Things took a grim turn for the entire division over the
weekend, when Andrew Luck said fuck this shit and retired to a life of doing
Andre the Giant impersonations at children’s birthday parties or drowning in
wine in the Napa sun while his Stanford degree magically earns him even more
money than the $100million he heisted from the Colts, and Lamar Miller, the
Texans starting running back, tore his ACL which means he will spend the season
at the glue factory.
That cripples the two teams who were probably the favorites
going into this season, which leaves the whole fucking division an utter mess
with no one around to clean it up save for a wild Mariota turning shit up in
Tennessee or Nick Foles bringing some of his Super Bowl magic to Jacksonville.
But these are hard things to ask of dudes who have been less than spectacular for
most of their careers.
So, what’s left? I don’t know, man, but it will likely be a
depressing cripple fight that ends with whichever team has the least amount of
injuries “winning” the division and then getting skull-fucked out of the
opening round of the playoffs to a lowly Wild Card team. That is some bad
energy to go into a season with, but what the hell, strange things happen in
the NFL, especially in this division, which always seems to end up with a
surprise team running away with it in the end.
I think I would have gone with the Texans this season, and I
still might, but I don’t know how they replace Lamar Miller, which means that DeShaun
Watson will have to take even more of the offensive burden onto himself, which is
no big deal for a dude who has already taken a hellacious beating and suffered
a ton of injuries in his first couple of years. Yup, no big deal at all, as he
rides out December in a cryogenic chamber to keep him alive until robots find a
way to save his life.
If he can stay healthy, though, Watson is probably the one
dude in this division who can be a true difference maker on offense. He’s an
exceptional athlete, a true dual threat in a time when the speed of the game increasingly
begs these dudes to be multi-dimensional, and he does still have DeAndre Hopkins
to throw to, so maybe this could still turn out alright?
Yeah, that’s a big maybe, considering that they’re unlikely
to get any help from the running game. That means that they’ll need to rely
more heavily on a defense that can probably take it if JJ Watt stays healthy
and Jadeveon Clowney takes another step towards being a fucking terrifying
murder monster along the defensive line. And all of this has to happen while
the city still recovers from the wild floods of yesterday, which has left a
sort of dank pall over the entire community, of which the Texans are a central
part.
It’s hard to focus and go all in on football when you have
to be worried that some crazy apocalyptic global warming monster hurricane
emerges from the depths to wreck all your shit again. That has always got to be
somewhere in these dudes’ heads, just a creeping kind of terror that they don’t
know how to combat because they are simple brutes who have been tought to just smash
whatever annoying bullshit comes into their lives.
But you can’t smash a hurricane, not even if Trump and his
boys Slim Pickens a nuke into the heart of every hurricane that threatens your
very existence. That is the kind of hopeless energy that has to hang over these
dudes day after day, which I guess makes them fitting representatives of the
New Americanism I have written about in the past, just spiritually drowned
broken people trying to get by just one more day without their houses being
swallowed into the great monster suck of Consequences of all our parasitic destructive
ways that has left an entire ecosystem hostile to our very presence.
It’s a hard thing to be in a one on one death match with
your own fucking planet, but that is the place where humanity finds itself
today, and the Houston Texans are just dudes on the front line, waiting to be swept
away by the inevitable tide of vengeance that God swore he would not do again
after drowning everyone save his boy Noah back in the day. But God is angry,
and fuck it, why shouldn’t he be?
So, anyway, that takes care of the Texans. Which brings us
to the Indianapolis Colts, who were probably the one team that could run with
Houston at the top of the division. That all came to a hilariously depressing
end when Andrew Luck told his team and the entire state of Indiana to fuck off
two weeks before the start of the season.
The big uproar in the discourse, of course, (discourse of
course, of course discourse) is about the fans booing the shit out of him as he
ran off the field in misery and contempt. Everyone rightly piled on dudes like
that pissant Doug Gottlieb for calling Andrew Luck soft, but you also can’t
blame a bunch of frustrated fans who can only see their favored son, their
hope, abandoning them to their own hell. I mean, I get it. I have been through
this with Barry Sanders and Calvin Johnson. It absolutely sucks, and I think
you have to cut people a break here for venting their wrath at their own
Failure Demons.
It's okay to separate the reaction from fans who are just
behaving like fucking fans always have from the bigger argument about Luck
walking away. These are two completely separate issues. One is about that child
like battle lust that is pure and untainted, swelling in the hearts of every
real fan, who don’t give a fuck about the propriety of their feelings, only the
rollercoaster madness of euphoria when your team comes through and the crushing
despair when they fuck you over just like everyone else in your life has fucked
you over. That is because sports fandom is a cypher for all of that, allowing
people to experience extreme swings in emotion in a relatively harmless
context. Fans are assholes, and they have every right to be because that is what
the whole fucking thing is here for. That is literally why these big spectacle sports
exist and you are just clowning yourself if you can’t understand that. And then
the other issue is about stepping away from all that and saying “Yeah, I get
it, live your life bro” instead of demanding he turn his brain into pudding for
your cannibalistic ass. You can both boo the man for the moment, for the fan in
you, and respect his decision to walk away from it all. These are not mutually
exclusive things.
But still, that leaves the Colts pretty much shit out of Luck
(lol indeed) for at least this season, and maybe for the next several seasons.
You just don’t recover from losing your crown jewel like that. Trust me, I
know. I have been here before.
It sucks too because the Colts managed to upgrade their defense
and were poised to ride Luck maybe all the way to the top. But all that shit is
gone now, a fire extinguished in the heart of a team, a smoking crater left
where Andrew Luck was last seen before he lurched off into the woods to live
his life as a Bigfoot.
So that leaves both the Texans and the Colts crippled as
they try to drag what’s left of themselves into this new season. And I guess
that means that the Tennessee Titans might just win this thing by default, if
for no other reason than they haven’t just been spiritually skull-fucked like
everyone else. Fuck it man, welcome to America in 2019. MAGA indeed.
The Titans start from an okayish place, a 9-7 kind of place,
that can probably be artificially padded by the downfalls of their rivals, but
unless Marcus Mariota turns into a big boy that will likely just be a hollow
thing waiting to get smashed in the first week of the playoffs.
The Titans are strong enough defensively to hold the line
here, especially when they have a head coach like Mike Vrabel who will
literally put the pads on in practice to show his defense what he wants. I
mean, that kind of hands on I’ve Been There Before leadership can only help a
team, right? If he can make Jurrell Casey his avatar on that defensive line
then things will probably work out well here, especially since the Titans have
one of the better pass defenses in the league.
Still, it will likely all come down to Mariota, who has been
okay but not exactly great either. If he can’t do it, the team did bring in
Ryan Tannehill to maybe save the day, and who knows, a change of scenery might
just be all that dude needs to break out of the promise he showed in Miami a
few years back. Either way, the Titans at least have a solid floor to lay face
down on when the whole world goes to shit. The Colts and Texans are looking out
over an empty elevator shaft, just waiting to fall into oblivion when things
get tough.
That might make all the difference here, which is kind of
sad, but fuck it, this has never been a happy place and you can fuck right on
off if you think I am gonna shine this up nice for you.
I haven’t talked about the Jaguars yet, but to be honest
that’s because I don’t know what to make of them. They do this shit all the
time, where they seem poised to break out before collapsing in a heap of Failure
Demons and shattered dreams. Blake Bortles has been exiled for the crime of being
a Jaguar in an even numbered year, and now Nick Foles is supposed to show up
and save the day, which is hilariously depressing when you consider that the
dude has mostly been a career backup, managing to ride the lightning one perfect
time and thus fooling everyone into believing he can be some sort of savior.
I mean, come on, man. Nick Foles can step in and do the job
for a team that is already right there. But he is not a dude who you can count
on to shoulder the whole fucking franchise and pull it to new heights. That is
an insane thing to expect and if that’s what Jacksonville is hoping for, well .
. . yeah, you know how this shit goes. Tears and Regret. Huffing Ether in the
Cold Night while the Failure Demons howl outside your window, which quivers and
threatens to break and let them all come in and devour your soul.
That is where the Jacksonville Jaguars find themselves,
huddled naked in the dark, hoping for a miracle from a dude whose only real
powers lie in deceiving people that he will keep them safe when all those
Failure Demons and the howl of their madness threatens to break on through to
the places of your soul that aren’t already ruined.
It’s a shame because the Jaguars still have the makings of a
cut-throat defensive outfit, with Calais Campbell, Myles Jack and Jalen Ramsey giving
them legit studs on all three levels. But this isn’t the 1970s and defense
doesn’t win championships anymore in the NFL. I mean, it does in the very
bitter end, but you can’t build a team to get to that end that relies on the
defense to carry it. No, this is a wide-open passing league now, a gunslinger’s
delight, and if you don’t have the fastest draws and the biggest hand cannons
you aren’t gonna make it in these wild streets.
The Jaguars want to run the ball, but Leonard Fournette is
kind of busting there, and there have been reports of him wilding out from an
emotional maturity standpoint, and so trusting in that to carry the team would
be ludicrous even if this wasn’t already a changed league, where running backs
don’t seem to matter all that much as long as you have guys throwing nukes all
over the place.
Which I guess brings us back to the Texans and Colts. One
lost their franchise quarterback. The other didn’t. It lost a running back. In
2019, that is a crucial distinction, and one that might tell you all you need
to know about who is gonna take this thing in the end.
I think Houston can probably hold onto the division, but don’t
count out the Titans, especially if Mariota can take a step up. If he can, then
the AFC South might have something here, If not? Well, shit, I guess they’re
all out of Luck.
Predicted Standings
1. Houston Texans 10-6
2. Tennessee Titans 10-6
3. Jacksonville Jaguars 7-9
4. Indianapolis Colts 6-10
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