paradise, a city of oil conmen and new money, existing for the sole purpose of sucking both the Earth and the people who live on it dry. It’s giant cowboy hats and fake swagger, a sociopath with a bullhorn mouth, a bully that stomps on vulnerable people in order to mask his own pathetic weakness. Dallas is the leering, sweaty brow hanging above the sour stale-beer breathed mouth of a vulture, waiting to pick the bones clean of anyone who lets their guard down for even a moment. It is the New Americanism, an ugly unrestrained capitalism that just takes and takes and takes. It’s no wonder that this is home to the NFL’s America’s Team.

And the Cowboys fall right in line with the whole bullshit mythos of it. They’re worshipped by a certain type who believes in the noisy veneer of the Military-Industrial complex, who wraps themselves in the flag and Lee Greenwood songs, who thinks America exists as an extension of that bully swagger, who doesn’t understand that it’s all just a massive inferiority complex disguised as “power.” The Cowboys are that franchise and always have been.

They are owned by a literal and metaphorical oil man, a dude who’s spent his fortune sucking the earth dry and oozing through life with a rictus grin, a slippery fucker, tasteless and washed in arrogance, a poor man’s idea of a rich man, a dumb man’s idea of a smart man, a stupid cartoon representing everything wrong about this country. The Cowboys are his team. Even before he owned them, they were his team, belonging to the JR Ewings, the fake cowboys of the world.

Their most iconic stars are two quarterbacks who were never their best players, but they represented exactly what the sort of people who love the Cowboys need in their heroes: square-jawed and empty, asses clenched around a permanent stick as they thanked God and saluted the flag, good Christian boys with good Christian values. It didn’t hurt that one was a literal military man, and it really didn’t hurt that both were white as snow, both racially and in terms of their souls.

It didn’t matter that the rest of the team was ugly and mean, cokeheads and whoremongers, as long as you had a Roger Staubach or a Troy Aikman smiling blandly and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance while standing, hands on heart, in front of a flag that their privilege never gave them cause to question. Shallow and empty.

And then you have Detroit, sad, broken Detroit, spit-on and scorned Detroit. Where Dallas was built on a people who took, Detroit was built on a people who built things. Dallas belongs to the bosses. Detroit belongs to the workers. Detroit is the city of the voiceless, of men and women who made their way north after decades of living in constant terror on tenement farms down south, who went to work in the factories, on the assembly lines and built America and each other. They were and are the backbone of this country. When it went to war, they stopped building cars and started building tanks, building planes, building anything and everything to help this country defeat fucking Nazis.

You wake up every day living in a country with problems. You wake up in Dallas’ America. But you also wake up in the most affluent country this world has ever known, in a country where things like “safety” and “liberty” were until recently taken for granted. You live in a country where once upon a time you actually had the chance to get a good job without mortgaging your whole life away, in a country where the poor, the wretched, the sons and daughters of slaves, could get a fair wage for a fair day’s work and buy the very things that they built. That is Detroit’s America. It is a ruined, broken idea, and yet, there was a time when it came the closest to achieving the ideal that we all want to believe in, the basic idea of America. That is Detroit and goddammit, it always will be.

And the Lions are its team. Once proud, a long, long time ago, it is now a broken franchise, scorned and mocked by the Dallas proudbois of the world. It’s a team left behind, a franchise that always sees its Hope stolen by the same corrupt assholes who ruined it all in the first place. The NFL has been turned into a conman’s paradise, a league determined to turn the whole world into the slick oil-fields of Jerry Jones, to match his rotten soullessness, and it’s no wonder that the Lions are always on the shit-end of that stick.

You take Dallas’ heroes, the Staubachs and the Aikmans, and now contrast them with the Lions heroes. Barry Sanders and Calvin Johnson. Both of them quiet, unassuming, just men who wished to go about their business, men of supreme grace, infused with a quiet dignity, who hit the factory floor every day, every week, every year, because you are told that if you do that, you will find the American Dream. That it will find you and everything will be okay.

But it’s not okay. It wasn’t okay, and they were eventually broken by the Lie, by living in Dallas’ America, an America that peddles that lie in order to keep people like Barry Sanders and Calvin Johnson coming to work every day, that peddles that lie so that they will keep building things that the Dallas robber-barons, that the Jerry Jones’ of the world, can coopt and steal and finally just take away altogether because no matter how hard you work, the American Dream is not for you, it is for the bosses, and worse still, the moment it becomes cheaper to let some poor slave in fucking China or wherever do the job, to prop up their stolen prosperity, they’ll even take that away from you and leave you to rot in a city surrounded by other betrayed people. This is what Dallas has done to Detroit, and whenever someone decides to snidely go in on Detroit, this is what you should think about. You should think about a people lied to, a people betrayed, a people robbed of their dreams, of their dignity, of their very security, of a desperate people with nothing left. You think of a Barry Sanders, of a Calvin Johnson, of their beauty, their grace, and you think that they have nothing left to show for it other than their own memories, memories themselves tainted by The Lie.

You assholes in Dallas stole our world. You stole what we built and you corrupted it. You stole what Detroit made and you ruined it with your petty greed and with your hearts made of hate and poison. You wanted it all. Well, now you have it, and your empty-ass souls have wrecked it because that’s who you are. The America you live in today is the America that Dallas deserves because it mirrors the wretched inner-life of a Jerry Jones. Fuck you.

Well . . . shit. Football, eh? I’m fired up! It’s everything I just wrote, but it also comes from watching the Lions dismantle the Patriots, from watching the Broken People pull it together for one beautiful moment and live again in a world that they see for themselves. Maybe the Dream was stolen from us, but the truth is that you can’t steal a Dream. You can’t steal Hope. You can beat it down until its almost nothing, you can make people almost curse it as some sort of sick, ironic joke, but Hope is a thing that lives in everybody, even if they don’t realize it, and sometimes all it takes is something like a stupid game to stoke those embers and then shit baby, we got a little fire going.

It’s not that I suddenly believe that the Lions are gonna take it all back, it’s just that it makes me remember . . . well, all of this. It makes me remember that there are better things, that we don’t have to live in this wretched world, in this Dallas’ America even if its only for one stupid symbolic Sunday afternoon.

The Cowboys don’t really look so hot this season, and still, it was only a week ago that I would have probably written something vastly different, something detached and bored because I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel those embers. This is all stupid in a real sense. I mean, it’s football, who cares? But that is the beauty of a dumb game. It’s just a game, sure, but the magic time is the time when it becomes so much more to you, when it truly becomes your city against theirs, when it becomes you versus them, when it becomes Your Way vs Their Way, and when you’re allowed to believe that, when you’re allowed to believe in that, “sports” becomes something powerful, a kind of ritualized metaphor you can’t find in anything else.

I’ve been woken to that. Maybe it was seeing the Lions hammer the Patriots, and maybe it was seeing the Cowboys next on that schedule. Maybe the timing of it all is just serendipitous to me. I don’t know. I once had some dude chide me and tell me to just write about football, that “this isn’t the New Yorker,” but fuck that. Why do anything, why care about anything, if you can’t make it mean something?

There is an exquisite beauty in allowing yourself to believe, in allowing yourself to feel, for something so obviously dumb. It is nakedly honest in a way that we don’t allow ourselves to be anymore because we’ve had our spirits mangled and abused by the Dallas conmen of the world. They’ve convinced us that we’re dumb, that we’re wrong, that believing in things is a meaningless and futile exercise only done by small children. This is just one of the ways that we’re kept in our place, but fuck all of that.

A couple of weeks from now, the embers might fade a bit, and I might be back to watching this all through ether dulled eyes, wondering how in the world I could have ever felt so goddamn much about such a stupid thing, but for today, for this week anyway, for this game against the Cowboys, I feel it, and it feels good, it feels righteous. It feels like anything is possible, and that is the America that Detroit used to represent. And even if its just symbolic, even if its just a dumb game, I want to believe in that again, and for three hours on a Sunday afternoon, I want to live in that America again.

Lions 27 Cowboys 14

Gambling With Sanity: Week 4

Last week I went 6-10, which brings my overall record to 17-28-3. Look, I’m basically the Lions of this shit, okay? The good thing is that I know people only read this shit for entertainment purposes, like waiting outside the ape exhibit at the zoo to see him jack off and throw his shit around. They’re not expecting the ape to suddenly do calculus on the walls while weeping and reciting poetry. If I fling enough of that shit and spunk around, though, sometimes it accidentally lands in a way that looks like an intelligent thought so, uh, keep reading and also, if you do bet based off this and somehow win big, you owe me a commission, but since the only people who would do that would just end up spending it on cough syrup and sex toys anyway, I suppose that is a moot point. Send me some cough syrup and a dildo and we’ll call it good. Jesus. Anyway, let’s just do this, and as always, these lines come courtesy of the VegasInsider.com consensus.

Minnesota (+7) at the L.A. Rams

Man, you can’t get whipped on by the fucking Bills of all teams and expect people to take you seriously. That is what you get when you ride with a known asshole like Kirk Cousins, though. I mean, any dude who willingly adopts a nickname like “Captain Kirk” is going to be a corny asshole no one can believe in. Fuck him.

Pick: Rams

Miami (+7) at New England

Vegas still believes in the Patriots and not the Dolphins even though the Dolphins are 3-0. They’re also 3-0 against the spread, so take that as you will. The only thing left for the Patriots at this point seems to be Tom Brady fiddling while Boston burns, but you also don’t want to fuck with a desperate sociopath. It was kinda surprising, though, just how impotent Brady and Belichick looked against the Lions. No dynasty ever ends in quiet dignity, with everyone going out winners. They all end in hopeless decay and then death, vulture people picking the bones. We are just animals, cruel and vicious, and no one’s gonna help these dudes. But dying dynasties usually also thrash around a bit before the end, kill a bunch of people to show they can still get their dicks hard, and it’s all so pathetic, but it is also the world we live in.

Pick: New England

Houston (+1.5) at Indianapolis

JJ Watt finally woke up last week, but the Texans still lost, so fuck it, I guess. Once you start out 0-3, you’re pretty much done. By the way, my aunt lives near Houston and got caught up in that Hurricane shit and my dad said no one could get ahold of her for like a week. They finally did, and she had been at work the whole time, at Home Depot because she’s maybe not as gentrified as your family, and said her phone had been dead that whole time. She never bothered to reach out or anything because that’s just how some families are, especially my dad’s, and anyway, she was fine, she just had a little flooding, and also, I’ve only met her once in my life, at my grandpa’s funeral, and she was all “Do you know who I am?” and I was all “Uhhhh, not really . . .” trying to play it off the best I could, and she was all “I’m your aunt Connie” and I was all “Word?” and she was all “Word” but of course we didn’t actually say that because we’re just dumb white folk and instead just sort of stood there doing the fake smile head nod thing for a few seconds and that was the only time I have ever spoken to my Aunt Connie.

Pick: Indianapolis

Cincinnati (+5) at Atlanta

Atlanta is kind of an underrated sad story as far as sports cities go, isn’t it? I mean, the only title they’ve ever won is the Braves in ’95 and that was the year everyone was coming back from the strike and no one really gave a fuck about baseball. The Hawks have never done shit, their hockey team stayed for like a day and then realized they were in fucking Atlanta and went to Winnipeg, and then there’s the Falcons and you’ve already got “28 – 3” running through your head because of course you do, and so do they. That’s a hard psychic thing to overcome, both on its own and in the larger context of Atlanta sports. Even their greatest hero, Hank Aaron, belongs more to another city than to them. He’s Milwaukee’s because that’s where the Braves played for much of his career. This is all very sad, but still, the Bengals aren’t gonna win this game.

Pick: Atlanta

Buffalo (+10) at Green Bay

Buffalo already shot their shot last week and aren’t gonna get a chance to take anyone by surprise again. Every team they play will be ready to not get Vikinged, which sucks for the Bills, but fuck it, at least they have last week. The Packers aren’t really that good this year. They’re sort of like the Patriots and the Seahawks in that they’ve just let everything degrade but quarterback and the result is a sort of confused sense of self. You can’t move on because you still have Aaron Rodgers, but you can’t really be the team everyone expects either because you’ve got nothing but bullshit everywhere else. I talked about all this over and over again in the season preview, and fuck, at least I got something right.

Pick: Green Bay

New York Jets (+7.5) at Jacksonville

Everyone was ready to crown the Jags after they whipped up on the Patriots, but then the Patriots got stomped by the fucking Lions and Jacksonville lost a shitfest field goal game to Tennessee, so . . . yeah. Meanwhile, the Jets are 1-2 since putting a ball gag in Matt Patricia’s mouth (he ate it, of course) and hey, that’s life in the big city, I guess. Like I said before, never trust a team from a city responsible for Fred Durst. On the other hand, you can’t trust a team whose best quarterback is still a thousand year old sex pest roaming the sidelines drunk looking for sideline reporters to molest.

Pick: Jacksonville

Tampa Bay (+3) at Chicago

I like Ryan Fitzpatrick. He sort of has a permanent hang-over fat-stage decadent Jim Morrison vibe that is vaguely Kenny Stablerish, and as you all know I am sure, Ken Stabler is my favorite player of all time even though I never actually saw him play a game. I used to read his autobiography every summer. The cover was an upside-down Raiders helmet with crushed up beer cans in it. Highly recommended if you can find it. Of course, Fitzpatrick isn’t Kenny Stabler. He’s a Harvard grad, which somehow makes the whole thing even seedier in a weird way. Like what the fuck is this dude doing destroying himself in the NFL? Anyway, of course he threw a bunch of interceptions last week and Tampa is gonna go back to Jameis Winston because the NFL is bullshit and so is the world we live in.

Pick: Chicago

Philadelphia (-4) at Tennessee

Is Tennessee the most boring team in the league? I never know anything interesting to say about them. The Eagles haven’t really looked that great so far, and I can see this being a boring defensive struggle, like maybe a field-goal kind of game. And since 3 is less than 4, I suppose I have to pick the Titans. On the other hand, that doesn’t feel right and I don’t want to do it. This is the kind of expertise you come to me for.

Pick: Philadelphia

Seattle (-3) at Arizona

Seattle is done as far as being a contender goes. They still have enough dudes on that defense to kick some shit teams around though and the Cardinals are most certainly a shit team. It’s kind of crazy how purposeless the Seahawks are, though, isn’t it? Like I said about the Packers, they can’t really move on because of Russell Wilson, but you have dudes like Earl Thomas playing but basically not showing up for work the rest of the week, and Pete Carroll has no choice but to be all “O… okay, c… cool, sir” because he’s been cucked by his own team. That’s never a good situation, but Pete Carroll has never exactly been a taskmaster sort so fuck it, maybe it can work. Probably not, though.

Pick: Seattle

Cleveland (+3) at Oakland

lol WAR BROWNS. The Browns should probably be 3-0 which is weird as fuck to say, but of course they are only 1-1-1 because they are still the Browns and these things take time and these demons take multiple exorcisings, sort of like when you go to the dentist and he makes you come back for three follow-up appointments instead of just doing everything all at once. It’s a fuckin’ racket, man. The Industrial-Priest complex is gonna make its exorcism money whether you like it or not. Also, fuck Jon Gruden.

Pick: Cleveland

San Francisco (+10.5) at L.A. Chargers

Jimmy Garropolo’s knee died and with it any chance the 49ers had for hope. This is a lost season for them, which makes it the 4^th straight since Jim Harbaugh left. This is really just a bad break for them, but let’s face it, Garropolo was turning out to be fool’s gold anyway. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tom Brady hired some Haitians or some shit to black magic his ass. That would be hilariously petty, but Tom Brady is a sociopath and would absolutely do something like that. Gisele is probably all “Not in the house, Tom!” and her Haitian maid who she thinks is from Mexico because she’s not a “full negro” as Gisele tells her friends in between cocaine enemas thinks “fuck this Nazi bitch” and retreats to her closet where Gisele makes her sleep and she starts slapping around the Brady family voodoo doll because what goes around comes around. Anyway, don’t fuck with Haitians.

Pick: Chargers

New Orleans (-3.5) at Giants

I can’t remember if I told you this before or not, but I’m apparently descended from Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville on my mom’s side and he’s the dude who founded New Orleans, so it’s technically my city. It belongs to me. And let’s face it, that is the most appropriate damn thing, is it not? On the other hand, it probably helps to explain why shit never seems to go the way the people of New Orleans hope. I’m sorry dudes and lady dudes. Of course, this is all probably bullshit family lore, like most family lore, but I like to think it’s true and that’s all that really matters. Anyway, I demand that Drew Brees leave my city immediately under pain of vampires.

Pick: Giants

Baltimore (+3) at Pittsburgh

I support anyone’s right to say fuck the bosses and try to wring as much blood money out of them as possible, but I also have personal grudges against Le’Veon Bell so fuck him. It’s also kind of nuts for a running back to throw away one of his prime years when they only get like 3 these days before their brains turn to pudding and they become 90 year old men and start choking their families out and hanging themselves from weight machines, but fuck it, that’s also why they need to get as much as they can while they can. It’s a complicated issue, but again, fuck Le’Veon Bell. Politics and beliefs are one thing, petty blood feuds another.

Pick: Baltimore

Kansas City (-5) at Denver

I was gonna say that at least I was right about Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs but I forgot I didn’t even pick them to win the AFC West in the preview, so fuck me, I guess. Anyway, they are straight killing fools, but lost in all that is that their defense has been kind of shitty. No one cares about that, though. They just want to see deep bombs because we’re all just dumb brutes deep down who want to see big explosions and hear loud noises go boom while we fondle ourselves. I would say that this feels like Kansas City’s season, but it’s never Kansas City’s season. On the other hand, my grandma lives near Kansas City now and she doesn’t have much time left. The last time I saw her she asked me if I had been going to church and I said “sometimes” because I’m a coward and also because why not just let her believe I am good and not a hell-bound degenerate? Anyway, it would be nice if Kansas City would win for her, but wait, she’s not even a football fan. She’s a baseball fan. I don’t know what I’m even gibbering about. None of this matters. I’m sorry.

Pick: Kansas City