NFC South Preview

The NFC South represents a deeper sort of South than its AFC counterpart, fielding teams hoping to best represent its voodoo soul in an annual war that often comes down to whether New Orleans can overcome the whitebread falsity of Drew Brees, surrounding him with slippery voodoo zombies like Alvin Kamara or receiver Michael Thomas. If dudes like that can somehow suppress Brees’ torture supporting ways enough to draw out the quarterback murder bot underneath then the Saints will likely walk away with the NFC South crown and maybe more while its fans revel in the dark streets while God sleeps, wading through floodwaters with buckets of stolen Heinekens in an undead procession to the Super Dome where they cheer on their Saints and feast on the souls of whatever cracker ass team dares roll through.

That is New Orleans Saints football at its best, which appears to be where Sean Payton has them once again, having rebuilt and retooled his roster around Brees with the sorts of spirit warrior weapons who can entrance him and lead him to the dark erotic heart that lies within every man, keeping him busy throwing touchdowns to them and not talking about why Gitmo is actually good. If Kamara and Thomas continue giving Brees outlets for his latent soul then everything should be all good here. Brees seems to be ageless, much like Tom Brady, which no doubt owes something to secret rituals in above ground cemeteries that act to counter the white devil within him. And as long as these rituals keep him ageless, the Saints are probably the pick here.

You could try to pick them apart by raising questions and concerns about the defense, but it’s never really about the defense when things are really rocking for the Saints, so you can assume that whatever they roll out there will be adequate enough to leave room for the voodoo-tranced soul of Drew Brees to rain down touchdown bombs all over the place. And if that happens, the whole New Orleans of it all should help take care of the rest.

If not, then it’s probably the Falcons who will be lying in wait to expose Brees for his inherent falsity, hoping that the defense can stay injury free this year and that Matt Ryan can be guided to greatness by a southern fried receiver corps led by Julio Jones and his understudy Calvin Ridley.

Take those two dudes and add Devonte Freeman at running back, and the Falcons are the one team capable of matching the firepower of Brees and the Saints. I mean, it’s kind of remarkable how these two teams mirror each other, each representing cities that are the heart of the dirty south, with whitebread machine gun armed quarterbacks draped in the soul of southern weapons offensively, relying on defenses to be just good enough to hold the other’s offense at bay long enough for that dirty south magic to do its work.

While the Saints mostly have their defense figured out, ready to complement Brees, Kamara, Thomas and the boys, it remains to be seen whether the Falcons defense can recapture the swagger that led to them being on the precipice of taking down Tom Brady in the Super Bowl before 28-3 turned into a living nightmare for them in that wild second half.

All of that likely depends on a return to health for its starters, who were decimated by injuries early last season, leaving the Falcons attack alone and vulnerable. If everyone can stay healthy and Vic Beasley can recapture his pass rushing swagger, then the Falcons are primed to be the one team in this division that can run with the Saints. And then it will likely come down to Brees vs Ryan in a duel to see which can keep their inherent whiteness in check long enough to allow their weapons to draw out their inner Kenny Stabler, whose 69 year old ghost floats all over the south from its home base on a floating ghost houseboat somewhere in the Alabama Gulf to possess whichever quarterback it deems worthy from year to year.

If neither man is found worthy by Ghost Stabler, then the entire division is likely thrown into anarchy, with Cam Newton putting his own dirty south credibility into the mix, hopeful that his shoulder has somehow been healed in between the end of last season when it was essentially being held together by scotch tape and prayer and the start of this season, where the hope is that he’ll once again be able to throw the ball more than ten yards downfield. And with Jameis Winston over in Tampa Bay hoping that the crab leg gods forgive him for his thieving ways and also that whatever ladies he likely assaulted while at Florida State have forgiven him enough to stake his own claim on being the alpha quarterback in this division.

Start with Newton and Carolina, who desperately hope that his shoulder is finally healed and that along with star running back Christian McCaffrey, that he can help lead an offense that can run with the Saints and the Falcons, letting Luke Kuechly cry havoc on defense from his linebacker spot enough to sabotage Brees or Ryan while Newton and McCaffrey steal the division from them.

You also have to wonder whether Newton can play well with others or if he will disappear in a fit of pique into his own ass which he is prone to do, choosing the play the opulent clown at press conferences instead of taking out all his inner demons on opposing defenses. That is always a prime concern for the Panthers, which adds another fascinating element into the never ending argument about just who is the true Big Dick quarterback in this division.

You also have to worry a little about whether Newton has the right weapons at receiver that Brees and Ryan have in Thomas, Jones, Ridley and company. They let Devin Funchess walk, which I think was a mistake as his struggles last year had more to do with Newton’s shoulder problems than anything he was doing wrong. I mean, it’s hard to be a deep threat when your quarterback can’t actually, you know, throw the fucking ball deep.

With Funchess gone, the Panthers receiving corps looks decidedly pedestrian, thin both in terms of a top line target and in depth, which may force Newton to use his legs more and get creative with McCaffrey.

He has the skills to do it that Brees and Ryan lack, but it would be a shame to just renounce his ability to go deep because he doesn’t have the weapons to do it with. That may end up being the critical difference between whether the Panthers can hang with the Saints and Falcons or whether they will once again wallow in mediocrity, leaving Newton frustrated and prone to lash out at those around him, making a scene whenever he can because that’s all he knows how to do, that self sabotage that gets the best of many of us, especially when maybe our hearts are a little wilder than the cold Puritan hearts of dudes like Brees and Ryan.

If the Panthers can’t keep up, then it falls to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to try to get their shit right a year after flaming out under Dirk Koetter, which saw his ass being canned and shipped off to, let’s see here . . . oh shit, he landed in Atlanta where he returns as offensive coordinator to a place and a quarterback he’s already familiar with, which adds another fascinating wrinkle to this ongoing battle for the soul of the dirty south.

Anyway, he’s gone and Bruce Arians is in, with the Bucs hoping he can be a sort of quarterback whisperer for Jameis Winston, who looks to finally harness the talent that made him the would be savior of the Buccaneers once upon a time. But there are bad spirit energies here, especially because Winston insecurely had backup Ryan Fitzpatrick run off, a true spirit warrior in the Stabler mold spiced with a sort of frightening Ivy League intelligence that has long made him one of the most beloved quarterbacks in the NFL, and a dude capable of catching fire and saving a team from a faltering Winston or two.

He also had DeSean Jackson run off, who was a vocal ally of Fitzpatrick’s and unfortunately also one of the team’s biggest playmakers. The Bucs will move on without both of them, hoping that Winston can finally be the Man without having to worry about someone more loveable stealing his job from him, and that Mike Evans can carry even more of the load at receiver.

And that will be a pretty heavy load indeed since the Bucs lack a real difference maker at running back, putting all their eggs into Peyton Barber’s basket, who is sort of a who the fuck is this guy rather than a dude with any real street cred in the running back game. That is likely a hilariously fatal decision that has already doomed Tampa Bay from jump here.

That is especially true since defensively, the Bucs are probably the weakest team in the division, made worse by Jason Pierre-Paul suffering a broken fucking neck, leaving him unavailable for most of this season and maybe forever. Meanwhile, the Bucs were forced to let Gerald McCoy walk in a cap saving move, which is bad news because he’s been the stalwart for this defense ever since he was drafted way back in 2010. The Bucs have chosen to replace him by turning to Ndamukong Suh in free agency, which let me tell you is potentially ominous from a spiritual point of view because Suh, as we all know, myself more than most, has always carried a sort of darkness with him wherever he goes. The move is made doubly interesting because McCoy and Suh were both drafted in the same class, and there was always an argument to be made about which of them was truly the better player, many favoring McCoy’s steady dominance over the wild bipolar madness of Suh, whose highs could be very high indeed, but whose lows were often humiliating and destructive.

Swap these two dudes out and it will be interesting to see how Suh does as the Man once again on a defensive line after a short spell as Aaron Donald’s sidekick in Los Angeles. Watching Suh last year, I could still see how much he lets his emotions carry him, which often leads to him doing stupid shit. It was eye opening especially to see him wilding out and fucking up while Donald just destroyed everyone. Whether Suh can finally grow the fuck up and be the Man with Tampa Bay after a career marked with disappointment and Failure Demons in this regard is critical to whether the Buccaneers defense can do enough to stop the other gunslingers in this division long enough for Winston to hopefully get his own shit together.

Those are a lot of ifs, though, and it’s likely that Tampa Bay is doomed to be the team that winds up beneath the wheel when it finally stops turning a few months from now.

Still, this division is really up for grabs. It all depends on which quarterback can get their spiritual game the rightest, which will probably come down to which one has the most spirit warrior weapons to help get him there. To me, it looks like its neck and neck between Brees and Ryan. Brees has Alvin Kamara and Michael Thomas, and if Latavius Murray can provide a little thump to play nice with Kamara’s flash, that might be enough to put them over the top. If not, the tandem of Julio Jones and Calvin Ridley, two Alabama boys, might give Ryan the edge, especially if Devonta Freeman can get healthy and get back to where he was when the Falcons were on the brink of winning it all only a few short seasons ago.

That is a lot of firepower in two of the south’s dirtiest cities, and it will likely be too much for either the Panthers or the Bucs to overcome. Defensively, it probably will come down to which team can just keep its dudes the healthiest. The Panthers have probably the best of the best in Luke Kuechly, and if Vic Beasley can get back to where he was during that Super Bowl run than the Falcons probably will have the division’s best pass rusher.

For the Bucs, it will likely come down to whether Suh can finally be the dominant murder man he was earlier in his career, while the Saints have to just hope for good vibes and the steady contributions of Cameron Jordan on the defensive line and the chaotic dark souled magic of a bunch of Ohio State degenerates in their secondary to work in their favor instead of blowing up internally.

Add it all up and you have a pretty fascinating division here, filled with explosive offenses and potentially powder kegged laden defenses, and it all probably comes down to which team’s talent explodes outward and which team’s talent explodes in on itself. And in the flaming wreckage, only one of these quarterbacks can truly emerge while the others burn, victims of both their own internal Failure Demons and whatever dark magic explosions gut their respective defenses. In the end, I suppose I will go with the Saints, who look primed to take that next step and return to Super Bowl glory. If they stumble, then it will probably be the Falcons, who really only need a bit of luck to allow them to return to where they were on the doorstep of blowing out Tom Brady and the Patriots in the Super Bowl before that all took a hilariously dark turn. The Panthers and the Bucs both probably have too many holes, especially offensively, where the Panthers are weak at receiver and the Bucs don’t really have a running back. In the end, all I know is that one of these quarterbacks will probably be a heavy favorite to stand across from Brady and the gang once again in the Super Bowl. Its either gonna be a white bread dude redeemed by his dirty south surroundings, an egomaniacal lunatic apt to show up to press conferences dressed like Ric Flair, or a crab leg thief and almost certain rapist hoping that a new coach can help harness his obvious gifts. That sounds like a whole lot of fun to me to see play out, and at the very least we will all be entertained while Rome burns around us.

Predicted Standings

1. New Orleans Saints 13-3

2. Atlanta Falcons 11-5

3. Carolina Panthers 8-8

4. Tampa Bay Buccaneers 7-9