Gambling With Sanity: Week 6

We roll deeper into the season with naught but despair and the utter indignity of failure in our hearts, coming off of a 4-8-2 week which brings the season total to a dismal 27-42-8 and I imagine the straight up record is even worse because as much as I think I have it all figured out, I’m really just a half-bright junkie hovering on the fringe, born to lose. But no one ever gets the perspective of the born losers, so you should still read this anyway, if only as a cautionary tale. lol fuck it, as it says in the Bible. Anyway, two things before we begin: as always, these lines come courtesy of the VegasInsider.com consensus (please pay me for plugging you to my literally dozens of readers) and two, since it is the Lions bye week, I’ll probably take off until next Wednesday, or actually maybe Tuesday since next Wednesday’s my birthday and I plan on killing myself. Calm down, I’m joking. Probably.

Philadelphia (-3) at N.Y. Giants

Two nasty ass fanbases that hate each other and themselves, pissed as usual, but for different reasons this season. The Giants are gonna ride Eli Manning straight to hell, while the Eagles are pissing away their Super Bowl, which I told you all was going to happen but it’s still lol nonetheless. The most likely thing that happens in this game is some sweaty Italian fellas in wife beaters who stink of cheese and spousal abuse will fight some other Italians in wife beaters who stink of cheese and spousal abuse in the crowd and in a nobler and simpler age, the entire stadium would be deloused and condemned, but we don’t live in either a noble or simple age and so instead whoever wins the brawl will be elected President.

Pick: Philadelphia

Arizona (+10.5) at Minnesota

Minnesota seems like an easy pick here, but we can’t forget they got humiliated by the fucking Bills a couple of weeks ago so anything’s possible. Also, Minnesota is kind of an underrated loser of a state. You have to remember that they once elected Jesse Ventura as governor, who was sort of a proto-Trumpian dipshit with dumb ideas, an inveterate liar and fake tough guy who duped stupid people into voting for him because “hey, this dumb guy is different and I once saw him pose half naked in a ring, and he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS” which is just code for I’M A MEAN PIECE OF SHIT WHO NEEDS HIS HATRED AND BIGOTRY VALIDATED BY A FUCKING CARNY but what the hell, I guess people didn’t know any better. But they then elected a fucking Saturday Night Live dude from the coke years as Senator, and of course he turned out to be a serial groper, and all of this doesn’t even take into account the Vikings 0-4 Super Bowl record, or their belief that Kirk Cousins of all people will change things. Just a naïve, secretly embarrassing state of simpleton giant Norsemen willing to embrace any idiot they see on their magic TV boxes. I’m probably going too hard on Minnesota here, but maybe no one else is going hard enough. Who is to say?

Pick: Minnesota

L.A. Chargers (-1) at Cleveland

I’ll admit it: I’m rooting for the Browns this season. This is shocking because of the whole Ohio trash people of it all, but maybe I just feel secret solidarity with a fellow loser. I don’t know. Maybe it is because my boy Dan (hi, Dan!) is a Browns fan, which is inexplicable, but he’s from England, and not even the big city posh part but like a fucked up part like Wigan, which also produced the Dynamite Kid, so the people there obviously don’t make good choices. He just doesn’t know any better.

Pick: Cleveland

Chicago (-3) at Miami

Don’t trust the Bears. Never trust the Bears. They’ve had a pretty decent start to the season, recovered nicely from the whole Aaron Rodgers of it all in week one, and seem like they’re headed in a good direction, but the Bears never really get their shit together and they will fuck this up. Listen, I understand when a team or a dude is a natural loser. I can smell that shit, the same way gay dudes can sniff out other gay dudes, which might sound offensive to you, but gays have a secret gland beneath their balls which secrete a pheromone that only other gays can smell, sort of like a sexual dog whistle. Listen, this is just science. I’m not saying I like writing these things. But you can’t argue with science. I’ve tried. I’ve tried sniffing under the balls of gay men and even licking down there and I can’t tell a difference and I’m totally straight, so it has to be true.

Pick: Miami

Carolina (+1) at Washington

I still think the only way to save Cam Newton is to hook him up with Ric Flair. Sure, he’ll end up broke and pathetic by 70, but who cares? He’s in the prime of his life and you might as well get busy fucking or get busy dying. Right now, you can’t trust him. He seems untethered, aimless, just surviving off of reputation and his gifted body, like late stage Dirk Diggler or some shit. He’s only one scene away from blowing dudes in pickup trucks. He’s gonna end up robbing some rich mark’s house while a hairless Asian boy throws firecrackers and they listen to Night Ranger. Sure, that’s probably the same thing as the Ric Flair story, but you can’t argue with a 15-time champion.

Pick: Washington

Indianapolis (+2.5) at N.Y. Jets

Andrew Luck coming back was supposed to change things for the Colts, but here they are, still losing. And you can’t really blame it on him since he’s probably the only good thing they’ve got going, but still. Personally, I blame it on his weird Andre the Giant voice, which has to be weird as fuck to listen to in the huddle all game long, especially when shit is noisy and wild and frenzied, and then you’ve got some mush-mouth dude garbling whale-song (shout out to my boy, AmpleVigor, which is his given legal name) and you’re sitting there thinking “what the fuck did this dude just say?” while your mind takes you to Giant Baba whale songing it in Korakuen Hall and then the play is over and Andrew Luck is yelling at you using only lines from The Princess Bride, and shit, that’s life in the big time, I guess.

Pick: Indianapolis

Pittsburgh (+2.5) at Cincinnati

I hate to give the Steelers any credit as long as Ben Roethlisberger is wandering the field with his dick out, palms hairy, eyes wide with sexual frenzy, as he scans the stands for his latest victim, but they seemed to finally get their shit together last week. Maybe the team finally moved on mentally from Le’Veon Bell. I don’t know. It has to be hard ignoring the fact that your best player wants nothing to do with you. I mean, I know it’s hard. Hi, Barry. Hi, Calvin. But those dudes weren’t assholes, which made it even tougher to disassociate for Lions fans. Le’Veon Bell is a dick, which probably makes it easier to emotionally move on, but still. Anyway, I still don’t trust the Bengals, but it’s reaching the point where you’d be an idiot to keep betting against them.

Pick: Cincinnati (I originally picked Pittsburgh to complete the joke, but changed it because I’m a coward.)

Tampa Bay (+3.5) at Atlanta

I asked my boy Adrian, noted Falcons fan, what the fuck is wrong with the Falcons this season and he replied that their defense is just straight ass, which is a problem given the Bucs can throw it all over the field. Granted, the last couple of weeks those throws have had a tendency to end up in the arms of defensive players, but still. BUT STILL. BUTT STILL. Anyway, this will probably be a wild, high scoring game, and Andy, my other Falcons fan friend, will probably have a heart attack at some point, but then again he disappeared from Twitter a while back and since he is also the biggest degenerate gambler I know, the odds are good that he’s currently stuffed inside an oil drum somewhere while his long-suffering wife listens to her mother tell her “that son of a bitch was no good anyway” and his young son wails and cries for his father in the background. Life is a bitch.

Pick: Tampa Bay

Seattle (-3) at Oakland

A few weeks ago, Jon Gruden said something like “pass rushers don’t just grow on trees.” That’s probably not the actual quote, but that’s the gist of it. Anyway, that is fucking hilarious given the whole Khalil Mack of it all, but what else can you expect from a dude who’s just grifting his way through this thing? He knows as long as he plays the rebuilding card he has all the time in the world to con everyone. Not that it’s hard to con a dumbass like Mark Davis. I mean, the dude’s first name is even “Mark”. Anyway, Gruden can play that card all season, and probably next and by the time he’s living in a Vegas casino penthouse getting blown by comped bottle girls, it will be too late for anyone to do anything about it. Still, the Seahawks psychic situation is somehow even worse. At least the Raiders don’t have dudes flipping them off as they’re carted off the field.

Pick: Oakland

Buffalo (+9.5) at Houston

I’m going to pick Buffalo, but not because I think they’re gonna win but because these teams have at least decent defenses and not very good offenses and how the hell are you gonna rely on a spread that big in that kind of game? Then again, I’m 27-42-8 against the spread this season so what the fuck do I know?

Pick: Buffalo

L.A. Rams (-7) at Denver

It’s looking like it’s the Rams and the Chiefs this year with everyone else chasing, but the Rams are bound to trip up at least once or twice. It almost happened last week, and Denver seems like a good place for it to happen again, but I don’t think it will if only because the Rams probably caught that lesson against Seattle. Still, playing in that mile-high air is a huge advantage for the Broncos and to be honest, I don’t think Denver should be allowed to have pro sports teams because Denver itself fucks everything up. Especially in football and baseball. Also, remember that dude who played for the Steelers, I think it was Ryan Clark, who could never even play in Denver because the air might literally kill him? I mean, what the fuck? Everyone gets all bent about steroids or a football being underfilled by a queef’s worth of air (scientific measurement) and no one cares about an environment that alters things that radically? Come on.

Pick: Rams

Jacksonville (-3) at Dallas

I’m downgrading Jacksonville. Everyone is gonna overrate that win over the Patriots, but the Patriots were clearly in a place where they’d lose to anyone (I mean, they lost to the Lions the next week) and Jacksonville hasn’t really looked very good since. Maybe it’s the whole Fred Durst of it all, I don’t know. Still, I forget sometimes that Jacksonville is also the home of the Van Zant boys, but Ronnie is dead and his brother is basically a second rate Michael P.S. Hayes because that’s just how the world goes.

Pick: Jacksonville because fuck Dallas

Baltimore (-3) at Tennessee

I have nothing interesting to say here. (when do you ever? Hahaha *puts gun in mouth*)

Pick: Baltimore

Kansas City (+3.5) at New England

Tom Brady is like a horror movie villain in that as soon as you think he’s dead, he climbs back out of the lake or whatever and starts killing teens again. I mean that literally, by the way. I think there’s a very good chance that at some point, Tom Brady has hidden out in a lake and then chased down a bunch of young teens late at night because it’s the only way he can get an erection anymore. This is what happens when you are a vainglorious sociopath. The more people discount Brady the crazier he’s gonna get and eventually he’s gonna end up being ganged up on by all those teens and burned to death, but until then he’s just gonna go on murderin’. Still, the Patriots defense is still the Patriots defense, which is to say a piece of shit, and Pat Mahomes and Tyreek Hill are coming to town and they are going to burn these Patricia PTSD survivors to the ground. Lots of burning in this paragraph, and that’s without talking about how Gisele can only get wet if Tom (or more likely, that Haitian houseboy she literally bought a while back who can’t speak a word of English) lights matches one by one and puts them out on her quivering body, or how her and Tom sometimes hold their child’s hand over a hot stove while staring intensely into each other’s eyes, waiting for the brat to cry.

Pick: Kansas City

San Francisco (-9.5) at Green Bay

There was a moment near the end of the Packers loss to the Lions where the camera found Aaron Rodgers seemingly consoling his longtime teammate, Mason Crosby, after Crosby missed his 4^th field goal of the game (along with an extra point), but what people don’t realize is that Rodgers was calmly telling him all the horrible things he was going to do to each member of his family. Crosby just nodded, sadly. He knows the deal. He understands what happens when you cross the devil. After all, this is the same monster who once got Raven Mack’s sister hooked on crack just for laughs. Somewhere, this past week, Mason Crosby’s sister pulled helplessly at her chains and tried to moan for help, but all that came out was a garbled mess, the result of having her tongue removed. She can’t see anymore, not with her eyes missing, but she can still hear Aaron Rodgers as he whispers to her every day about how he’s going to take her feet, one by one, so that he can plant them in Mason Crosby’s locker with a note saying “Even your sister can kick better than you . . . and she doesn’t have any feet.” It’s crude, yes, and not even all that clever, but it’s only a start. Mason knows this. Mason accepts this. This is what happens when you deal with the devil.

Pick: Green Bay