Friday, December 25, 2020

The Ballad of Matthew Stafford

 

It’s Christmas which means that somewhere Matthew Stafford is walking on broken glass like Bruce Willlis. And somewhere, Lions fans bitch about him because we hate everything. It’s fair to say that I have had a love/hate relationship with Stafford going back to the day he was drafted, and in the interim between now and then, I’ve been frustrated many a time by his lack to “win the big one” forgetting of course that it’s the Lions and to blame one dude for not being able to “win the big one” is ludicrous.

 

Also, so soon we forget Stafford leading the Lions to a win as a baby QB back in the day while playing with a broken everything. Which brings us to today where Stafford again plays with a broken everything. His quest for a goddamn meaningful win is much like Odysseus trying to return home to his wife. Oh yeah, that’s right, Stafford’s wife is also battling the Big C all the time. He is a man who should be wrecked, but he isn’t. Instead he just tries to get home and win the damn game of life.

 

He has the heart of a Spirit Warrior, as only a special kind of dude could handle playing QB for a decade plus for the Detroit Lions. Is he a perfect QB? No, of course not. But I think he is good enough to win with for a good team, but that “for a good team” caveat looms large. The dude has thrown for 45,000 yards which is good for 16th ALL TIME. That’s uh, that’s good no matter how you break things down. Assuming he has at least another good five years in him, or shit, maybe longer given the NFL’s new ageless QB trend, he has a very legit shot at being top 5 all time. Read that again.

 

Stafford is one of those dudes who you don’t know what you’ve got until he’s gone and then you get Dan Orlovsky running out of the back of his own endzone. He’s also 16th all time in passing TD’s and again, when it’s all said and done, he will at the very least be top 10, probably closer to top 5. The numbers are insane, and speak to a dude who is underappreciated in his own time.

 

Those numbers, of course, tend to get overshadowed by the optics of never winning a playoff game or even beating winning teams, but the Lions are so fucking wretched that it’s almost shameful to put the blame on him. I mean, this is a team that broke the will of Barry Sanders AND Calvin Johnson, and yet Stafford is still in there fighting his ass off when he could just walk away. But he hasn’t and he deserves all of our love for at least that much.

 

He is a tragic figure, Hector to the rest of the NFL’s Achilles, shit, to the Lions Achilles. He is the last hero of a beleaguered kingdom, and yet his fate is to be dragged behind a fucking horse. But, like I alluded to earlier, he is also Odysseus, fighting a bunch of strange and crazy shit like giant cyclops just to try to make it home. Hint: Odysseus eventually made it home and then killed all the dudes macking on his wife. If that is Stafford’s fate, I’ll take it.

 

It is that duality between doomed hero and a dude who never stops fighting that makes him so compelling, and, ultimately, worthy of inspiring that rarest of things for Lions fans: hope. It is a fragile thing, that hope, beset by Lions Disease at every step along the way, but if the Lions are ever gonna win anything, it will be with Stafford at quarterback. On any other team, he is talked about as an all-time great. With the Lions, he’s a perpetual scapegoat.

 

More than even the numbers, though, is Stafford’s warrior like determination to play through pain, carrying the cross to the hill for his own crucifixion in between throwing for all those yards and TD’s. He is often derided and betrayed by his own people, but his martyrdom will one day be looked upon with reverence and respect. He is the best Lions QB ever and it isn’t even close.

 

I am, of course, getting wild and ridiculous with my metaphors here, but that’s what I do. And I feel sort of a kinship to Stafford as a dude who goes overlooked in his own time. I think everyone can relate to that at least on some level. Whether it’s your boss not valuing you enough, or your wife up and leaving you, or old friends ghosting you for making Poor Choices, you know you deserve better.

 

What “better” means is always open to interpretation, but what it will always mean at its base level is that we are all just people who want to be loved for who we are, for what we do. Stafford’s desire for “better” is public in a way that would break most people. And yet, he never breaks. Inside, he’s just a dude looking for love, for “better” just like all of us. That is an everyman sort of quality that is rare, especially in the ego factory that is the NFL and their near sociopathic QBs. Stafford, though, *cares* and that is perhaps both his strength and his weakness, which is true of anyone who cares like that.

 

He is not the dude to go all Patrick Bateman like Tom Brady. He is not some cocky young thing like Patrick Mahomes. He is just a dude trying his hardest to overcome decades worth of absurd failure that is Detroit Lions football. Others would sulk, demand trades, fight with their own front office, but Stafford just goes to work and try to be the man who finally transcends Lions Disease.

 

He will always be the dude who dragged himself onto the field for a game winning drive as a young dude. Just as he’ll always be the dude who turned that comeback into something of an artform. And he’ll always be the dude who played through the pain just for a chance to fight back against Lions Disease.

 

People always want to blame the QB when things are going bad, and unfortunately things are damn near always going bad for the Lions. But please, dudes and lady dudes, blame someone else, anyone else, because this QB is a fucking Spirit Warrior who never says die. And that makes him pretty unique in the Lions grander culture and history. Everyone else quit. Stafford never did, and he doesn’t look likely to do so anytime soon. Hector and Odysseus all in one, John McLane walking on broken glass, he is all of these dudes, and yet, he is also One Of Us, and he embraces it. He is in the mud with the rest of us and that makes him a brother. Embrace him.

Saturday, December 19, 2020

Gambling With Sanity Week 15

No time for a preamble or fixating on past disgraces, it’s Saturday and there are football games today, NFL ones and I don’t even recognize Thursday in the calendar anymore, that seems like a plot by Julius Caesar or those fucking Gregorians, I don’t know, let’s talk about football and life.

 

 

Carolina (+8.5) at Green Bay

 

The Panthers barely even tried this year, and Christian McCafferty is probably off seeding the all-girls school in whatever the fuck goes on in Colorado where the McCafferty’s are bred for sport and nobody better mess with whatever Easy Ed has going on there because the CIA has invested too much in the McCafferty family to not let it be anything less than ALL AMERICAN and you can print those on t-shirts or just watch the commercials with them being ALL AMERICAN and maybe drinking Coors, every specimen is a McC and every tender virgin knows not to peak above the laboratory doors where the ALL AMERICANS are made.

 

But even if Christian was ready to rep the McC Lifetsyle for more than three or four games in Carolina, it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference once the devil gets down to doing the evil things that he can only do. There were some people talking down le devil because the Packers went and got themselves a 1st round QB, which is the same thing they did to Dr. Burt Fever as he fucked with his dogs and got that Wrangler game down. But Our Devil has just gone and thrown 39 TDs against only 4 INT. It is diabolical how this evil son of a bitch keeps destroying records while shooting insurance commercials and pretending to like women. And The Devil isn’t even a dumb redneck even though the Wisconsin fans probably retcon that shit. He went to Cal U, Berkley, which is basically like going to Progressive St. Grew up in California and probably has an acid bath next to him at all times so he can rid himself of any Midwestern fat shit redneck people particles that get caught up in all the devilry.

 

Listen, I respect The Devil. He has his role to play, mostly demoralizing the youth of the Midwest he fucking hates so much. People in these states are fucking gross, and I am including my beloved Michigan in that. Fat, mean, stupid simple people who are into cheese and occasionally helping to blow up fertilizer bombs, The Devil is right to detest them. Sure, he sometimes ruins us, but he also ruins those we hate too, and I bet in the offseason he smokes weed and plays Call of Duty with his friends from back home.

 

Pick: Packers

 

 

Buffalo (-5.5) at Denver

Two teams who are used to the cold and dead of December. But the Bills are leaving behind their frozen failures and embracing Josh Allen as an MVP candidate at QB, which is something I did not expect to see given he could barely get decent numbers at fucking Wyoming. He was the quintessential project QB and somehow the Bills, the fucking Bills of all teams, managed to get a dude in there who could turn the project into a monster. That’s Brian Daboll who is going to be on every lizard tongue in the offseason coachathon that starts when a Harbaugh pops its head up and ends when a drunk Barry Switzer is guest hosting a wet t-shirt contest in fucking February.

 

The Bills do appear to be For Real, which is astonishing given that they are basically Detroit’s fatter cousin. Buffalo is not a town on the move, and everything there is snowed under thanks to Lake Effect Snow Storms which we have here in the Great Lakes and it just dumps snow on us while the inland folks get a light dusting. To be For Real, these Bills must be working with some serious Spirit Warrior Energy to overcome all the doldrums of Buffalo life. By the way, the name Buffalo Bills is probably the laziest fucking name for a team that I can think of. They named their team after a fucking buffalo hunting carnie. Of course, Buffalo Bill is a Medal of Honor winner because America is the dumbest fucking country ever put on a map. But anyway, it has always bothered me that the Buffalo Bills are named as such. Just lazy and stupid.

 

The Broncos are a pathetic mess and nobody cares about them anymore, which is a hell of a job done by John Elway to turn one of the AFC’s bell cows into, I don’t know, those cows that don’t have any fucking bells. Hamburger, I think they’re called.

 

Pick: Buffalo

 

Houston (+7.5) at Indianapolis

The Colts continue to roll as this fucked up marriage between them and Phil Rivers seems to be working out. Really, this is Frank Reich’s offense showing everyone that he was the dude with the big dick when the Eagles were stealing Super Bowls, and never forget that Frank Reich had one of those backup QB careers that just don’t exist anymore where he was Buffalo’s backup when Jim Kelly was slinging it and everyone knew that if Kelly got hurt or had his jaw eaten by acid or whatever the fuck ended up happening to him in his retirement years, that Frank Reich would roll up and just start straight shooting everyone. They had that arrangement, I mean it must have been something deeper than just QB1 QB2, for damn near a decade. Frank was always Jim’s butler basically, you know those weird English Downton Abbey type arrangements where the butler is basically married to the house and might have even covered up Good Sir’s war crimes a time or two. That’s what they had going on in Buffalo all those years.

 

But, like many servile types, Frank was probably the brains of the outfit while Jim tried not to have his face eaten by the flesh eating bacteria or whatever the fuck that eventually got him. And now Frank is probably just carrying on as a coach with a quarterback’s brain, all ready to make a shitty QB like Nick Foles play like Frank Reich off the bench and if I recall he engineered the largest comeback victory in NFL history when called upon one Sunday. And I think he might have done the same at Maryland when he was in college, but now I might just be making shit up, I don’t even fucking know, but maybe he did.  Anyway, he coached Nick Foles to a Super Bowl win and now he’s got Phil Rivers to play Jim Kelly for at least one more year, so you have to recognize when a dude like that is making his power move. Running out in front with a division leading Colts team that has Frank’s butler skills intact along with a pretty decent defense feels like Frank Reich’s Power Move. I mean, it’s about damn time, you can’t always be the butler. Then again, when Frank Reich did leave Buffalo he caught on with an outfit that went by the name of the Detroit Lions. He started two games for the Lions in the twilight of his QB days, and, of course, he lost them both. So maybe double check him every now and then.

 

Pick: Indianapolis

 

 

Detroit (+9.5) at Tennessee

 

The Lions look like they give a shit under Bevell which is the first time that’s happened since you got a baseball bat and a rape on the side running the team. But those evil fucks are gone now, taken by le nain rouge during one of his impish runs to Windsor where Canada and Detroit live in a magical fucking place together where you can gamble and get drunk at 19 even though you’ve been getting drunk since you were 13 and got a few beers from Darren McCarty when he used you to watch out for pigs when he was running dice. And the Detroit River runs through it all, a magical place.

 

Anyway, if I were a Lion, running shady street games in Windsor would be all I was doing while the Ford family decides whether to make a commercial with Eminem talking up the city again or whether to name Eminem the Lions new head coach. I would not hate a Slim Shady Lions team for a couple of years, I mean it’s not like you can ruin it or anything. You could even let Kid Rock hang around as like the Team Jackass, getting bounced around by the offensive linemen after he made some unfortunate racial remarks. Everybody get him, a real team building exercise.

 

But no, these Lions are playing hard for Bevell and maybe each other and that is honorable and kinda sweet until the whole thing gets tossed in a flaming dumpster while the new Lions GM Vince McMahon promises a whole new look to the team next year.

 

There are so many dark and dangerous doors I could open when talking about the Lions because anything is really possible. Not winning games or anything crazy like that you poor suffering bastards, never anything like that. But something weird and fucked up? Maybe. Listen, I once said a bunch of shit about a 7th round draft pick who nobody cared about and that dude ended up becoming The Great Willie Young and it wouldn’t have worked if the dude wasn’t The Dude, synchronicity and a lot of fucking fun just fell together for a few years there, so you never know what weird shit might happen with this team, and if I’m writing about them, it’s pretty much guaranteed to have an interesting backstory or mushroom dream.

 

I want to root these Lions on right now, though, because none of it means a fucking thing and that’s when folk heroes get made. You could pick Tennessee here because they are a functional football team and all that, but you’d be a Failure Demon or the Noid or some other fucking thing I invented or coopted for this crazy shit, and I’d talk shit about you all season long, or at least until my methadone came through. Just cheer for the boys for fucking once.

 

Pick: Lions

 

 

NY Jets (+17) at LA Rams

 

New York to LA, they should just let the talking heads cosplay this game because NYC and LA are where all the pregame and halftime and FUN TIME crews gather every year until they are all fucking muppets basically, or heavily made up corpses. Seriously, these fucks have been out of the game since the fucking Victorian Age, and some vampire gets caked in makeup and plays the straight man even though he has a tombstone with the year 1864 etched on it or maybe they get a lady who’s really one of the guys but that doesn’t usually work out without one of the actual guys pawing her like a fucking gorilla but maybe it will work because these dudes haven’t had a hard dick since the Ford administration. Terry Bradshaw hasn’t played in 40 fucking years.

 

Shit, the actual Jets and Rams will probably be auditioning at the half for their own spinoff show, maybe one of them gets a fat assed Mexican wife with a hot temper and a dog that shits everywhere, there are at least six different networks being pitched that while I write this. The NFL has always had kind of a celeb fucking culture more than any other league. Maybe the NBA, but that is mostly a famous fan thing, with the NFL, these guys are all half marketing majors or some shit ready to get into daytime TV when their concussions start feeling like space abductions.

 

The Jets QB has always been a celeb of sorts, whether it was Broadway Joe or Butt Fumble, but nobody fucking cares this time around, probably because the USC to NYJet transfer program has once again been revealed as a hollow mess. And of course, people don’t really pay much attention to a 4th rate LA Showboy minxing it up in NYC when their loved ones are all dying from some rat disease or pig shit virus, I don’t know where they breed, and no one can even have a Happy Christmas without demanding that grandpa be outfitted with one of those plague masks that looks like a dick. Maybe New Year’s will be wrung in from a concentration camp. Either way, the Jets lose and lose horribly.

 

Pick: Rams

 

 

Tampa Bay (-6.5) at Atlanta

 

The last time Atlanta, the city, the sports teams, the people, went up against Tom Brady, he rode through their front doors and fucked their wives, daughters and hung the ugly ones from bridges built between he and Gisele’s palatial estate and the plantation states which make up our 50 stars and stripes, with some moats and shit built around private estates or islands which are designated for hunting and or/fucking depending on the season.

 

The Falcons have never recovered, Matt Ryan is a joyless miser who will spend Christmas throwing chocolates shaped like turds at the exposed asses of whatever lady folk he can run out of the Atlanta strip clubs. He will sneer and shout rude insults at the women because none of them NOT ONE is a biochemically enhanced Nazi Brazilian like Tom Brady’s wife. If he would have leaned into the natural fat asses of the locals he might have turned this thing around, but he fancied himself a Brady and even the hookers are sick of talking to him in faux German/Portuguese or whatever he imagines Gisele speaks, probably some dolphin language,

 

Atlanta is never coming back with this core and the only interesting thing will be seeing where the parts are eventually offshored to. I imagine The Tom Himself might even put in a requisition order on an Alabama bred WR or two or maybe Tom will just get bored and pretend to befriend all the Falcons refugees before having them clubbed and their parts sold for oil in the deep Amazonian plantations run by Gisele’s family, Uncle Klaus sending communique’s back with the odd humanoid messengers who have anuses for mouths and never stop crying.

 

The FUCKING PLAYOFFS are coming, and TOM doesn’t need any distractions from assorted side projects, so one can only assume that Matt Ryan won’t even get a chance to look upon the wonders of the tropicos as he is literally pantsed and sent to the locker room sucking his thumb.

 

Pick: Bucs

 

New England (+1.5) at Miami

 

Didn’t I just talk about Tom Brady? Oh right, this is his divorcee, and really Little Bill has managed to smear at least a little lipstick on this pig, but the Patriots will not be promoting the Patriot Way Infomercial through February 2021 mostly because some franchisee’s turned their Patriot Way Homes into palaces of sin and filth, floods carrying away the rising turds from Houston, Bob Quinn and Matt Patricia reduced to a touring rape bus which I don’t think is going to change any cultures no matter how patient their clients are and Little Bill himself is frolicking with his Senator Horse and the children on staff whose names he doesn’t even know, they could be leftovers from the zygotes never thrown out properly from the Drew Bledsoe years when Big Bill Parcells was shaping this thing for him.

 

But Miami has a shot at a Wild Card. And that means that they have to piss on Little Bill while the pisssin’ is still good. It’s a big opportunity for Tua to show that he is a man now and that means defiling the ex-wife of The Man, but Little Bill might not even give a shit at this point and is just content to curtsy in his spurned lover dress before the new hot young thing. It’s very political, these high society meetings, you never know what to expect for sure. And maybe Little Bill just wants to go to bed before dawn this one time, and even if he doesn’t know any of his kid’s names that doesn’t stop him from making sure none of them look him in the eye. He’s had it with all these damn kids!

 

Pick: Miami

 

 

Seattle (-6.5) at Washington

 

I just did some drugs here at 3:41 AM so I could power through this after a day which saw me scoot on my naked butt from one room to the next because my legs had abandoned me and so too the pantaloons which adorned them. A cold shower never felt so good. But anyway, I am determined to write this up for you despite the absurdity of it all, which is juxtaposed with a special episode of that show Euphoria on HBOMax which is all about addiction and society’s fucked hold on your damaged parts played out in a conversation between a 17 year old druggie played by the beautiful Zendaya and a 50 something crack addict who is her NA sponsor playing on my other screen while I do drugs and make art and it’s pretty good, not too precious and probably says some things to me, but not more than what these pills said to me so I don’t know if that is irony or just sad junkie shit or me flourishing as an artiste because there is no other me than Me and I will Slay All My Haters.

 

Anyway, it all made me think of Washington, not the stupid football team with no name, but the city itself which is always sort of caught in that same transitional and deluded milieu as the junkie. It is a junkie city, filled with hateful addicts who scurry from all parts of this shitty country, and their enablers and dealers and the dick suckers and titty shakers who make the leviathan shoot steam out of its pipes once in a while.

 

And then you have Seattle, which is the megaplex of the State of Washington, and it is also frenetically fried like a junkie way past their limit. Seattle is a weird place that is very white in a sense, but also a place where anti-globalization rallies went wild with riots and shit and there are parts of the city that are basically infinite independent states all screaming at each other in a place stripped of government with the purpose of screaming for some kind of government, all broken apart and rearranged. It is a strong protest city, to the point that the protest does not even need to have a base movement, it is a metabolized collection of grievances and causes and screaming just because the world needs to be screamed at. I like this ever evolving thing they seem to have going on there, which exists at street level even while that same level is overrun by nut huggers and white bodhisattva’s wearing cycling gear or some hellscape from Planet Microsoft.

 

I’m not even sure what I’m getting at talking about TV shows and junkies and cities that I am not in right now, but if there is one current, it is that junkie energy which seems fucking crazy and insane but which is really just a fractured reality put back together again in surprising new ways by people with eyes to see and ears to hear. Music, art, writing, drugs, religion, it’s all just ways to see bigger than ourselves and nurture the tiny fragile parts that hold it all together. Both these teams roll out black QBs and that is not a thing I usually go on about, but my Dad once asked me why all the QBs were white if they had to be smart and it was a stupidly racist thing said by a stupidly racist man whose head never rose above the beans he picked as a boy and I remember just kind of giving him an uncomfortable shutup dad kind of thing, but it occurs to me now that my dad wouldn’t even be able to throw out that lazy trope because the black dudes have just sort of taken it over and that makes me glad the same way Seattle makes me glad and fuck you if you’re on a NEIL’S ON DRUGS LOL tip right now because that shit hasn’t even kicked in yet. lol owned.

 

Pick: Seattle

 

 

Chicago (+3) at Minnesota

 

There is no reason for these failed teams to be playing right now. Let an actual bear maul Kirk Cousins, just rip apart his entire abdominal region, maybe claw his dick off too, that would be great. And then let a troop of real life Vikings run wild down State and Madison and pillage Chicago for whatever its worth,  the Xanadu of the Midwest.

 

I mean it, fuck this game and fuck these two teams, I hope the field just eats them all.

 

Pick: Vikings

 

 

Jacksonville (+13) at Baltimore

 


 

 

 

Pick: Baltimore

 

 

Cleveland (-6.5) at NY Giants

 

WAR CLEVELAND!!! The Browns are hurdling towards the playoffs with a hot shit offense and a, uh, well, some level of shit defense, but fuck it, it’s Cleveland, of course their run will be tainted with poop. They stood up to the Ravens – and lost – but it was one of those Fuck You losses where the losing team earned a night of carnal delights because at a certain point the score doesn’t really matter, it’s just all about how you stand up on that fucking field and the Browns stood the fuck up. Toe to toe with not just a behemoth of an offense but the TEAM THAT USED TO WEAR THEIR CLOTHES. Again, it ended in a loss, but it also ended in something real, which is the Cleveland Browns.

 

Now they just have to snuff out a pesky Giants team that might have a thimble of pride thanks to Jabrill Peppers, but the Giants sad sack QB and offense won’t be able to keep pace with the Stablered Stallions of Baker Mayfield and the Browns. I mean, the Giants took a QB from Duke. Fucking Duke! That’s geek ball, son, and Baker Mayfield will make you wash his balls after he ruins yet another Giants football Sunday.

 

Pick: Browns

 

 

Philadelphia (+6.5) at Arizona

 

The Eagles somehow tripped up the Saints last week, but their season is still a fucking disaster. Weird shit happens in New Orleans, okay? But weird shit happens in the desert too, which is where the Eagles are set to take on these up and down Cardinals. Now, I like the Cardinals basic deal. Flashy offense under the hot sun, but they also lost to the fucking Lions under that same sun, so… you don’t know.

 

Philly is obviously just pulling random cards at this point and seeing what happens, but the Cardinals absolutely must win this game if they have any hope of jumpstarting this desert speed show maybe a year early. Chasing Tom Brady is not a place you want to be even if you are as fast as Kyler Murray. What this season will probably be is a coming out party of sorts, with no reception at the end. Maybe next year, Kyler. But that’s not that bad for a team playing in the desert before Cowboys fans with a head coach who loves to throw the ball but couldn’t get past .500 with Texas Tech, but he’s got a nuclear weapon in Murray and another weapon banned by Geneva in DeAndre Hopkins.

 

Sometimes, it’s as simple as looking at who has something to play for and who doesn’t, and that metric heavily favors the Cardinals.

 

Pick: Arizona

 

 

Kansas City (-3) at New Orleans

 

New Orleans always blows a puzzler or two, and that’s what happened last week against the Eagles, but that probably means they will be back on their game against the Chiefs. One problem, it’s against the Chiefs.

 

Patrick Mahomes almost certainly goes on Kansas City morning shows and convinces my grandma that he is a white dude. He’s just very tan, she’ll tell me. I feel for Mahomes because while he is the Dick Times Ten in the NFL, it is also accompanied by the very real race problems that the NFL has with its star QBs, some of whom are essentially banned from the league because the NFL is a criminal organization. But Mahomes stays under the radar because he can “pass” to my grandma which, hey, good for him not having to deal with that headache, but also that is just such shitty shit and my grandma can go set herself on fire atop a haywagon filled with other soup brained idiiots who were raised on Petticoat Junction as the most scandalous of escapes.

 

Sadly, Drew Brees would probably commend old grandma B, but the good thing about both of them is that they are old and old people get sick and then they die. People love their grandmas and want them to stay around forever, but fuck that old bitch. If I could trade her and her son’s peanut brain for letting my mom roll happy for an extra ten years, I’d be all for it. Maybe that makes me a bad whatever, but maybe it makes me a dude who knows who loves him and who he loves and who is good in this fucking world.

 

This got kind of weird and sappy, but don’t forget those drugs I took a while back.

 

Pick: Chiefs

 

 

San Francisco (-3) at Dallas

 

Both of these teams are tragically shot to shit, so the only real question is whether Jerry Jones finally gets busted for running that underground sex dungeon I have painstakingly detailed these many weeks. Now, I’m not one for abusing a man for his proclivities, but there are immigration and possible age issues at play here. I am not saying FOR SURE that Jerry Jones keeps a dungeon full of underage immigrants for touching his penis, but the CLUES have been there all along. The bloodshot eyes and face, the REFUSAL to spring for even a mediocre defense proving that his entire philosophy is based around OFFENSIVE AGGRESSION!!!

 

For real, all I want for Christmas is Jerry Jones quaking on Main Street Dallas in women’s underwear and with bite marks all around various sensitive areas. Maybe I want a few things more than that for Christmas but fuck it, that would be something to soothe the soul.

 

Pick: San Francisco

 

Pittsburgh (-14) at Cincinnati

 

The Steelers have been disgraced and defiled, no longer undefeated, no longer even one defeated, losing to Washington was one thing, losing to the Bills in a Confidence matchup was another, and I kinda called it.

 

I have said all along that the Steelers are not the Big Bad in the AFC that their record made them out to be, and after the last two weeks dented their armor somewhat, I feel kind of gratified.

 

But feeling gratified by these stupid things is not cool or awesome or good even, because they only serve to set me up to look the fool next week. I am a Lions fan after all.  The Steelers have been humbled, but I always try to stay humble, so that I don’t end up waving my small dick around like Ben Roethlisberger does at any open event.

 

The Bengals are obviously sans Joe Burrow who was taken by a feminist sex cult who refused to even acknowledge the sexual member Burrow spent training in Baton Rouge. It serves him right as the final satisfied customer of Jerry Jones’ Underground Sex Dungeon, which we have explored in depth these many weeks. It will all go towards making him the QB he Can Be, but for now Rapey Ben gets to maintain his aggressive advantage and the Steelers will win while their fans turn into ghosts busted by Oxy and the plant not opening back up since 1988. Weren’t there supposed to be service jobs? They have robots for those now. Your best bet very well may be in the Oxy Olympics.

 

Pick: Steelers