Tuesday, September 3, 2019

NFC West Preview


The Los Angeles Rams have to be considered the favorite to win the NFC West again given that they have the best running back in the NFL, maybe the best group of receivers, a young franchise quarterback who is on a parabolic curve of greatness, the most innovative young head coach in all of football, and oh yeah, the no doubt best defensive player alpha warrior in the NFL. That, uh, is all pretty good, right? It makes them the prohibitive favorite to win this division and probably the NFC again and maybe even the entire NFL this time around.

It all starts with the mind meld between head coach Sean McVay and quarterback Jared Goff, who are two young dudes who probably have mansions in the Pacific Palisades where they fuck all the beautiful people LA has to offer, and when they’re not doing that they are chilling at the LA Memorial Coliseum under a sun that never sets and where it never rains except for maybe a sprinkling of pussy juice now and then from bioengineered Hot People who live out their Tranquillo existence like characters in a Bret Easton Ellis novel, fucking and sucking each other, doing blow and waiting for the world to end.

It is an environment conducive to Big Shiny offense, which the Rams probably do better than anyone else in the NFL, thanks to McVay and Goff, all those receivers and, oh yeah, Todd Gurley dominating on the ground in between deep bombs and orgies at Robert Evans’ place. But even if the offense isn’t clicking for whatever reason, the Rams can just rely on Aaron Donald, the NFL’s defensive alpha dog, to destroy opposing offenses, which he has done en route to being a four time All Pro and the back to back defending defensive player of the year.

That is a whole lot of fighter jet bomb angels to have on one team, where, as I have mentioned, they live out a Tranquillo existence devoted to utter hedonism and the promise that the sun will never set and that it will never rain and it will always be like this in Hollywood, a place where the young are constantly recycled and where vampires live forever sucking all that beautiful young blood on beaches and in the hills and on Sunset, where they openly stalk the street and suck on each other’s necks in a way that the rest of America dreams about deep in their hearts, envious of the hedonism, too chickenshit to taste any of it for themselves.

That is the world the Los Angeles Rams live in, and it is no wonder that they are flying high, on top of the world, young dumb and full of cum, immortals too beautiful and fucked up for the rest of America, living forever or at least until they get bored and return to their coffins, to awake at night and feed off of every ingenue fresh off the bus, a never ending menu of human flesh, young and eternally perfect.

It’s easy to just go out and toss the football around when you are a golden god, beholden to nothing, carefree of the tired morality of the rest of a jealous country. It is touchdowns during the day and titties at night, a carnival of the flesh that never ends, moving from the clubs to the hills and then back down to the clubs again when ordinary fucking people are asleep in their beds, trying to talk themselves into another dreary day in Hayseed, America. The Rams live in that Paradise City where the grass is green and the girls are pretty. Never mind the urchins living under the street, it’s sunny out and fuckbots stalk the streets looking to suck your dick. This is Los Angeles, baby, the crescendo of the American Dream, live fast, die young and leave a good lucking corpse. Fuck the squares.

The Rams are golden gods in this world, young and perfect, putting up the points that are inaccessible to the rest of America, and it would take a miracle for anyone to knock them off their pedestal in this new football season.

But the thing is, is that the rest of these teams in this division all have something going for them, a secret hope that they can nourish until it finally flourishes and bursts forth to overrun the Rams, drunk on their own hedonism.

Start with the Seahawks, who have the best coach in the division in Pete Carroll, a dude all too familiar with and comfortable in the glitz and glamor of LA, who understands how to build the kind of defenses necessary to slow the young dumb cum filled offenses of the city of angels. He still has Bobby Wagner as the heart of that defense, and even though the Seahawks famed Legion of Boom secondary have all been processed out, their meat packaged and sold, you have to believe that Pete Carroll knows how to rebuild it all.

It helps that he still has Russell Wilson to rely on at quarterback. Wilson gets better and better as a passer each season, and can still rely on his legs to bail the Seahawks out. But Carroll has also rebuilt the Seahawks running game, turning it into the best in the NFL last season, giving the Seahawks the ability to control the pace of games against the firebombing Rams. Put it all together, and you have a team capable of quickly returning to the NFC West mountaintop. Never count out Pete Carroll and his boys.

This is especially true if they can find a receiver to pair with big play machine Tyler Lockett. They drafted D.K. Metcalf, a dude who has a tantalizing mix of size and speed, and if he can put it all together, then it is easy to see Russell Wilson leading an attack that can at least hang with the Rams, and maybe knock them off at the last minute if Carroll can rebuild his defense around Wagner and bring it back to the terrifying no man’s land place it occupied only a few short seasons ago.

It isn’t sunny in Seattle. It is cold and it is rainy, and the beautiful people are all buried underneath flannel, but Seattle has a fiery heart, a people smart and ironic, who understand how to play the beautiful people of LA, to take what they build and subvert it to their own fucked up, heroin chic beautiful lives. LA is a bright shiny smile. Seattle is the sardonic laughter mocking it all, and this makes for a light vs dark showdown on the edge of the American Dream, next to an ocean that is the only barrier for the fucked up people of America, an ocean that is the only thing that stops them and keeps them in one beautiful fucked up place, a place where they don’t have to run from the ugliness of the rest of America, where they don’t have to hide and where they can revel in their own fucked upness while miserable corn fuckers live out their miserable petty lives on the farm.

That all makes for a beautiful rivalry for the Rams and Seahawks, two sides to the same coin, one bright, one dark, each too beautiful and fucked up for the ordinary fucking people of Hayseed America to understand.

The Seahawks are almost certainly the last best hope for the rest of the NFC West to topple the burgeoning dynasty of the LA Rams, but they are not the only ones who have at least something going for them.

The San Francisco 49ers have drowned hilariously in the choppy Pacific waters ever since running Jim Harbaugh out of town, an act of ridiculous hubris that has set them back to their old ways of struggling for an identity in the shadows of the ghosts of Joe Montana, Steve Young, Jerry Rice and the rest of the boys who once made the 49ers the envy of the entire NFL. But there is hope that they can finally stop drowning and can once again build a bridge between the now and that glorious past.

That hope mainly rests in the idea that Jimmy Garoppolo is the real deal, the dude who got everyone excited after the 49ers stole him away from the Patriots, where he was languishing as Tom Brady’s heir apparent. He looked great in that late season stretch and gave birth to the kind of hopes and dreams that were once commonplace for fans of this team. But then he got hurt last season, and even before that he didn’t look like the dude who was advertised to be the Next Big Thing.

That has the 49ers sort of nervously holding their breath, hoping that Garoppolo is the dude who threatened Tom Brady, shaking him into running Jimmy G out of town, and not the dude who the Patriots gave away while Brady yawned and ate the cream of some young baby from between Gisele’s tits.

The 49ers are hoping and praying that he is the former rather than the latter, but they have also invested in a little help for him in the running game, where they have signed Tevin Coleman away from the Falcons and if they can team him with wunderkind Matt Breida, who was a pleasant surprise last season, and Jerrick McKinnon, who they hope can get himself healthy and back to being the kind of runner who showed promise as Adrian Peterson’s understudy in Minnesota, they will have a nice stable of backs that they hope can match up with the Rams and Seahawks formidable rushing attacks.

Defensively, the 49ers are hoping that Nick Bosa can be the pass rushing terror he promises to be, chasing down and funneling opposing quarterbacks into the massive hands of DeForest Buckner who will be collapsing the pocket from the middle like some dark nightmare, creating a pass rushing tandem that should be devastating for dudes like Goff and Russell Wilson.

That is an awful lot to hope for, but at the very least, the 49ers seem to finally be trending in the right direction after a half decade of bumbling around in the wake of owner Jed York’s jealous dismissal of Jim Harbaugh. They still probably don’t have the receivers to keep up with the Rams wild haired attack, and Garoppolo is far from a sure thing, but fuck it man, at some point you have to roll the dice and hope that you’ve made the right moves. Don’t plan on the 49ers somehow taking this division, but don’t completely dismiss them either.

That leaves the Arizona Cardinals, who have decided to buy the ticket and now hold their breaths as they take the wild ride promised by New Hope Kyler Murray at quarterback and a wide open all out aerial assault engineered by Air Raid master Kliff Kingsbury. It is a crazy risk given that Murray is only 5’10” and likely to get squashed like a bug by some NFL terrorbot pass rusher like Aaron Donald or Nick Bosa, and that Kingsbury only went 25-30 as a head coach at his alma mater, Texas Tech, who fired him because he could never get the defense right.

The hope is that Kingsbury won’t have to worry about the defense at all, allowing Vance Joseph to take care of that side of things as defensive coordinator. Joseph flamed out as head coach of the Denver Broncos, but he has an extensive background as a defensive assistant in the NFL, including a run in the NFC West as the defensive backs coach under Mike Singletary with the 49ers. The hope is that he can figure things out on the defensive side and let Kingsbury play with his new toys on offense.

Murray is the most exciting of those toys, a dynamic dual threat type who can just run away from you when he’s not busy throwing bombs, but like I said, he is only 5’10” and it’s a hell of a risk counting on him to not die in the NFL. The Cardinals traded away Josh Rosen in favor of Murray, and honestly, I don’t like the move because Rosen is almost the perfect quarterback for this style of offense, possessing the physical tools and stature that Murray just doesn’t have. He doesn’t have Murray’s electrifying athleticism, but that isn’t really necessary in a pure Air Raid kind of system, which just needs a quarterback with a howitzer to pick apart opposing defenses all day long.

Still, the Cardinals are excited to have a weapon like Murray, and maybe he can survive in the NFL. I don’t fucking know. He certainly offers a dynamic skillset and understands how to operate in a wide open passing attack after winning the Heisman at Oklahoma, which is nice but also maybe a little misleading since Baker Mayfield did the same thing the year before, suggesting that perhaps the offense itself was the real star and that a dude like Murray just needed to be dropped in and told to go as fast as possible. We’ll just have to see how that plays out now that he is in the NFL, and it will be worth keeping an eye on Jalen Hurts at Oklahoma, who profiles as a similar athlete as Murray after transferring from Alabama, where he led them to the brink of a national championship before being passed over in place of Tua Tagovailoa, who famously replaced him in the national title game and tossed bombs in victory. Hurts lost that job because Tua was a better passer, which is only relevant because the same thing is probably true of Murray. If Oklahoma had Tua Tagovailoa last year, Murray probably wouldn’t have seen the field and would probably be playing in the Oakland A’s organization after being a highly prized first round draft pick in baseball.

All of this is a long and winding way of saying that Kyler Murray is far from being a sure thing, being a dude who just happened to play in the perfect offense in the most wide open passing league in all of football in the Big 12, illustrated by the success of Baker Mayfield the year before Murray’s Heisman season. The NFL is a different animal all together, which is something that both Murray and Kingsbury will to face and adjust for if the Cardinals have any hope of this working.

Chances are that it will explode in on itself in the desert, but what the hell, at least the Cardinals are really going for it here, deciding to fight fire with a goddamn nuclear bomb of an attack that at the very least will probably be exciting to watch. They have to hope that Christian Kirk can take the next step towards being a star receiver in the NFL and that Larry Fitzgerald has enough left in the tank to be the spirit animal for Murray as he tries to adjust to life in the NFL. The Cardinals also picked up Hakeem Butler in the draft, who they got as a steal in the 4th round after a couple of years spent dominating the same Big 12 that produced Murray and Kingsbury. Hopefully, they will give Murray and Kingsbury enough weapons to work with to at least have a shot at running with the big boy Rams.

The team also hopes that David Johnson can return to form at running back after a couple of injury plagued seasons. If they can get all of that up and running, rock and rolling in the desert, where the sun burns away the sin and leaves only fire-sworn fuck machines and crazy racists, then maybe they have a chance to make a move here. Probably not this season, but you never know in the West World hedonism of the NFC West, which is overrun by vampires and silicone fuckbots, starting in the insane heat of the desert and making its way up the coast, into Los Angeles, filled with its wild souled residents, who fuck in the streets and on the beaches and most of all in the hills, where they attend orgies and do blow and revel in their own perfection, and then into the Bay Area, where the people are a little less outwardly extravagant, but still wild and crazy, the place that was the epicenter for the Summer of Love back in the day, when people literally fucked in the streets and ran back and forth between the hedonism of LA and the righteous vibes of San Francisco, and then finally onto the cynical rain filled embrace of Seattle, where the people are still beautiful, but also wrapped in their own knowing rejection of the sun and its people, holding to an ideal of credibility and Truth, to something realer than LA, even smarter than San Francisco, and devoid of the wild racism and desert insanity of Arizona. It is Kurt Cobain vs David Crosby vs Axl Rose vs Alice Cooper, and they’re all beautiful and fucked up in their own ways, and their souls all burn for something different, something better than what the rest of white bread America can offer, having run all the way to the edge of a continent, going west as Horatio Alger once beckoned them to do, running from the banality of the Puritans until they could run no more, and now here they all are, gathered on the Pacific shore where they all fuck hard and dream harder and where the boring people can never touch them.

That is the battleground where the NFC West will be decided, and it is the place where the people are all wildly different and yet very much the same in their rejection of the uptight drear of Ma and Pa America. This is where the true battle for the soul of America takes place, in the land where the people chase the sun as it sets across from an impossibly huge ocean, where they stare out and wonder what looks back at them, secretly wanting to wade into the waters, deeper, deeper, deeper, until there is nothing left but oblivion and the end of the pain that they all desperately ran from before the ocean was just too big to cross. This is the division of the most restless souls in America, of all the world, where the sun shines, the sands are soft and where everyone has big tits and cums suntan lotion or maybe grows out their hair and wails away with a guitar as the rain falls. This is the NFC West, the apotheosis of the American Dream.


Predicted Standings

1. Los Angeles Rams 13-3
2. Seattle Seahawks 10-6
3. San Francisco 49ers 8-8
4. Arizona Cardinals 4-12

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