Well, week 2 was pretty much a disaster as I went 5-10, proving once again that I am a goddamn idiot. I didn’t even bother to fuck with the Lions, hence that missing pick, but it would have likely added to the win column, meaning I fucked myself twice over, once by not picking and twice, of course, by being a Lions fan in the first place. The good news is that I am just going to start folding my Lions bullshit into Gambling With Sanity. The bad is you are denied more gibberish from me and also that I am still a fucking Lions fan. To be honest, it might be good that you don’t have more idiot words to read from me than is necessary. I don’t know. Gambling With Sanity is certainly more popular than my Lions ravings which has a dwindling audience and to be honest I don’t blame anyone. Fuck, I am part of that dwindling audience now. I still plan on doing a Thanksgiving Lions piece and also some other bullshit here and there when the mood strikes. It doesn’t strike right now, that’s all. We’ve been through this all before and we will be through it again I’m sure but for now let’s just roll with what we’ve been dealt with and eventually I’ll fall back off the wagon and rant and rave some more much like I fell off the literal wagon, one of those little red ones, when I was four and my cousin dared me to ride it down a hill. I broke my arm and my redneck dad refused to take me to the hospital until it swelled up into a grotesque looking thing. That has since served as a metaphor for my whole fucking life but what the fuck am I rambling about now? There is football writing to be done and also G1 writing to be done later and my god I am out of control. Let’s get on with it.
Miami (+3) at Jacksonville
Miami remains a lost cause for the 168th year in a row and pretty soon they are going to get a real stink on them spiritually. Maybe it’s already there, I don’t know. They are still riding Ryan Fitzpatrick when they should probably just be starting the future with Tua, but what the fuck do I know? I certainly like Fitzpatrick who remains one of the last true rogues in the Stabler mold, only he’s Harvard bred which makes him all the weirder. He has passed up a life of High Finance and Fucking Over The Little People to concuss himself into oblivion and god bless him for it.
Meanwhile, Gardner Minshew embraces the Stabler in the more traditional sense. A vagabond, he will likely end his life on a houseboat in some swamp, balling low rent strippers. Fuck, even Stabler had his roots in Alabama. Minshew is just a drifter who has somehow won the lottery. Of course, he’ll piss it all away because that’s what dudes like him do. He doesn’t know how to handle success or money and that’s okay, most of us don’t. But it’s all fast cars and blow right now for him and it’s enough to carry him over the Dolphins of the league if not the truly good teams. Mediocrity is likely his fate as his star will fall and people will turn on him but fuck, again, isn’t that true for most of us? After all, I am just a failed novelist and sometimes drug addict. I am perilously clean right now, which is to say that I am open to further drug use so long as it doesn’t become all encompassing like a certain substance did for a while. I won’t name it because it’s too pathetic. I would like to get high again in the future, but this is all just me rambling and I don’t even fucking know what to do with myself to be honest. I am having bad nightmares and shitty anxiety as I try to make Good Choices, which is some real ironic and mean shit, isn’t it? But you don’t care about all that, you just want to watch the monkey dance and dance I shall. The point, I guess if there is a point, is that I relate to a dude like Gardner Minshew for sure and I wish him all the best. It’s just that life is an asshole and comes for us all. I’ll do blow with him if the opportunity arises. You can’t say more for a dude than that.
Pick: Jacksonville
Las Vegas (+5.5) at New England
I’m kinda disturbed that the Raiders are hanging in there and maybe even prospering in the desert, but I suppose it is a worthy metaphor for the shitheap that is America these days. Fucking carpetbaggers and betrayers of once noble spirit, they are feeding off the last remnants of the American Dream with no fans and nothing good going on spiritually. But Good Spirits have betrayed this country and run away and left nothing but Evil Spirits to gnaw on our livers as we are chained to the rocks like Prometheus, paying for the sins of our wicked ancestors who raped and pillaged their way to Super Power status, breaking the backs of slaves and the Chinese and poor Irish immigrants, not to mention abusing the labor of Mexicans and Guatemalans and Hondurans and the like searching for something better after America went and fucked up their countries in a brutal display of hegemonic lust for control and exploitation of the drug trade. The Raiders are their team now, the evil Americans who did all that shit and it is apropos that they are succeeding in a vacant desert town bereft of desperate tourists who can’t be trusted not to get each other sick with Corona tinged madness.
The Patriots went and lost to the Seahawks and are experiencing life without Tom Brady, and speaking of Evil Empires, it is perhaps apropos again that they are maybe breaking apart just as the Patriot themed one that has existed for nigh 250 years now is. Bill Belichick is just another gross old white dude who has clung to power for far too long, using and abusing the rules, fucking with people’s lives and ruining his own personal life in the gross addiction to power. But it’s stupid football power, which is meaningless and lol at him for being a mark for it all. And yet, I suspect that the Patriots will still be okay post-Tom because they have built something hideous and mean and its roots are in Bill Parcells who knew how to build hideous and mean teams. Belichick is just his acolyte. People forget that, but he learned from a master of evil and will probably work just enough evil magic to keep the Patriots in the discussion if not the driver’s seat of this fucked up race car of a league. It certainly should be enough to take down the Raiders, but fuck, you never know. Dark forces are at work in either event.
Pick: New England
LA Rams (+2.5) at Buffalo
It is a sign of how quickly things can change in the NFL that the fucking Bills are favored over the Rams who were yesterday’s darlings. But the Rams smoked the Eagles while the Bills had to fight their way to a close win over the Dolphins so crowning the Bills may be a bit premature. Still, the Stefon Diggs experiment seems to be working for the Bills and gives them the firepower on offense that they have been missing. I still don’t really trust Josh Allen who I suspect is a fraud, but that may be a lingering bias left over from when he was drafted and I was incredulous because his stats sucked ass in college at fucking Wyoming of all places. And yet, it all seems to be working. At least for now.
The Rams, meanwhile, have lost all respect for some reason. But they sit at 2-0 and it seems to be a healthy 2-0. They lost Todd Gurley, but big deal, running backs don’t matter like they used to. They still have a nice aerial attack and they still have Aaron Donald so fuck everyone. They play in LA so they are already used to playing without fan support as nobody in LA is a true fan of anything except doing blow and sucking their own dicks in the hills which, hey, I’m not opposed to by any means. Sports are fucking dumb.
Pick: Rams
Houston (+4) at Pittsburgh
It doesn’t get any easier for Houston who have a brutal early schedule. 0-3 will likely lead to some Rumblings even if it really shouldn’t, but this is a team that has knocked on the door only to have no one answer and that always sucks. It’s too soon to rebuild, not with Deshaun Watson. JJ Watt is starting to sniff corpse life and the timing just hasn’t been there. Maybe a high pick will allow them to reload on the fly, I don’t know. Success for them would be a nice salve for a city that has been whipped up on a bit with flooding and hurricanes and all that madness, a sort of New Orleans overlooked in popular culture which has enough wild shit to dwell on at breakneck speed. Fucking Houston gets left to rot and its people grow desperate for something to cling to. A dumbass football team isn’t the best, obviously, but it’s better than the Nothing that they are dealing with now.
The Steelers will always be the fucking Steelers, which is to say a dangerous outfit that demands respect. My man Devin Bush has reinvented the defense around himself, giving the Steelers a dangerous identity defensively yet again, which has always been their calling card when things are going well. The rapist keeps on keeping on offensively, which sucks, but what are you gonna do? These are the types of dudes who flourish in this fucked up society of ours. They hardly miss Old What’s His Name at receiver which speaks to the brutal realities of this league, which doesn’t much care for individual success as it does The Team The Team The Team, which while noble in a certain light is also kind of fucked up. Subsuming yourself to a greater good is a noble goal, and yet, given the brutal nature of this fucked up sport, it’s maybe not that great an ideal. I’m sorry, Bo. I know that is blasphemous. But football, perhaps more than any other American sport, is all about Culture, as I well know as a Lions fan. When it’s good, like with the Steelers here, it can survive any number of defections. When it’s bad, it doesn’t fucking matter if you have transcendent stars like Barry Sanders or Calvin Johnson. Which is why the fucking Steelers will continue to be the fucking Steelers and beat teams like the Texans, who have yet to really establish a culture either way.
Pick: Steelers
San Francisco (-4) at NY Giants
The 49ers drilled the Jets but lost Nick Bosa which may be a critical hit for them. Speaking of cultures, the once mighty 49ers culture has become something more fragile due to mismanagement and Trumpian ownership. Young York suffers just like the erstwhile Duke of York, the last true Stuart did. Ha, history bitches! Anyway, I don’t see the 49ers being able to hold up like people seem to expect. After all, the Super Bowl loser usually shrivels up under the weight of such failure and the 49ers seem primed to be that team to me. Of course, I will likely be proven an idiot, as is my role as Town Jackass.
Still, they should be able to maul the lowly Giants, who remain a team Of Shit, the lifeless corpse to be fed upon by New York vultures who are barely human. I feel for my man Jabril Peppers here. He doesn’t deserve this shitty situation, but the Giants are always a stretch of Shitty Situations in between Super Bowl champs, which is perhaps the weirdest culture in the NFL, one going back to the Parcells years. They are either winning it all or inexplicably awful and I fear that they remain inexplicably awful despite their many advantages as the NFL’s shining New York team. I mean, let’s face it, the league would love the Giants to be good and rake in that TV money from the biggest market in the country but then I will start rambling about conspiracy theories and no one really wants that, do they? The simple fact remains they are trash and so be it.
Pick: 49ers
Tennessee (-2.5) at Minnesota
I am, of course, delighting in the Failure of Kirk Cousins, who swindled the Vikings into giving him a bunch of money for being a Fucking Loser. He is deeply representative of the fucking goons who have taken over this country and I imagine he owns a red hat. Fuck him and the team he quarterbacks. I feel kind of bad saying that since the Vikings were the favorite team of my favorite uncle, but he is dead now of a heart attack, suffered in Bumfuck, Ohio while working as a fucking sales representative even though he had an artistic personality like me. His life – and death – serve as a cautionary tale. I have wandered off the path, which is that the Vikings were his team and so I have always tried to see the light with them. But he is Gone now and only wretched monsters like Kirk Cousins remain. Life sucks.
I’m glad that Tennessee is favored here, and yet I suspect that the Vikings will climb out of the sewer starting now because that is what they usually do. The Titans are an outfit that is oddly successful despite not having anything resembling a powerhouse talent. They have a good running back in Derrick Henry and their defense is always up to the task and they manage to squeak by on that even though those two things are out of fashion in the explosive pass heavy NFL of today. It is a weird scene, a boring scene, one that is tough to gauge year after year, but I suspect that they won’t be able to stop the Vikings as the Vikings reclaim something resembling respectability. Of course, I hope I’m wrong.
Pick: Vikings
Washington (+7) at Cleveland
It does my heart good to see the Browns favored by a full touchdown here. Of course, they will likely break that same heart. Loveable losers, Baker Mayfield and the boys managed to triumph over the lowly Bengals which is all you can ask for. Really, it was Nick Chubb who balled out, giving Dan a chubby and me a sense of happiness as my backup team spoke to my degenerate heart more than my primary team. I only gravitate to losers, what can I say? But no, there is still a chance for the Browns to be something other than miserable I think, and that is reflected in that healthy line against the disgusting Washington Football Team. Mayfield keeps the Stabler flame alive another week and Dan rides his bicycle into the Atlantic as he tries to visit me. Jesus walked on water, why can’t Dan bicycle on water? What the fuck am I even babbling about here? Anyway, Washington isn’t even worthy of discussion. Fuck them and their hideous owner.
Pick: Browns
Cincinnati (+4.5) at Philadelphia
The Eagles are in trouble, much to the dismay of my boy Tosh who will no doubt react by doing a bunch of blow and hollering at a police horse or some insane shit, god bless the boy. They just can’t seem to get their shit together and that Super Bowl win is looking increasingly like an isolated incident. The NFC East is either an Eagles division or a Cowboys division year after year now and I think it’s safe to say that this year looks like a Cowboys year. Then again, who knows with that division where teams rarely live up to their potential. But for now, the Eagles just have to work at getting off the fucking mat, which means it’s a good thing the Bengals come to town.
Joe Burrow actually balled out against the Browns, showing that maybe he isn’t the Ohio wastrel I pegged him as but the Louisiana gunslinger he turned into in college. There is something there, obviously, much to the relief of Bengals fans, of whom I assume there are, like, six or seven. Seriously, who loves the fucking Bengals? They are Paul Brown’s second family, seeded on a Cincinnati hooker and paid for surreptitiously by Paul while he sent his beloved Browns to college and hoped the two would never meet. It’s hard to be an honorable man when they won’t get rid of the bastard.
Pick: Eagles
Chicago (+3) at Atlanta
Not really sure why the Falcons are favored. They showed some life against the Cowboys, sure, but they are still clearly a team haunted by Tom Brady taking them apart like Patrick Bateman. Matt Ryan is now a man chasing time but time always wins and then it’s retirement while the Falcons rebuild. He has enough weapons to destroy various Japanese cities, with Calvin Ridley and Julio Jones augmented by Todd Gurley, but it doesn’t seem to fucking matter. This team is haunted, cursed, whatever you want to call it.
The Bears, of course, are a team in search of a quarterback as always, but they have that nasty defense to carry them through. Matt Ryan as a Bear actually would cure a lot of ailments, but the NFL is a cruel league and nobody gets what they want. But the Bears are 2-0, even if it’s an ugly 2-0 and the Falcons are 0-2 and that shit don’t lie. Or maybe it does. What do I know? This is a hard one to pick, to be honest, and maybe the Falcons deserve some grace while the Bears certainly don’t deserve to be 3-0.
Pick: Falcons
NY Jets (+11.5) at Indianapolis
Damn, Vegas knows the Jets are trash. It’s another failed quarterback and failed regime in a history of failed quarterbacks and failed regimes. Remember that talk about culture? Yeah. Joe Namath ain’t walking through that door and even if he did he’d fondle a sideline reporter and get drunk before crashing on Kenny Stabler’s houseboat. Even though Kenny is dead, his ghost still runs a mean houseboat. Spirit Warrior shit is strong and complicated. But it’s another round of shit for Jets fans who, like Giants fans, can barely read or write. Fuck them.
I still don’t trust the Philip Rivers era Colts, but they did embarrass the Vikings so I will give them some respect. Mo Alie Cox, a VCU legend and Spirit Warrior to make my boys Paul and Raven proud came through big and it’s maybe his Spirit Warrior energy that is keeping this team alive because I don’t see how it’s possible Philip Rivers’ stink can be doing it. But Mo Alie Cox probably isn’t enough to sustain anything for too long. I mean, after all, even The Great Willie Young couldn’t sustain the fucking Lions and when a culture is rotten, no one can save it. Am I saying the Colts culture is rotten? I guess, maybe. The post-Manning years have seen a quarterback up and quit rather than quarterback this team which is never a good sign. Even in the Manning years, the Colts were often coming up short against the Patriots. I’m probably being unfair. After all, half the league would kill to be the Colts. I know Lions fans would. I just don’t like them for some reason. Some gibberishy reason. Still, Mo Alie Cox is a dude to be admired and is on my radar as a true Spirit Warrior.
Pick: Colts
Carolina (+6.5) at LA Chargers
I don’t give a fuck about this game and neither do you. Let’s be honest here.
Pick: Carolina
Detroit (+5.5) at Arizona
My God, the sickening stench of these Lions is too much to take. I have never loathed this team more than I do right now. Matt Patricia is a fat fraud who has been exposed as a wannabe Parcells, which is the Absolute Worst type of human being to be. Imagine his girth suffocating that poor girl as she lay incapacitated. A true monster, I will piss and shit all over his grave when it is all said and done. He is the most wretched thing foisted upon us in a history of wretchedness. I mean, that is saying something. I’d rather eat from Rod Marinelli’s filled diaper than root for this odious jackass. And, of course, he is just an appendage hanging from the rotten body of Bob Quinn, himself a charlatan, wandering the locker room with a baseball bat like Crazy Joe Clark, only without the gravitas. Morgan Freeman would never play Bob Quinn, that’s all I know. Fuck them both.
Naturally, they are about to be further exposed, rather ruthlessly probably, by the wild animal that is Kyler Murray, as he rains bombs to DeAndre Hopkins and splits the hapless defense with his legs. They should just leave Patricia and Quinn in the fucking desert after this is done, make them dig their own graves and then decapitate them with dull knives Mexican Drug War style. This post might get me in trouble, I don’t even know, but fuck it, I have had it with this shit.
Pick: Arizona
Tampa Bay (-6) at Denver
Tom Brady finally instilled some order in week 2 and should have this team cooking before too long. It’s one thing to half retire and fuck your supermodel wife in the sun, it’s another to allow things to degenerate and make you look a fool. Tom Brady is no fool and his pride will see him and this team through. Maybe not to Glory but at least Respectability. Leonard Fournette knows, as he says that Brady has been tough on him, but in a way that admiring soldiers feel about a hardass officer. The almost uncontrollable will to Win is ever-present still, and while that also means a trail of Cuban housemaid corpses will be strewn about the Florida swampland for the gators to take care of, it means that winning football games will be of paramount importance.
The Broncos are a listless outfit that were forced to turn to Jeff Driskell as John Elway fucks up the franchise that he made legend as a player. This leaves them in an almost sad position, a fetal position as Tom Brady comes to drink their blood and keep himself living for another day. The town burghers will offer up their babies to him for forgiveness and grace and he will eat them but he will not give them forgiveness nor grace as he rampages through the mountains, turning into a bat as he swoops down on Denver innocents whose only crime was to be born. This is a game made for Tom Brady to show cruelty while his wife makes a pie out of the undocumented servants and orders up the next round of terrified Anne Franks, embracing her German roots while her Aryan Superman husband cleanses the earth of Broncos young and old, the crippled and the retarded. Fuck, might as well go full Problematic here.
Dallas (+5) at Seattle
A relatively big game early on, Russell Wilson vs Dak Prescott in a showdown that will likely establish an early pecking order in the NFC. The Cowboys are, as always, somewhat of an enigma, never as good as they are on paper. That is due to the Spiritual Wretchedness of Jerry Jones, a Trumpian figure who thinks he’s smarter than he is. He’s really just another country jackass, a redneck without a soul, a monster who bathes in oil and the likely literal blood of something young and brown. He will take his coked out sense of entitlement to Seattle and he will likely be humiliated, but of course demons like this asshole can’t be humiliated because they lack the shame necessary and the self-awareness of normal human beings. He is a narcissistic sociopath who thinks his tiny dick swings bigger than it does. He has a trunk stuffed full of dead hookers, and he just dumps them into the Gulf of Mexico when it fills up too much and starts to stink. But I’ve said all this before and will say it again.
Russell Wilson has proven himself as one of the NFL’s alpha dogs and still doesn’t get quite the respect he deserves, I think. But he’ll do what he always does and lead Seattle to the playoffs. He has a record of 88-41-1 which averages out to about 11 wins per season, which is a hell of a feat over almost a decade’s worth of ball on a team that doesn’t often give him a lot of weapons to work with. They are lucky to have him, all 5’11” of him, which is some mold breaking shit and proof that the plastic Sam Darnold’s of the world aren’t worth a shit and most scouts are just stealing money from teams. You can probably say something similar about Dak Prescott who was a 4th rounder of little repute. There is, of course, the ultimate in such dudes in Tom Brady, but let’s not get into this now. The point is that Russell Wilson is a Man in a league in which precious few are Men. And that makes all the difference.
Pick: Seattle
Green Bay (+3) at New Orleans
The Packers are fresh off their annual whooping of the fucking Lions, and the Devil Aaron Rodgers continues to command hell. It helps that he has Aaron Jones to lighten the load in hell, as even the devil needs minions to do some of the tough work. The Packers are 2-0 and people trying to run Rodgers out of town like a certain Cockslinger named Favre back in the day should probably calm down. To bet against Rodgers is an episode of insanity, much like any time anyone tries to beat the goddamn devil. That fucker is who he is for a reason. Even Jesus struggled with his ass.
Drew Brees is also the devil, but not in the same way as Rodgers. Brees is the moral devil whereas Rodgers is the devil that takes you. Brees is just an evil idiot, the Mitch McConnell of NFL quarterbacks, and it’s a shame that he is the quarterback for the people of New Orleans like my man Heinie, who can’t even get his friend The Great Willie Young to do anything about this shithead who is entrenched in New Orleans like the Vampire Lestat. You can’t trust Brees, either on or off the field, and his Saints are always fucking up my fake gambling glory. If I were actually putting money on this shit, Drew Brees is the dude who would get my legs broken. Fuck him. In this battle of devils, no one wins, least of all me, but at least Rodgers is a devil you can semi-respect. I feel gross even saying that, but here we are.
Pick: New Orleans?
Kansas City (+3.5) at Baltimore
Now this is a Prime Time Game that deserves the moniker. This is it, I think, the battle for the best the NFL has to offer us in these strange and terrible times. Mahomes vs Jackson, The Chiefs as champion vs the Ravens who might be better than the champs but can’t say shit because they haven’t actually won shit. I like the Ravens because I like the Harbaugh way because I am a Michigan Man idiot and loyalty runs deep. Also, you have to remember, these are the OG Browns in disguise, which might be fightin’ words to Dan but, shit, these things happen. They have mostly cleansed themselves of the Shame of their Great Betrayal through dudes like Ed Reed over the years and a certain nastiness that lends itself to Baltimore just as well as it did to Cleveland. And besides, *heel turn*, fuck Cleveland, the city, as it is of Ohio and therefore a trash people. I still like the modern Browns, but I have no problems with the Ravens either. I can say this as an outsider, but as I have said before the AFC North is probably my favorite division due to all the hate, which extends every which way from all four teams for various reasons. But fuck Ohio. That should always remain paramount in any discussion.
I am rambling like a fucking jackass as I surge towards 5,000 words again, but fuck, what can be done about it? This is who I am and you all know and love it or at least tolerate it. If you somehow have stumbled upon this shit for the first time, and have made it this far, welcome to the idiot show, I don’t know how to stop it.
Okay, shit, get it together and bring this on home. This is The Game in this early season, and will likely have Consequences when it comes to playoff seeding and whatnot and homefield advantage, although that is a thing that might not even exist in these pandemic times so what is really the point? Let’s not ask ourselves that question or else we’ll realize we just wasted 5,000 words on a fucked up sport in a fucked up year in a fucked up culture. Shit. Thanks for reading.
Pick: Baltimore
