Death From Above 2018

The Rams are gonna win.

Gambling With Sanity: Week 13

So, last week I said I would tack my picks onto the Thanksgiving post but obviously that never happened and so you can decry me as a liar and a scoundrel if you want, but fuck it and fuck you too!!! Sorry, I didn’t mean that. I mean, I kind of did, but let’s forget about it. Anyway, lines as usual come from the VegasInsider.com consensus, who instead of sponsoring me sent me a cease and desist letter on Thanksgiving, but if didn’t work for Alexandra Daddario, why would it work for them?

New Orleans (-7.5) at Dallas

The Cowboys have wormed their way to the top of the NFC East thanks to a convergence of factors: Alex Smith’s untimely death, the Eagles going Full Philadelphia this season and because the universe is bullshit and creepshow death mask wearing ghouls like Jerry Jones run everything. But fear not, because Jerry Jones is also incompetent and whenever anything is merit based (and the NFL is . . . barely, but come on, humor me here) dudes like him inevitably fuck up and embarrass themselves. Donald Trump’s teams would never win the Super Bowl either, you know? He’d end up ruining the league and forcing black players to lick his feet during the anthem, but still, no rings for that idiot. (Also, I’ve said it before: Jimmy Johnson built and won those Super Bowls for the Cowboys, things fell apart when Jerry Jones decided he needed to swing his three inch dick around and take control of everything, so THERE)

Pick: New Orleans

Indianapolis (-4) at Jacksonville

Goddamn, the Jaguars collapsed faster than the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane, or Fred Durst’s career. That may sound terrible, but it’s spiritually Correct for Jacksonville. This is who they are, what that godforsaken place is. No wonder my boy Al is a hopeless drunk. Love ya, buddy.

Pick: Indianapolis

L.A. Chargers (+3.5) at Pittsburgh

I’ve said more than once this season that Matthew Stafford is basically Philip Rivers. That’s an obvious insult, but at the same time, here’s ol’ Phil at 8-3 ready to take another shot at the playoffs, so is that really such a bad thing to be? Fast forward to January when Rivers is throwing his 5^th interception of the game and he’s stomping off the field with a sneer on his face like fucking Niedermeyer from Animal House. This is just who he is at his core, and it’s who Stafford is. That’s okay, I guess. I mean, that’s life. Life also sucks.

Pick: Pittsburgh

Carolina (-3.5) at Tampa Bay

The Panthers have begun their slide and the Buccaneers are basically as worthless as the Jaguars now, so who really cares? The Bucs should just let Ryan Fitzpatrick get drunk as fuck and start the game. That would at least be fun to watch. Someone get Cam Newton coked up and let him play the game in a fur coat screaming Ric Flair promos instead of the snap count every play. This is the only way to save this game and the NFL.

Pick: Tampa Bay

Baltimore (+1) at Atlanta

This is how shitty the AFC is this year: the Ravens have basically already decided to move on from John Harbaugh and Joe Flacco and to blow this shit up because it obviously isn’t working anymore, and yet the Ravens will probably get into the playoffs this season. That is a shitty ass conference right there. It’s basically a 3-team conference: the Patriots, Chiefs and Steelers. Who else is there? Philip Rivers is gonna fuck the Chargers, so forget them. Imagine the Ravens sneaking in and upsetting their way to a Super Bowl. They’ve done it before. And then imagine John Harbaugh getting fired anyway. lol what a league.

Pick: Atlanta

Cleveland (+6) at Houston

lol Baker Mayfield came out and said “Fuck Hue Jackson, that mongoloid idiot was holding us back, I’m glad he’s dead and also I fucked his wife.” That’s a direct quote. I didn’t make that up. You’re not allowed to lie on the internet. Anyway, it’s probably not a good thing when your rookie quarterback is willing to shit-talk people so openly and bury them out the door like that, but that was always the thing with Baker Mayfield. He’s an asshole. That’s fine, as long as things are going well and he can channel that asshole energy towards pissing off the enemy, but if things don’t go well, he can easily channel that towards pissing off his own dudes, and since this is the Browns, I think we know where this is inevitably headed. Dan, I can’t believe you support someone who uses hateful language like that . . . I mean, “mongoloid”? You should reevaluate some things.

Pick: Houston

Buffalo (+4.5) at Miami

Sad news to report: I have a family friend who lives in Buffalo. She’s one of the coolest and most amazing people I know. She’s overcome a lot and has a big family, including adopted kids and foster kids and all that, just a beautiful, gigantic-hearted woman who deserves all the best in life. Anyway, she just found out she has colon cancer. She was passing out and shit and had lost a lot of weight and they eventually found a big tumor on her colon. They removed it, but they couldn’t get it all and it doesn’t look good. She’s 38. Anyway, welcome to Buffalo.

Pick: Miami

Chicago (-4.5) at N.Y. Giants

Mitch Trubisky is still questionable, which is why this line is so low. Most places don’t even have a line on this game because of it, but those usurious vampires at VegasInsider.com (love you guys) gots to get their blood money. Anyway, the Giants stink and the Bears defense will probably get them through this. This just seems like one of those couple times a decade Bears team where their defense eats people and they win the division and then next season they’ll go 4-12, but then again Lovie Smith was last seen wandering around Illinois looking like Black Hobo Santa, so maybe it will be different this time.

Pick: Chicago

Denver (-4.5) at Cincinnati

It took a while, but Marvin Lewis eventually revealed himself as a worthless bozo just like I said he would. Andy Dalton is out for the Bengals too, so this should be ugly. On the other hand, John Elway has ruined the Broncos, so who is to say? The NFL is full of idiots who are in charge of things just because they are.

Pick: Denver

Arizona (+14) at Green Bay

There is a sense of finality, of incurable rot, hanging over the Packers right now. Or at least this version of them. It was like they were conducting some fucked up experiment to see how shitty they could get around Aaron Rodgers in order to see how deep his devil-pact truly run. It turns out even the devil can’t help you when it gets this shitty. Mike McCarthy has flatlined and everyone pretty much knows it’s over. But what the hell, it gets dark at like 3PM right now in Green Bay anyway, so it should be pretty easy for everyone just to get drunk and bitch at their wives like Red Foreman, although in Wisconsin it’s usually much more passive-aggressive than that and AT BEST it will just turn out like Fargo. They need the Packers, man.

Pick: Green Bay

Kansas City (-15) at Oakland

I have a dirty little secret that makes me look like an asshole: I actually don’t enjoy games like that 50 whatever to 50 whatever game between the Chiefs and Rams that everyone was jacking off to. It’s just mind-numbing tedium to me, football as basketball with no real meaning – oh hey look, the Rams just scored again and oh boy so did the Chiefs, this is really fun ho hum – I mean, when every drive ends in a touchdown, who really cares? I recognize that this is just a personal failing on my part, a weird quirk that shouldn’t be valued or encouraged, but I actually like brute-force concussion ball shit, at least on an aesthetic level. I’m not a good person.

Pick: Kansas City

N.Y. Jets (+7.5) at Tennessee

Tennessee might be the most boring team in the league. I never know what to say about them. I mean, who cares?

Pick: Tennessee

San Francisco (+10) at Seattle

Seattle is a lot like Green Bay in that they’ve sort of let things rot around Russell Wilson, but they do still have some dudes on defense, so it’s not a full Packering yet. These things have different stages: you have the Seahawks, who are headed towards terminal decay, but maybe they recognized it quick enough and can rebuild on the fly. Then you have the Packers, who never really recognized it, and now it’s too late and they have nothing but Aaron Rodgers and even he is starting to break down a bit. And then you have the Patriots, who should be the terminal version. Everything has fallen around Tom Brady, the defense gave up 10,000 yards and points in the Super Bowl, rumors of hideous infighting abound, and yet they’re still the Alpha Dogs because Tom Brady transcends such petty shit. It’s a reminder that as great as dudes like Aaron Rodgers and Russell Wilson are, Tom Brady is on a whole different level. It’s also a reminder that having a dude like Pete Carroll makes a huge difference vs having a dude like Mike McCarthy.

Pick: Seattle

Washington (+6.5) at Philadelphia

Man, things sure turned on the Redskins fast, didn’t they? It’s almost like you’re risking a spiritual curse by building your team on a goddamn Indian graveyard. Alex Smith is dead, and now they have their dudes sending out “apologetic but not really” word-soup press releases to justify signing a violent woman-beater like Reuben Foster. I mean, the whole thing basically could have been summed up like this: “We know this is fucked up, but we don’t care. This motherfucker might help us win a football game.” The end. It’s especially funny that the Redskins also lost Alex Smith and never even bothered to call Colin Kaepernick, which just frames the whole Reuben Foster thing so perfectly. “Yeah, this dude gave his girlfriend a series of shoot DDTs followed by a Stone Cold Stunner, but at least he’ll stand up for the anthem!” lol the NFL is so fucked.

Pick: Philadelphia

Minnesota (+5) at New England

What do you think a Tom Brady Thanksgiving looks like? I imagine it is a bunch of organic macro-biotic or whatever buzzword bullshit “food-like” sustenance products spread in order of their Soylent color around the table while Gisele berates the help and refuses to let Tom’s son he had with Bridget Moynahan out of his cage. “Just slip him some scraps along with the dogs” she tells Tom, or more likely, the Haitian houseboy who she won’t let wear clothes because “he isn’t to be made to feel human.” Tom’s parents are allowed to call him and speak for 2 to 3 minutes depending on the schedule, and when he says “I love you too, Mom” Gisele gets angry and tells him “Love is a wasted, useless emotion, Thomas” and then the phone dies and he loses his telephone privileges for the next month. Meanwhile, their child cackles because it’s actually a Hitler clone like in The Boys From Brazil and calls Tom “a useless ass” and the child and Gisele laugh while Tom fights off tears before he chokes them down along with the rest of his feelings and he smiles at them, a plastic, empty smile and tells himself that later he can let it all out during the Thanskgiving Hobo Hunt and Gisele told him he can choke one with his bare hands this year and his child with Bridget says “Dad . . . I still love you,” from his cage but Tom doesn’t hear him, Tom can’t hear him, and Gisele has the Haitian houseboy poke Bridget’s son with a sharp stick and every time the boy cries out in pain she gets more and more wet and she thinks “maybe I’ll let Thomas fuck me tonight” but she’ll probably just torture the Haitian to death instead.

Pick: New England

I'm Not Thankful

Another game, another loss. Another Thanksgiving, another loss. Another year, another lost year. Another . . . fuck, man. Just fuck. We’re so beyond the horizon line when it comes to this shit that there is no way to contextualize it, no way to really analyze it other than to do some Looney Tunes shit where I just flash a whacky sign to the camera and then plummet to my death on the canyon floor below. I mean, I’ll try, but I can pretty much guarantee it will just end in gibberish and tears.

There a lot of ways the Lions lose football games. You know this. I know this. We collectively know this the same way we collectively know how to breathe. It is knowledge so deep, so inherent to our very lives as Lions fans that it’s not even a conscious thing, it is involuntary knowledge. We could hold our breath, but then we’d die. Maybe that’s better, I don’t know. But, anyway, this is Version #9,638, in which the other team doesn’t win the game so much as the Lions just lose the fucking thing.

The Lions defense only gave up 16 points, which should be enough in any game, but then Matthew Stafford almost literally gave the game away and, well, here we are. In the aftermath, the arguments about Stafford have begun, the endless infighting and backbiting amongst Lions fans has unhinged its unholy jaw and swallowed us all anew and we’ve all seen this before, every last miserable part of it, and what is left to say or do? This is Lions football, 60 years running, and there is no escape.

I guess I could talk about Stafford, since that is all the rage. It’s been ten years. When he got here, I was still in my 20’s (barely, but shut up) Twitter wasn’t a thing, there were still people clinging to myspace, Obama had yet to be thanked, Donald Trump was a reality show host, the Red Wings were still good, and people still read shit instead of just watching videos all goddamn day. This was a long time ago.

To put it another way, Stafford has been the Lions quarterback for roughly 17% of those 60 years of wandering in the desert. That’s a lot of wandering.

And the thing is, is that he’s obviously not doing the damn thing this season, and next season isn’t gonna happen either. At that point, he’s what? 12, 13 years into a career with nothing to show for it? And that’s even assuming that this somehow all works out in the end, which is lunatic gibberish kind of shit. So, what then? Does a 42 year old Stafford finally drag the Lions across the finish line and then ride off into the sunset in a robot google car?

This is the reality we live in, and it sucks. But here’s the other side of that reality, and I don’t know if this makes things better or worse: we’re not gonna do any better than Stafford, at least for the foreseeable future. Leaving aside his monster contract, which makes him basically untradeable without completely crippling the cap, what would this look like if we dumped him and started over at QB? Say we get the new rookie hotshot QB – who doesn’t exist in this draft by the way – what then? Wait 3 or 4 years before he’s even ready to do anything beyond waddling in his diaper? No thanks. So then we’re what, into 2022 or 2023 and by then Matt Patricia surely hasn’t survived, literally thanks to a spaghetti heart attack and metaphorically thanks to years of losing, and so we’ll have a new coach with a new plan and maybe he starts looking for his quarterback and then we’re starting over again and then it’s a new five year plan or whatever and then we’re all old and then we’re all dead and our children are bitching about the Lions and 100 years of failure or whatever the fuck.

We’re stuck with Stafford. This is the reality we live in. There are no options even worth considering here. We just nervously hold this goddamn gun to our head and hope that we have the strength not to pull the trigger. Or the strength to pull it. Whichever works for you.

Matthew Stafford is Philip Rivers and that’s okay. I mean, I guess. Sure, it just puts you in some sort of Phantom Zone of fandom, but in that zone maybe you can convince yourself that this year will be the year, that if one or two things break the right way then ol’ Phil Stafford can overcome that slight defect in his makeup and fool the gods for once.

That is the shittiest thing about this, really. Stafford is 99% of a Real Deal Franchise Quarterback. The problem is that the 1% that’s missing makes all the difference in the world. To be so close, to live in a world of constant Almost, is agonizing. We’re all Tantalus only an inch away from that fruit or from that drink of water, but we can never quite get there.

But, I mean, it’s not like we have a choice. This is It. This is what we have, this is who we have. We can’t abandon it. We can’t start over because we’re out of time. I mean, I guess we could. Time is a relative concept to Lions fans, but you know what I mean. To us, here today, the desperation of Time is so acute, so terrible, that to have to suck it up for another decade or whatever is just too much to bear. I can’t deal with that shit and neither can you.

So . . . it’s Matthew Stafford until it obviously isn’t. That is ridiculously grim when you put it like that, but it’s the only way we’re gonna even be able to delude ourselves into Hope anytime in the near future. After all, the Chargers are 8-3 and I’m sure at least 1 or 2 of their 6 fans thinks that this is finally the year for Philip Rivers.

Throwing away a single game in the shadow of all that almost seems trivial, but somehow the goddamn losses never are for us, are they? They all have their own unique flavor. This will always be the Thanksgiving game that Matthew Stafford threw away and gave to Chase fucking Daniel and the Bears. It is its own thing in our diseased minds, both singular and all too familiar at the same time. That is the sick paradox of Lions fandom – it all feels brand new and awful while it’s happening and yet disgustingly familiar at the same time. This is both version #9,638 and The Time Stafford Ruined Thanksgiving.

There are other things, of course. There is the whole Chase Daniel of it all, and there is Michael Roberts quitting on a route as Stafford throws a hissy fit after that last interception. But mostly, it’s about Matthew Stafford throwing it all away because we eternally live in that 1% that’s missing, because he should be something else and so should we, and yet we’re not, and his very existence has become a sick metaphor for our entire struggle. It’s unfair and it’s fucked up, but welcome to the Detroit Lions.

I have no answers. There are no answers. Next year, Matthew Stafford will be the quarterback of the Lions, and we’ll all take a deep breath and allow ourselves to hope that the 1% will magically show up. And then we’ll do the same thing the next year, and the one after that until one day, one season, Matthew Stafford isn’t the Lions quarterback anymore. And then we’ll start concocting elaborate fantasies about the new guy and then 10 more years will pass and this is how 60 years happens, and it is how 60 will become 70 and how 70 will become 80 and how misery is really a thing without end, without bottom. Tantalus is a goddamn Lions fan.

Thanksgiving

In 1934 – that’s 84 years ago – the first televised NFL Thanksgiving game was played. And it was played in Detroit, Michigan. The Lions played the Bears, and, naturally, lost to the Bears. The Lions have hosted the Thanksgiving game every season since, and every season it’s the same thing from people who don’t get it: “Why do the Lions get the Thanksgiving game every year? They suck.”

This misses the point. The Lions get the Thanksgiving game every year because it’s ours. It has always been ours, and it always will be ours. And I say the Thanksgiving game because the Dallas Cowboys stole it from us, copied it, and lived off of what we built to become “America’s Team.” As metaphors for gentrification go, that one is tough to beat.

We’re used to people taking from us. We’re used to being left broken in a ditch while the Dallas Cowboys of the world leave town counting their money – counting our money. We understand this because it has been woven into the very character of Detroit, of Michigan.

These days, people mock Detroit, mock Michigan. They sneer and make jokes about abandoned buildings, about burned out husks of our history, about people who can’t even get a glass of clean drinking water, and it’s all true. It sucks, but it’s true. But the thing is, is that it wasn’t always true, and the other thing is that it’s not our fault. You want to blame us? We’re the victims here. We built something, we made something, and that something is called the United States of America. And you clean-faced bastards stole it from us.

You wanna know why the Lions got the first televised Thanksgiving game? Because Detroit was the heart of this country. Detroit was bigger then, swelled with internal immigrants, the broken, the downtrodden, the oppressed, who came up from down south to find the American Dream, to find it in a hard day’s work and a fair wage, to find it 40 hours at a time, to find it in the satisfaction of being able to afford the very things that they built with their own two hands. They found it, and they thrived. They built a city, they built a culture, they built a state, rooted in that belief: that any man, born anywhere, could roll up his sleeves and get what was promised to him. This is the Only place where the American Dream was Real.

There are still murals in Detroit that show men – black and white – working hard, side by side, to build something. And it wasn’t just something they were building for others, for rich con-artists and carpetbaggers, but for themselves, for each other. That mural will never die. It is part of Detroit forever and ever. So is Joe Louis’ fist. You know the statue. It’s just a giant goddamn fist. That is Detroit. That is who we are.

And when World War II came around, what did we do? Detroit took all of its might, all of its knowhow, and built the machine that would win a goddamn World War. You want to thank someone for saving the world? You thank Detroit. You want to sit down on Memorial Day or Veteran’s Day or, yes, Thanksgiving, and give thanks to someone? You thank Detroit.

But money always talks, and the people who control the money always listen to it, and what they hear makes them just want more and more of it, and so people like the Dallas Cowboys came and took it from us. These rank hypocrites who wear the flag on their chest, who cry crocodile tears whenever a soldier is paraded through the streets, stole the very heart of that flag, pissed on the men and women who did the work that made it all possible. And so the American Dream broke, because in the end, that’s all it’s turned out to be: a Dream.

It’s a dream that’s been leveraged, used and abused by the Dallas Cowboys of the world, to get others to do their work for them and then reap all the benefits. These leeches have always been here. Hell, a Civil War was fought once upon a time over this shit. But these Spiritual Confederates, these traitors of the American Ideal, that thing we’re all taught growing up to believe in, never really went away. They just slinked in the dark until real people, working people, built something that they could take away again. And they did, and, well, welcome to the hellscape that is America in 2018.

It’s ironic that the very people who the Spiritual Confederates rely upon to prop them up are the people who they’ve been robbing blind all this time. It’s ironic, but it’s also kind of the point: the only reason these assholes are even allowed to exist is because not only have they robbed us all, but they’ve convinced us that it’s our fault, that we deserve it, that all of our hard work and sacrifice exists simply so that they can take it from us. They’ve conditioned us to believe that we’re inferior, that we don’t deserve our piece, that a man who breaks his back everyday doesn’t deserve anything more than minimum wage and then a layoff when even that becomes too inconvenient to the bottom line of these vultures. They’ve made us embarrassed to be who we are, and then have encouraged us to lash out against people who are just like us, hard working people who just want their piece of the Dream.

So when you ask “Why does Detroit get the Thanksgiving game?” that’s why. When you look at Detroit, and you sneer at its husk, you remember who you’re sneering at. You’re sneering at yourself. You’re sneering at the Heart and Soul of what America was supposed to be. You’re sneering at that Dream, at the very thing you were taught from birth to revere.

Detroit is a fragile thing these days. It’s been drawn back and drawn back until it exists as little more than a downtown area huddled by the river. It’s an idea more than anything else these days. And yet it’s an idea that people like me still want to believe in. I love Detroit not just because I have lived in Michigan all my life, but because it is the city of Dreams, because it is the city where once upon a time, those Dreams were Real, where America – the romantic myth that we all grow up believing in – was Real. I love Detroit because it’s tougher than you, because despite all its been through, it will still stand the fuck up and puff out its chest and tell all you bastards to go fuck yourselves. Nobody believes in Detroit, but goddammit, deep down, Detroit still believes in itself. It still believes in an Idea, in Possibility, in the heart and soul of a working man’s mural, in the giant fist of Joe Louis. That is MY Detroit, and I will love it forever.

It’s a hard thing, though, to know what you could be and to not really be able to do anything about it because the Spiritual Confederates, the Dallas Cowboys of the world, came along and took it all from you, left you with only that Attitude. We’re still Detroit and we always will be because it’s who we are, and that makes it extra painful when we can’t even afford the basics, when we have to choose between shit like getting clean water and fucking garbage service. It hurts when your football team, the same one that has been playing on Thanksgiving Day since Joe Louis was the Champ, can never get their shit together. It hurts to get up everyday knowing that all you need is a chance because you know who you are, you’ve proven it to the world already and they just forgot. It hurts to know that no one will give you a chance, that they’ll all just sneer and look down on you while they count the money that they forgot they stole from you in the first place. It hurts to know that these swine are out there believing that this is their country. It hurts to live in the most powerful country, the richest country, in the history of the world, a country that we built, and to be left out of it, treated like low class scum by those who stole it. It hurts. It all hurts. But what I want you to do is to stop and think. I want you to be thankful for everything you have this Thanksgiving, and while you’re thinking and giving thanks, I want you to thank God, to thank Detroit, that you get to have it all. You’ll never give us back what’s ours and that sucks, but goddammit, you will turn and you will look at us and you will say Thank You.

Thanksgiving is ours. It is our holiday. It belongs to us. And you will never take this away.

Lions 27 Bears 0