AFC West Preview

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