The AFC West contains the last best hope for anyone
dethroning Brady and the Patriots, keeping them from yet another Death Star run
on the universe, but whether that comes down to the Kansas City Chiefs or the
Los Angeles Chargers is anyone’s guess. You can pretty much abandon all hope
for the Denver Broncos and the Oakland Raiders, which makes it time to retreat
to a safehouse for John Elway and time for Jon Gruden and Mark Davis to start
looking for real estate in Las Vegas once they manage to swindle the locals and
tourists and anyone else dumb enough to take a ride with them on some lonely
night into the desert which is full of holes stuffed with ruined dreams, poor
choices and the corpses of the mad and the desperate sorry enough to put their
futures and those hopes and dreams in the hands of a vampire of a city, a city
too fucked up even for Hunter S. Thompson, a city where an undead Al Davis will
likely live atop a new age pyramid, settled in its penthouse where he can jack
off to the neon lights that serve as sirens in the desert leading men to their
doom and where his corpse can overlook the final bastardization and soul
destruction of his once proud franchise, a franchise that stood against those
sort of things once upon a time, that was the oasis for fucked up types, wild
bikers and living on the edge groupies who could see themselves getting saved
for one night at least by a wild haired Southern gentleman like Kenny Stabler.
That is where the AFC West finds itself in the year of our
lord 2019, and whoever emerges from it victorious will probably be the team
standing in front of Tom Brady yet again in the hopes that finally one of them
will manage to put him down long enough to sneak into the Super Bowl and make a
dream that has eluded them forever, or at least for 50 years, a reality.
Start with the Kansas City Chiefs, who are that team looking
to finally return to glory after 50 years of frustration and oh so close
moments that have been invariably swept away by Failure Demons or assorted
Marty Schottenheimers or Dick Vermeils who were either doomed by their own
Failure Demons or by senility, leaving the team once again shattered and broken,
looking to find their identity that at times has swung from the extreme of
brutal defensive domination found in the fire avatars of dudes like Derrick
Thomas and Neil Smith to the wild haired frenzy of a ride the lightning shout
at the devil offensive blitzkrieg of an attack that at times would have been
better off onside kicking every kickoff rather than relying upon its hapless
defense to break yet again in the final act of a wild west shootout.
And now here they are again with Andy Reid at the helm, a
dude who himself has had sort of a Sisyphean existence in the NFL, always so
close but invariably so far away when his quarterback either pukes all over the
middle of the field in the Super Bowl or his defense just sort of scratches its
head while it collapses yet again in the blazing glory of one of those wild
west shootouts, shot down by teams with bigger guns and maybe the ability to
duck behind an outhouse now and again when the bullet flying gets a little too
real.
With Patrick Mahomes, the Chiefs have stumbled upon the fastest
draw in them here streets, and if he can replicate his balls out MVP rookie
season of shooting up the whole town until Sheriff Brady rolled in with a
fucking howitzer to put an end to his spree, then the Chiefs will probably be
the team waiting once again for that high noon showdown and the chance to
murder everyone in the NFC town just one hill over on the horizon. But even
then, the Chiefs have to hope that their defense will pull it together long
enough to let Mahomes rain death from above.
Even then, the Chiefs have been kind of cursed by their own
particular sort of Failure Demon, one that has seen every supernova offensive
fire star get caught on tape beating up a lady. Kareem Hunt is already gone,
banished in a PR move to Cleveland, who were desperate enough to sell their
souls in order to try to overcome their own Failure Demons. And now Tyreek
Hill, who was probably an even more important gun in the Chiefs Arsenal, finds
himself in the same predicament. Luckily for him and the Chiefs, though, the
NFL inexplicably gave him a free pass, but you have to imagine he is on some
sort of secret double probation, and if even a hint of him wilding out on a lady
gets out there again, he too will probably find himself exiled to yet another
desperate town willing to make deals with the devil to keep them safe from
their own bandits in a Kurosawan sort of tale of survival and redemption.
But if Tyreek Hill can keep himself clean and his skeletons
buried or at least their tapes erased, then he and Mahomes will probably be
enough to get them to that final high noon showdown, when the streets will run
red with the blood of the innocent and no one pure will get out alive.
Still, whether or not they actually win that final high noon
showden will come down to whether or not Andy Reid has managed to remake the
defense behind new terrors like Frank Clark well enough to finally drag Sheriff
Brady through the streets while the whole town burns and various ladies get
raped and beaten by Tyreek Hill and his boys and a lone rider manages to escape
to try to warn the NFC villagers of the oncoming brute squad intent on sacking
yet another city and making off with its hidden treasures and loosest women.
But before that even happens, the Chiefs will have to try to
get past the Los Angeles Chargers, a team that has the pieces on defense the
Chiefs don’t to defend itself from the aforementioned wanton rape and murder. Start
with a defensive line led by terror murder man Joey Bosa and Melvin Ingram,
which has just imported a fresh new killer from Notre Dame in Jerry Tillery to
rise up and hunt down Mahomes and Hill and the gang before they can set fire to
the city. Add in the arrival of a grizzled old bounty hunter like Thomas Davis
in the linebacker corps and a young gun known for beating the prisoners and
fucking the young ladies from the brothel next door in Derwin James in the
secondary, and you have a defense that is set up to maybe withstand both
Mahomes and Brady and stake their claim as the AFC’s best.
What it will likely come down to is whether Philip Rivers
can keep up with Mahomes in his old age, and whether Melvin Gordon can get his
head out of his ass long enough to get on good terms with the Chargers front
office.
Rivers is often overlooked when people list off the best
quarterbacks in the NFL, but the truth is that he has been there operating at a
very high level for years now. His gun is as fast as anyone’s, but you have to
wonder whether his own Failure Demons, whatever has caused himself to
invariably shoot himself in the foot in a drunken haze every time the bullets
start flying a little too hot, will drag him down yet again and leave him to
his fate as a dude who was good but maybe not good enough to throw down with
the real gunslingers.
He has enough weapons, especially if Gordon can get his
contract right, who paired with young Austin Ekeler makes the Chargers
backfield maybe the best in the entire NFL. At receiver, the Chargers hope that
Mike Wlliams will explode on the streets like Doc Holliday and that Keenan
Allen will continue to show that he is maybe the most underrated gun on those
wild streets.
But really, it all comes down to whether Philip Rivers can
finally get himself right just enough to win the final shootout and send everyone
home in Los Angeles happy, or at least the few dozen fans the Chargers have
managed to make loyal to them in their wanderings across Southern California.
That’s the other thing that can doom the Chargers here. The
Chiefs are well known for having one of the toughest places to play at in the
entire NFL, a cold and merciless home field that echoes the death courts of the
old Aztecs, but which is now populated by a sea of cold, mean Midwestern folk,
clutching their guns and muttering vile threats to anyone of color who dares to
run out on their field. It’s a tough place for visiting teams to roll into, and
it might end up making all the difference here.
The Chargers, meanwhile, play in the laid back fuck it
atmosphere of Los Angeles, and worse, they aren’t even the favored team in that
city, which likes the Rams just a little bit more and secretly loves the
Raiders most of all. It is a city that has no time for the Chargers, who
abandoned San Diego in the hopes of galvanizing the entirety of Southern California
in a hilarious misstep that has instead led to them wandering apathetic streets
wondering why no one bothers to even show up to their home games. Compare and
contrast the two environments and it’s hard to see how the Chargers can outgun
the Chiefs.
Still, the Chargers are the only team here that can really
give the Chiefs a real run in the sweepstakes to stand in front of Sheriff
Brady as he coldly stares them down from the top of a horse carried by a team
of slaves, the horse snorting and nipping at their heads while Brady casually spits
on them and Gisele sits behind him fantasizing about her family’s German roots.
The Denver Broncos once again find themselves hoping that
John Elway can get the quarterback right, a thing that he has constantly failed
to do ever since Peyton Manning just got too damned old to bother answering his
calls. The Case Keenum thing flopped, which everyone but apparently Elway could
see coming given the dude was a career journeyman before finding some life in
the cold Minnesota north where Viking children howl and Brock Lesnar smashes
your front window with a giant log before fucking your wife. He was always a
fool’s hope, which I guess makes John Elway the fool, proving yet again that
most times your biggest heroes make for shitty GM’s, like Michael Jordan or
Isiah Thomas or Matt fucking Millen.
So who does Elway turn to once Keenum was crushed by the heady
Denver atmosphere? Joe Flacco. Wait . . . Joe Flacco??? Yeah.
It’s hard to see Flacco somehow being the savior here, the
dude who finally gets it right for Elway, given that he was finally run out of
Baltimore by a raw rookie, and who has never been anyone resembling The Man,
propped up by those vicious Baltimore defenses year after year. He is 34 years
old, which isn’t exactly ancient in these modern times when dudes like Tom
Brady can survive and thrive into their 40’s so long as they have the same sort
of maniacal drive of Brady and his resources which he uses to fly in elite
nutritionists and also airplanes stocked with coolers filled with the blood of
babies and virgins and their marrow filled bones, which he sucks late at night
when no one else is around, leaving in a pile for Gisele to get the Honduran
help to discreetly dispose of before she has them ritually dismembered in the
cryogenic lab run by her great great grandfather who managed to discover the
cure for old age when he was working in an underground lab in Nuremberg back
when a certain funny ol’ Austrian artist was busy writing books and giving
speeches to the peace loving people of Germany.
But . . . yeah, Flacco doesn’t have access to all of that,
which means that he is doomed to age like a mortal man, which doesn’t bode well
for Elway and the Broncos, who will probably find themselves throwing in the
towel once and for all and trying to rebuild for some glorious future that
Elway probably won’t even be around to see once he gets dragged out of his
mountain mansion by the outraged villagers who once loved him but now only see
him eating their newborns with his giant horse teeth before flushing their
corpses down the toilet in an intricate sewage system that sees all waste flow
down to the bottom of the Rockies to lay in a fetid pool of excrement somewhere
in the wastelands of Eastern Utah. That is the sort of fate that Joe Flacco of
all people has been signed on to try to avoid, which means the people of Denver
are in for some hard times.
Even if the Broncos can continue to field halfway decent
defenses led by terror murder bots like Von Miller and Bradley Chubb it’s hard
to see it mattering if Flacco is, well, Joe Flacco and not somehow a meat
puppet inhabited by the spirit of some new hotshot rookie gunslinger. John
Elway will forever be looking for the next John Elway, not realizing that there
can never be a next John Elway, and this will be the doom of the Denver Broncos
yet again.
And that just leaves the Oakland Raiders, a fucked up zombie
corpse, bloated and foul, with the Skeletor face of a vampire Al Davis
stretched out on its skull as a warning to anyone stupid enough still to
believe that his idiot son can somehow rescue a legacy that is decades old now,
fading with each passing year, the Kenny Stabler heart of it all little more
than a memory for old people, not even existing except as sort of a wild rumor
for anyone younger than 50, a seductive ghost whose glories are frozen in time,
inaccessible to anyone other than as a death trap of the soul like Atlantis,
drowned beneath the waves of time, obliterated by history, a legend whose only
power lies in its ability to seduce broken people who get pulled beneath the
waves to drown in an underwater prison of the soul.
And as that mad circus gets underway once again, Mark Davis
will drown everybody dumb enough to buy a ticket while Jon Gruden leads it from
those hell waters to the False Hopes of the desert, where the sad and desperate
are all buried in places those neon lights don’t shine. Gruden is a con man,
plain and simple, a dude who once upon a time was maybe the real deal, but who
has spent more than a decade as an old blowhard on TV, talking down to everyone
while the game passed him by at lightspeed, leaving him an antiquated false prophet
who will lead his people straight to hell.
And it is fitting that that hell is located in the Nevada
desert, where neon demons swarm and suck the souls of anyone dumb enough to get
lured to its fantasy trap. Gruden is all set to be a Prince of the Damned in
that hell city, that nightmare of the Broken American Dream, a place designed
to fleece ordinary people, a place built to gnaw on their bones and their
dreams as their children’s futures are sold off to the hellmouth of the
American Nightmare one roll of a dice at a time, one busted hand after another
while soulless parasites encourage them to give it one more go as they
dutifully rake in the money of those goddamn fools to be counted in back rooms by
even nastier sorts, people who know where that blood money goes, people who
understand that the only thing worse than being owned by mobsters and parasites
is to stand in front of them unprotected, to be “free” in a place where that
freedom is little more than a bug, a virus downloaded into everyone dumb enough
to think that they can roll through that city without being looted and robbed
while they ate and drank and rolled dice and while they slept their futures
away in comped hotel rooms, where whatever the gangsters don’t take from them
is hoovered up by the professional mouths of professional dick suckers.
That is the place where Jon Gruden has chosen to cash in his
legacy, the place where he will take every Raiders fan for whatever the fuck
they have left after decades of being preyed upon by a vampire and his brood.
In that light, it almost doesn’t matter who the Raiders have
or don’t have on their roster, which quarterback is chosen to be the one who
knocks on the doors of the fans’ souls, to get them to open up so Gruden can
suck them dry. Derek Carr is that dude right now, but it’s obvious that he has
been trapped by the Raider Way, yet another victim of the demands of a faded
glory, doomed to fall short because the Raiders have become a lifeless thing, a
dead thing dressed in the clothes of long dead men, feeding on their memories
year after year until those memories become little more than crumbs waiting to
be gobbled up by rats in the night. Yes, that is the sort of fucked up world
that Derek Carr has no chance of surviving in, let alone thriving in, because
almost no one has a chance to survive in it. It is too rotten a place, too
dead, and the only thing left here is to see how he is finally crushed while
Gruden orders another whore to his penthouse and stares out past those neon sirens
to the dark depravities of a desert which is filled with the bodies of everyone
dumb enough to get called by them.
He already hilariously fucked up by alienating and then
trading Khalil Mack, the Raiders best player and only hope for salvation before
they get sucked into the Vegas hellmouth. He traded him because it gave Gruden
space to work his con, the ability to crater this thing so he can sell people
on his magic beans, removing the pressure to have to win right away because he’s
Jon Gruden and he’s selling everyone a promise that he knows he can’t deliver
on because he has just been a guy on TV for a million years and whose NFL that
he knew doesn’t resemble the NFL today in the least except of course for its
eternal existence as a vehicle to sell beer commercials to dimwit fans.
So that’s what Jon Gruden is offering people, False Hope,
dreams of a future that will never be made real, a future that will arrive and
Gruden will already be gone, having fleeced everyone of millions, leaving Mark
Davis alone in the desert waiting to be put in one of those forgotten holes
while his players live like Babylonian gods, hedonists running through the
streets with bulging hard-ons and heads full of cocaine and the pussy juices of
whores who lie naked and bleeding in their penthouse showers, waiting to be
collected by hotel minions who will have their vacuum sealed bodies flushed
down high-flow toilets sucking whatever water can be stolen by that desert
Sodom and Gomorrah while its people die thirsty because their water bills are
matched only by their electricity bills.
Does it even matter which mercenaries Gruden imports between
now and then? Not really. All that matters is that the Raiders will be awful
yet again because that is all part of the con, which is fine because no one in
Oakland loves them anymore and the Raiders are simply waiting to get the fuck
out of town in the hopes that everyone’s souls will be too crushed to rouse
themselves to pelt the moving vans with shit.
Predicted Standings:
1. Kansas City Chiefs 12-4
2. Los Angeles Chargers 11-5
3. Denver Broncos 6-10
4. Oakland Raiders 4-12
