Short, Brutish and Nasty

You don’t actually believe that the Lions will beat the Patriots, right? Good, let’s just get that shit straight right away. The only real intrigue is in the way it happens. Furious Staffordian comeback that falls short? Obscure rulebook chicanery? Martha Ford gets drunk and streaks the field and the game gets canceled? All of the above? Or maybe the Patriots just beat the shit out of the Lions from the start and we can spend the rest of the night getting fucked up and jacking off. Who’s to say?

There’s the whole Matt Patrica: ex-Patriot of it all to consider. Both Bill Belichick and Tom Brady are exactly the sort of psychos who would take perverse pleasure in humiliating him just that he knows his place in the pecking order, so that when he inevitably returns home they can make him scrub nose-tackle ball-slime from the toilet seats without any backtalk.

This is especially true in light of reports that an unnamed Patriots assistant (or former assistant) claims that all of the coaches think that Brady gets too much of the credit, but Robert Kraft loves Brady and meanwhile Brady hates Belichick. Brady, especially, will be out for blood, an absolute sociopath bent on the destruction of everyone who isn’t him, and if that starts with Patricia, all the better. You don’t want to fuck with Tom Brady With Something To Prove. That way lies madness and insanity, and also a grim and awful death.

Look, I don’t care that the Patriots lost to the Jaguars, and convincingly too. I don’t even care that it’s kind of obvious they’re in the last, ugly stages of their glory, in those last couple of years when everything becomes a sort of discordant death wail of humiliating losses, infighting, old players waddling around with their pants around their ankles sucking their thumbs while some young buck spanks them and an entire nation howls for their blood . . . I don’t care about any of that this week because the Lions are not the team to accelerate that process. Also, “Discordant Death Whale” is a good band name.

It’s not just that the Lions are 0-2. It’s not just that Matt Patricia is already a swollen pinata. It’s not even just that Matthew Stafford is spiritually touring the Outback once again. It’s all of that, and more. It’s Darius Slay wandering around with a brain made of pudding after last week. It’s Ziggy Ansah and Taylor Decker and TJ Lang and who the fuck knows who else wondering if they should even bother to risk it all for this sorry ass team. It’s LeGarrette Blount becoming a quintessential Lion in only his second fucking game. It’s all of it. And it’s about 10,000 other things we haven’t even seen yet.

You take that, and it makes the Decline and Fall of New England seem quaint. After all, Rome even during its decline was still Rome and some mudhole village in Albania or wherever the fuck was still just some mudhole village. I don’t care that Rome is clearly Doomed, at any point they can send in a single legion and reduce that village to ash and bad memories.

This preview is short and nasty, just like the life of one of those Albanian villagers, but fuck, man, what else do you want me to say? I mean, even the Browns have nosed past the Lions again on the NFL Misery Index. Right now, only the Bills are in probably a sorrier state and at least they made the playoffs last season. Trying to find Hope in individual games seems like obscene madness.

If the Lions do somehow win, if they do the miraculous and stampede their goats through that Roman Legion, everything changes. Or maybe not. After all, Rome will just send another legion tomorrow. Then again, that is the story of the Fall of Rome. Eventually, they had to send too many legions and . . . this metaphor is falling apart.

Anyway, the point is this: if the Lions were to somehow win, I don’t think it changes much for this season, and I think it would say some truly ominous shit about the Patriots more than anything else. But it would at least buy Bob Quinn and Patricia some time, and it would at least hint that maybe something good could happen in some far-off time, but then again maybe not. After all, that tiny Albanian village is 2,000 years later a cramped series of drab apartments, and inside are swarthy gangsters in Adidas tracksuits watching soccer and screaming at the TV and their baby-mamas while those babies scream and cry because of the fetal alcohol syndrome. Things change, but not really.

Patriots 38 Lions 17