I’m not even sure what week it is. Week 5? Yeah, let’s go with that. I’ve been feeling sick and terrible, the result of some off the rails choices around here, which were somehow worse than the ones I was making, and now I am just a dude frantically swinging between Poor Choices as my birthday looms and I have made a mess of another year lol.
But you’re not here for that dumb talk, you are here for FOOTBALL TALK which is still grosser imo but hey, what the fuck, we’re all adults here and can handle this. Or adultish anyway. I, as always, remain a teenage girl at heart. But if things get weird(er) just know that it’s because I am making a buffoon of my Real Life and really this is all real life by now as some of us have know each other for 20 fucking years and by that I mean we have fucked for 20 years. Okay, see, I am already making an ass of myself here, but this has never been about pretending or self-editing, but about pouring this shit out like a debauched Mozart. Fuck it and fuck you if you don’t like it.
I’m sorry, that was perhaps too much and I Appreciate You. Anyway, in the Cold Winter of Our Discontent or at least Mine, I went 6-6-2 last week, blowing off the Thursday game and watching as the Steelers and Titans postponed shit so Ben Roethlisberger could meet his Rape Quota for the week, or maybe it was because of the Covid madness, who is to say? Also, you might hate all of my rape references, and maybe you are right too, but the dude raped people and so probably did too my own team’s slovenly head coach, so perhaps it is not me you need to take issue with but this Awful Society.
ANYWAY . . . shit, we should probably get to these games, huh? I apologize in advance to my boy Davy Hamburgers who likes to gamble with these for real and I will probably end up getting his legs broken. It is perhaps enough for now that we hover around .500 every week as theoretically these should get easier to pick but lol you and I both know better than that and by Christmas I will be carrying on like Dan Aykroyd in the Christmas Party Scene in Trading Places. Fuck. FUCK. Let’s just get on with it, dudes and lady dudes.
Tampa Bay (-3.5) at Chicago
On the surface it seems almost insulting to Tom Brady that this is such a close line, but then we have to remember that the Bears, the fucking Bears, are 3-1 and sniffing around first place in the NFC North. It will all likely fall apart on them, but maybe not as the Bears manage to pull these kinds of seasons out sometimes. But they did lose to the Colts and Philip Rivers last week and only managed 11 points as they continue to flail away offensively and hope the defense doesn’t break down on them. But this all feels so rickety, doesn’t it? Like not even a vintage Lovie Smith lol what the fuck was that effort but something different that could collapse into dust and smoke any moment.
I say this, but I feel like I say this every year and it never quite happens. The Bears are most likely Not Good, but I’m not sure if they’re Not Bad either. This is the sort of thing that games like this will go a long way in telling. Get ritually disemboweled by an elderly Tom Brady and hey, thanks for coming, Bears, see you again next year for more of this sadness, but if they beat up on an elderly Tom Brady, then maybe this thing does take on the character of those goddamn Lovie teams.
I am being grossly unfair in calling Tom Brady “elderly” but I just want to write something different about him than the usual Batemanish nonsense. And he *is* old, at least a year older than me and I can’t even drink without vomiting for two straight days now that I’ve hit 40. I am a sad ass fake Hunter S. Thompson maybe, who is to say? But like I said, I have already begun making other Poor Choices so maybe not. Or maybe he was successful and I’m just this fucking idiot who influenced a bunch of people oh man years ago and am now flailing around in my own word vomit? But again, you don’t care about all this nonsense.
The point, if I have one, is that Tom Brady is even older than me, and yet he, of course, is the greatest QB of all time and has been monstrously successful in perhaps every meaning of the term, so it is of course ridiculous to compare us. I have largely wasted my own talents while he has legendarily maximized his so it would be idiocy to pick against him even if it is Smart to pick against me, a fucking fool, lol welcome to the Fun House.
Pick: Tampa Bay
Carolina (+2) at Atlanta
Carolina stopped the Cardinals last week but lol so did the Lions a couple of weeks ago so maybe we shouldn’t read too much into that as we are reminded of the Cardinals own psychic detritus. Still, Carolina remains kicking furiously to keep their heads above water at 2-2 behind a secretly decentish running game that is not just Christian McCaffrey but also dudes like Mike Davis and Reggie Bonnafon. And hey, Teddy Bridgewater was doing okay before the Reaper came for his knee a few years back so maybe this will all work out better than expected.
Probably not, and yet it is still miles better spiritually than whatever Gross Shit is going on in Atlanta, where Tom Brady’s cuckolding of them in the Super Bowl remains an obvious impediment to ever being anything other than broken wrecks, not the dude screaming ASSSSS TA ASSSSSSSSSS from Requiem For A Dream, but Jennifer Connelly being the one *doing* the ASSSSSSSSS TA ASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.
ASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS TA ASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.
Ahem. Sorry. But not really. The point is simple of course: the Falcons are fucked, spiritual doomed wretches who need to start all over again. Slipping to 0-5 should probably guarantee it, but this is a franchise who is just staring wide eyed while that double ended dildo does its work. No one seems to know what to do, and hey man, one day you’re standing in the crowd watching all of this madness go down and the next you’re the one writhing in the middle of a screaming throng of gross sex perverts. That’s just life.
Pick: Carolina
Las Vegas (+13) at Kansas City
Big money lines like this are a tough sell in the parity ruined NFL, but if anyone has earned it, it’s the Chiefs, right? It’s gonna be like this until someone stops them. The Patriots were not up to it, although they were dealing with the loss of Cam Newton on top of Tom Brady basking in the sun and blood of Florida and paperless immigrants. Sorry, had to get it in there anyway.
But this is not about the Patriots, it is about the Chiefs, who are ruining everyone yet again, Patrick Mahomes “only” throwing for 230 yards or so and 2 TD and people treating that like a big disappointment lol what a world and what a goddamn team where that is a thing. But the Chiefs won with defense and Mahomes passer rating was still 113.6 so I mean Jesus Christ. Like I said, they are the Big Dawgs physically, spiritually and in every way until someone stops them.
That someone likely won’t be the fucking Raiders, who are still 2-2 despite losing to the Bills, which is not as dishonorable as it once was. But as much as I just jocked the Chiefs, there are no real spiritual winners when it comes to comparing the people of Las Vegas and the people of Kansas City. One is a spiritually depraved wasteland of the soul. The other is Las Vegas.
Seriously, though, Kansas City is Ground Zero for the Trumpian Nightmare which has enveloped us and I’ll remind you that Trump himself is a symptom and not the disease itself. He exists in his Current Monstrous Form because of people like the ones in Kansas and Missouri and the Midwest in general, which has become a cradle of racist shitheadery and people whining about their lives even as they have it better than 98% of the rest of this fucked up world.
I mean, the industrial wastelands of Ohio, Buffalo, even my beloved Detroit, are one thing. People have been really fucked over by the New Economy which has seen jobs flee and opioids enter in their place. I myself have somehow only just managed to avoid being dragged into an Oxycontin Hell but that is also because I have used other substances to technically be Better and lol no I am actually probably worse.
But again, we are getting Dark and I don’t want to dwell too much on that. The point is that there are people who have really been fucked over by Life and Economic Betrayals and all that noise. The people of Kansas, Nebraska and the like are not really those people, though. They are just vile shitheads, racist hicks, farmers who steal farm subsidies from people who need genuine help because they don’t understand that they are Way Better Off than most. This isn’t the fucking Dustbowl 1930’s.
I am perhaps overgeneralizing and I will get a Kansas farmer in here telling me to eat his dick and ass, but I don’t fucking care. That part of this country is a spiritual blight, exactly what people think of when they picture the Ugly American. It is not The South, no, but people don’t understand that it is not The South that drives this despicable bus anymore, but the Kansases, the Nebraskas, the Oklahomas, etc. There is a reason fucking Georgia is increasingly up for grabs and not these states, never these states, which are so deep in the proverbial red that they might as well just try to break off one more time. At least that way we could start shooting them.
Shit, I am getting out of hand, about to start ranting and raving about John Brown and always remember, before the Civil War there was Bleeding Kansas. This is not exactly new, it was just hidden by the sad fact that the rest of the country wasn’t much better, especially when it came to race relations.
Wait, we were supposed to talk about football, right? Goddamn, I haven’t even begun my screed about Vegas, which remains a clownish version of all of the above, the place that fleeces these dumb farmers and their ilk. There’s a reason Hunter S. Thompson wrote about the death of the American Dream in conjunction with this shitty place and that was 50 fucking years ago. It’s not like things have gotten better.
But I have written rather extensively about Vegas, and if Raven and I ever get back to our Project, you might see a hell of a lot more, but it’s time to move on and try to separate these teams from their awful fanbases. It ain’t easy.
Pick: Chiefs
Denver (+5) at New England
What a weird game. Mostly because of the fucking plague which has robbed us of Cam Newton and left the Patriots to turn in desperation to Brian Hoyer, who is like a shittier Kirk Cousins, although that is just my Michigan State hate showing through.
But most of Vegas isn’t even allowing odds for this game so we’re starting to wade deeper and deeper into the Covid world, which invites madness and despair and also confusion wherever it is to be found. In the end, this probably will be a lost season for the Patriots, which is maybe something that had to happen eventually, appropriate given Tom Brady’s departure and yet it is not something anyone really expected to happen, and shit, maybe it still won’t. They need a QB, obviously, but Bill Belichick is still a towering ogre who can never be truly dismissed. Always remember that the year Tom Brady was taken out by injury, the Patriots still went 10-6.
But this isn’t a blip for the Patriots. This is their New Reality, and it will be interesting to see what they do with it. Perhaps fall down just so they can draft high and become monsters again? I don’t know. There is a Pride factor, of course, but that would require Belichick to be Human, which he largely isn’t, at least not spiritually or emotionally. And maybe he presses on, Too Proud to do anything else, recognizing there is danger in letting it go, letting your team and associates know it is okay to quit? Vampires don’t quit, baby, they just drink more blood until they get staked in the heart or the sun comes up and they aren’t fleet of foot enough to make it back to the coffin. I say this as a vampire.
Denver, of course, is nothing. Just a ruined shell of a once proud franchise, John Elway has fucked his own people and himself and tbh he probably deserves it. Little more needs to be said as this story isn’t about them anyway.
Pick: Patriots
LA Rams (-7) at Washington Football Team
lol shit, every time I see that name I laugh, which is probably not the intended effect and yet that is what Daniel Snyder gets for being himself.
Little needs to be written about what a catastrophic reign he has had in Washington, pushing poor Raven and Paul out, suing his own fans . . . but only because I have said it all already. He is an obvious monster, a dipshit of phenomenal vintage, and it is perhaps Appropriate that he does his thing in Washington D.C. and lol maybe I still have some ammo left for him after all.
The Rams, meanwhile, are clearly not the Darlings of the league anymore, but they are still 3-1, they still have Aaron Donald beasting people into their base parts and it should all be enough to drop the sadass Washington Football Team (lolololol) And yet, the Rams were not super exciting against the Giants last week, fucking up my fake gambling prowess and we’re reminded that they are further and further from their Super Bowl caliber with each puzzlingly middling season.
But I think they’ll be okay. They still have the QB and they still have arguably the best defensive player in the NFL. The Washington Football Team has . . . none of those things. But they do have a Sad Little Emperor of an owner. A False Napoleon, or maybe a Real Napoleon after he was exiled for the second time after blowing Waterloo. There is no Talleyrand to step in here, though, no one to tell him It’s Over, and so Daniel Snyder will continue on, ruling over this insipid franchise until it becomes Lions adjacent. Goddamn, good for Raven and Paul getting out.
Pick: Rams
Jacksonville (+6) at Houston
Pick: Houston
Buffalo (-1) at Tennessee
I’m surprised this is still on the board anywhere tbh with everyone getting the plague and all. Let’s just move on because what is there to say until this wraps itself up?
Pick: Buffalo if it happens
Arizona (-7) at NY Jets
The Jets remain the subject of Infinite Jets by David Foster Wallace, who died rather than watching this fucking team anymore. We might speed to the end here as I get increasingly fucked up on my Poor Choices, but maybe not. I just wanted you to understand what was happening if these got shorter and shorter.
But no. we are still here to talk about the Jets endless suffering because if anyone Gets It when it comes to that it is me, your stupid Lions fan and lol thank God the Lions don’t play this week. But the Jets are 0-4 and just lost to Brett Rypien so perhaps they beat even me when it comes to The Terror.
It’s been more than 50 years since Joe Namath had his Stabler moment, although it is famous enough on its own to be known as a Namath moment probably. In any respect, they are both Spiritual Giants the NFL misses terribly. But Sam Darnold, like so many before him, is not Namath. He is barely who he was supposed to be, which is Sam Darnold USC Quarterback. Somewhere along the line he was kidnapped by Mark Sanchez and the misery goes on for this fucked up team. By the way, when Armchair Linebacker was really cooking, my dude Pete wrote about the Jets. Today, Pete doesn’t even follow me on Twitter, having had Enough of what apparently several of my friends have had. Again, this is all getting Too Dark, but I believe in the Honesty of Writing even if it may lead to me looking like a goddamn fool at times. My point, if I had a point, is that I do miss Pete’s takes on the Jets, because he Got His Own Team which is tough to do tbh, and he wrote about them in a way that was poignant and interesting,
Arizona, on the other hand, has never been poignant or interesting and they wither in the desert once again. It looked good, for a moment anyway, with Kyler Murray and DeAndre Hopkins playing catch. But then they lost to the fucking Lions and you don’t lose to the Lions without there being some spiritual detritus that follows you, especially when you lose because you gave the game away by tossing all those INT’s. And so it lingered into Carolina and now the Cardinals are just another 2-2 team hoping it can all break right for them.
Thankfully, the Jets are the fucking Jets, and yet I get the sneaky suspicion that they steal one here, if only because it has to happen at some point, right? And shit, the Cardinals are probably still trying to walk off that spirit wound suffered against the Lions. Losing to My Boys has consequences, what can I say?
Pick: Jets
Philadelphia (+7) at Pittsburgh
Philly pulled themselves out of the muck and trash which has dragged down teams like the Falcons, but perhaps only for a week before Tosh and his boys go back to turning life into an It’s Always Sunny… episode, bless his drunk and perhaps even more ass.
But Tosh and the Eagles got their Super Bowl THAT’S WHA5 I’M TALKIN’ ABOUT, right Tosh baby? And now they don’t seem to know what to do next or how to make it all work again, but shit, that just proves that they’re Good People who maybe sometimes make Poor Choices like your idiot boy here me.
That Ben Roethlisberger seemingly has his shit together better than either me or Tosh seems like a fucking disgrace, certainly one against the lives of people who Try to Do Good. He is a degenerate and an animal and should be held in a zoo, where he would no doubt just jack off all the time and try to make forcible eye contact with every woman who walked by.
But fuck all this, it is an emotional thing for me, a Good Degenerate against a Bad Degenerate, and this is perhaps the sort of thing that gets written when my own degeneracy comes for me, who is to say? All I know is I hope Tosh is doing okay and I hope Ben Roethlisberger gets hit by a bus.
Pick: Steelers
Cincinnati (+13) at Baltimore
Joe Burrow has been something of a revelation, which is crazy given that he was the number one overall pick and yet here we are. The Bengals are 1-2-1 and he’s gonna go for over 4,000 yards but I doubt any of it matters as he reclines into the comfortable wastes of Ohio.
Lamar Jackson, meanwhile, has been maybe somewhat disappointing? These are hard things when you consider how crazy good he was last season, but that’s what Time and Perspective do. He’s still the MVP and Burrow is just the College MVP, but it feels vaguely like Burrow is a hit right now while Jackson searches for himself. I think he’ll find it somewhere in John Harbaugh’s offense which is Greg Roman’s offense and Roman, of course, is the dude who shaped Colin Kaepernick into a near Super Bowl champ before that all went the way of The Discourse. But Roman and the Harbaughs go way back and they will mash you in your face while you are busy trying to spread things out.
In a battle of two damn good young QBs, I still like Jackson as it has perhaps come time for Joe Burrow to take his lumps. And I like the Ravens attitude and general Deal, which is physical, mean and, well, Harbaughian. And never forget that Joe Burrow toiled away at Ohio St. before transferring to LSU and so fuck him. But this is a huge spread.
Pick: Cincinnati
Miami (+9) at San Francisco
It’s not gonna happen for the 49ers this season. Injury has seen to that. But it never happens for the Miami Dolphins unless you have a time machine that drops you off in 1972 which if you can’t do basic math – and hey, no judgments given my own, uh, proclivities – that is almost 50 years ago. Does Bob Griese know Bobby Layne?
That is an ugly question to ask, of course, not least of all because Bobby Layne has been dead for 34 years and so if Griese does know him we’ve got a situation here and not the MTV version. But it is perhaps bad news that I am even invoking Bobby Layne’s name here given that he is most famous now for cursing the Lions with 50 years of bad luck which lol you can let up a little now Bobby it’s been more like 60.
The Dolphins, of course, have a better spiritual history than the fucking Lions, but not lately. Again, 1972 was almost 50 years ago. They had their Dan Marino years, sure, but we have our Matthew Stafford years. Don Shula can’t be compared to anyone in the Lions world because he actually fucking won once upon a time, but it was most definitely Once Upon A Time. Things are not good in Miami spiritually.
But Ryan Fitzpatrick is a Harvard dude who somehow became the most Recent Form of Ken Stabler, although I still have my eye on Young Mayfield, and he doesn’t give much of a fuck about anything, Dolphins history, 49ers attempt to get back to their Storm Trooper years, led by dudes like Joe Montana and the Mormon Steve Young . . . Fitzpatrick shits on all of that and also probably himself from time to time if he is a Proper Stabler. We don’t come clean out of the box, that’s for sure.
Pick: Miami
NY Giants (+9.5) at Dallas
It is perhaps vital that we continue to share, like when my boy DJ Dobbo aka CKC Enthusiast aka one of my best goddamn friends on this hideous thing called the internet, shared with me his own Gambling With Sanity. These are the things that keep this ridiculous community alive, as we are a collective of artists, poets and degenerates in some strange relationship with each other that somehow never ends and is why I am still writing these fucked up things. Some may leave, but those who stay are my rocks, my fragile ego in bloom. I may be talented enough to Level Up so to speak but I am a fucking weirdo too and I know this about myself and it makes me appreciate you guys all the more.
Hey wait, what was that? Oh, just me carrying on because this is my place and I can do that here. In vino veritas or something like that. Armchair Linebacker remains my love letter to you all, and yet, I feel compelled to holler and scream when it comes to the Dallas Cowboys of it all. They are a fucking dystopian nightmare of a team, maybe *the* team in pro sports who best represent the ugly decline of the American being. The Yankees, the Lakers, yes, yes, yes, but none of them gets at it like the fucking Cowboys of Dallas.
They kill Presidents in Dallas. They kill the American Dream in Dallas. They kill ME in Dallas. Everyday, some jackass wakes up and heads to a shitty office in Dallas and decides my credit isn’t good enough. Or they wake up and head to the Cowboys soul crushing stadium and they gawk at cheerleaders with more plastic in them than your kids’ toys and they shake hands with the Vince McMahon’s of the world, the Donald Trump’s of the world. These clowns were never supposed to have any real power and now here they are with all the fucking power.
And sure, they play football on Sundays for their despicable desire to be NFL Champions which is a lot like wanting to be the top murderer in your cell block. Please keep sharing with me because it’s the only way I can take any of this shit.
Pick: Dallas
Indianapolis (-1.5) at Cleveland
Speaking of internet friends and let’s be honest, friends are just friends, I was worried that I ran off poor Dan with my DEMANDS that he read my G1 discourse which on top of this wild ass discourse is perhaps heroic of anyone to read. But Dan is still here as are most of you, understanding that Art is autotelic and that even while I spin out of control, I can write like this and give you something to smile at or think about. And, of course, once these teams get their savage hooks into you, you can’t get out. Sorry, Dan.
The good news, my boy, is that the Browns, yes, the fucking Browns seem capable of if not paying it off entertaining the hell out of everyone. At one point they led the Cowboys 41-14 and at 3-1 are fast marching their way to That Place I predicted for them last season. It’s okay to listen to me sometimes.
And as much as it’s about Baker Mayfield, and it is, it’s also about Odell Beckham, Jr., Jarvis Landry, Nick Chubb and Kareem Hunt. I mean, this is a wildly talented football team. Fucking Myles Garrett on defense tearing people’s faces off. WE CAN WIN THIS WAR. That’s all I’m saying.
The Colts are 3-1, meanwhile, and it fucks with my head a bit that Philip Rivers is two years my junior. That is not right, or at least it should not be as I am a youthful sprig and he is an aging concussion ball player. Think about it too damn long and I’ll end up not hanging myself but caterwauling that I’m going to. I just love this luscious face too much still to let it go.
But Rivers is Old Man River now and how have I not made that reference before? Fuck it, I am pleasantly smashed. Maybe it is because I associate the River People with Raven Mack and The Great Willie Young and not shitheads like this loser because let’s face it, that, more than anything, is Rivers’ essence.
Pick: Cleveland
Minnesota (+7) at Seattle
Kirk Cousins continues to burn in his earthly hell and lol no one deserves it more. Okay, that’s stupid, Neil, plenty deserve it more probably, but he *is* deeply representative of a religion (Capitalism) and a region (West Michigan) that are perhaps not my favorites. That’s not entirely true as I love West Michigan, at least the earthly splendor and Lake Michigan, but the people, man, the fucking people . . . they can largely GET THE FUCK OUT.
And Cousins is pretty much King Shit, a Holland legend, and yes, Holland MI is named for *that* Holland. But he is also MSU Green to his core and while I don’t want to offend anyone (Hey, Ty!) Cousins took particular pleasure in relishing in My Michigan’s fall from grace. But we got it largely back and he is left to ponder what it would be like to have a Don Brown defense chase his dumb ass down, which is what would happen if he played for MSU today.
But he does not. He plays for the Vikings, and their spiritual quest seems to be falling off the rails. Perhaps he was not the Spartan Warrior King Leonidas relied upon back in the day.
Russell Wilson, though, is that warrior, and Seattle is lucky every damn day he is with the team. Pete Carroll might still be known as the ultimate college coach, but he’s done pretty damn well this time around as an NFL head coach and the combo of Russell Wilson and Pete Carroll should be enough to carry this team – oh shit, and don’t forget Bobby Wagner – to a divisional title.
Pick: Seattle
LA Chargers (+7.5) at New Orleans
The best thing about New Orleans is the Southern Comfort they sent up North here that I drank and then vomited back up. Okay, we’re DEFINITELY in some rough waters now, but just know that I appreciate the people of New Orleans more than just about anywhere.
I take a lot of shit. lol there’s no surprise, but amongst this horde of shit is something that boosts testosterone because I AM AN OLD MAN, well, 40, and I want to keep on fucking and going wild with youthful exuberance and so I take a supplement that I was turned onto by a friend who I won’t name because I don’t want it to look like I’m snitching. Anyway, half of you guessed him instantly, the other half are backing away slowly and lol why hasn’t Deadspin hired me yet?
ANYWAY ANYWAY this beautiful stuff? It comes from a lab in New Orleans, home of these beautiful Saints and also Heinie. The LA Chargers are NOTHING when put up against such psychic strengths.
Pick: Saints
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