Last week everything went fucking wonky with games getting dropped and rescheduled and after being dragged by a team of horses outside of an old fashioned saloon, I came away with a 6-8 record, which means that poor Davy hates me now and poor young Finn, who I taught how to gamble on these goddamn things which will probably see me sent straight to hell, probably lost at least a tooth or two. Hard times in the Armchair Linebacker collective. It is insane that any of you would listen to me because I am really just here to write like I just woke up from a fever dream and the lines are just there to put the whole fucking thing in context, but I guess I have made too many goddamn deals with the devil and now I am an Official Shark or at least a Homeless Man’s Version of a Shark, a fucking degenerate hobo with no pants and a drug dependency but if that’s who you want to listen to, I can’t stop you.
Chicago (+1.5) at Carolina
Shit, this might actually be one of those seasons for the Bears where they ride their defense and hope to hell a quarterback falls from the sky or is plucked from the Mormon hills that gave them Jim McMahon, Jesus, 35 fucking years ago, and even then Jimmy wasn’t really that great a QB, he was always hurt, it’s just that he looked cool ‘cause he, uh, wore sunglasses. Look, it was a simpler time and everyone was on blow and Reaganomics which meant that rich people were just staggering around drunk like fucking wild apes pissing on everyone else. Of course, The ’85 Bears were a hit then, they had a guy with sunglasses and a fat fucker named the Fridge, who tbh would probably be an undersized DT these days thanks to chemical, I mean natural selection churning out all these fucking war ogres who will die in their 40s but lol at least they got to get their heads mashed in every fucking weekend, what a world we live in.
But the Bears stole one from Tom Brady and that still means something even if Tom spends half his time on the sideline looking through interior design plans that Gisele keeps sending him, relentlessly, neverending, and Tom liked the one where they built an entire wall out of the bones of paperless immigrants who drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande, but Gisele wanted them Custom Boned aka each bone would be traced back to an individual name and face because that’s the whole fun of it, right? But Tom tried explaining to her that defeated the whole “paperless” part of it and Gisele got all mad and reminded Tom that she wasn’t just Brazilian, she was GERMAN Brazilian, and he knew what that meant and Gisele’s Uncle Klaus is a scientist and a “doctor” of some sort but he travels with an army of small Pinoy boys who he calls his Subjects and doesn’t seem to have a standing office or anything and anyway, it’s no wonder Tom got distracted towards the end of the game against the Bears.
Shit, this wasn’t even the Tampa Bay/Tom Brady segment and we’re already off like THAT? Shit. I think what I was originally trying to say is that this Bears team has now passed one of those tests that marks them out as a contender the rest of the way, QB or no QB. Of course, the “no” part of that will doom them in the end, but for now, they can drag teams down into the shit and unless you have a fleet of Shiny Mahomes, you’re gonna get caught in it. And the Panthers? Well, they barely have a McCaffrey this season, and Cam Newton is dead somewhere, or dying of the Flox up in the Pilgrim Country. Still, they’ve reeled off a few wins against a bunch of shitty teams and are at home which means next to nothing in Ghost Town USA these days, so I don’t fucking know why they’re really favored here, even if it is by a sliver. It’s one of those seasons for the Bears.
Pick: Bears
Detroit (-3) at Jacksonville
Jesus Christ, the state of these Jags to be home underdogs against the fucking Lions. You have to be seriously fucking up to get that kind of damnation from the boys in Vegas. I mean, even though Gardner Minshew is out there trying to convince everyone he’s a Stabler nephew, I suspect he may be False as he plays a character in Jacksonville, hanging out with the Khans and Cody Rhodes on off-days instead of with whatever wheelchair bound Van Zant’s are out there or even Fred Durst, who would probably just get Minshew high and watch old TRL reruns when he was boys with Carson Daly on a CRT monitor TV before asking Gardner if he’d suck his dick for $10. It’s either Cody Rhodes or sucking Fred Durst’s dick for a tenner and Ken Stabler never found himself in such dire straits. Or if he did, he got Cody to suck Fred’s dick while he fucked Cody’s fat ass wife. Where is Gardner Minshew’s powers now? They just aren’t there.
And yet, they may be against the Lions who are all about making the Gardner Minshews of the world look like Kenny Stabler on steroids and I don’t think Kenny ever took steroids but he sure did take a whole lot of amphetamines so it all balances out, I guess. The point is that the Lions defense is fucking embarrassing even though they have a GOSHDARN WIZARD in Matt Patricia who knows all the defensive secrets, he bought them from the Bill Belichick Power Hour on QVC. Bill also threw in a handy pamphlet which diagrammed how to ooze your fat fucking ass all over some terror stricken coed whose entire soul sank into the voluminous folds of your greasy fucking flesh as you raped your way like an amoeba through that room. It was a hell of a pamphlet and Matt Patricia studied it even harder than the Defensive Secrets he bought from Bill on the Power Hour on QVC just before Kathy Lee Gifford showed up to sell tampons made from the bones of cancer orphans.
So Gardner Minshew is definitely gonna light these idiots up, and maybe, just maybe, Matthew Stafford will be able to do enough to keep the Lions in it, but then the lights will dim and both teams will be thrown off the field to make way for Matt Hardy being shot out of a cannon into a endzone filled with broken bottles and knives and Daniel Benoit’s corpse. There are no winners here, not even you, especially you, both for reading this and for watching any of this fucking drek.
Pick: Jacksonville
Atlanta (+4) at Minnesota
The Undertaker’s Gong rang out and everyone in Atlanta was soul-taken or fired or whatever happens when you roll up to the stadium to find all your shit in a box and the box is on fire. Yes, the Falcons finally fired Dan Quinn, which was a bit like tipping over a casket or finally just shitting yourself after spending hours wet farting after a soul bender which started in the fucking Super Bowl and never let up. Bad times, man. Bad times.
It has never made that much sense given that the framework of the team never seems to have been broken, and yet all points of that framework ended up being fucking cursed just like the others. Who knows what the fuck goes on off the field down there. They probably got Lisa Bonet or Zoe Kravitz for the yung folk (mother/daughter, but pretty much the same fucking person) writhing around with snakes and shit while some ashy looking motherfucker shakes some smoke around and I don’t even want to be writing about this shit because they’ll probably come for me and I already have enough shit to deal with.
But there is No Point to these Falcons now, they are just looking for an Exit, a Get Out Of Life Free Card to pop up and just let the season run its sad string out. Unfortunately, that means the fucking Vikings get to pick these bones, but it’s not an honorable Viking raid. There will be no gold and fat women to carry off. This is a raid on a cesspit, a hole filled with the stinking dead. Kirk Cousins will probably try to gnaw a pinky ring off of some corpse, but he might just as well fuck it up too and end up giving himself the plague or something. He has fooled these stupid Scandinavian exiles into believing he could steal them the good gold, but he’s just another trickster who will get their winter food eaten by wolves while they are left to starve and eat Uncle Bjorn. But shit, at least they aren’t hexed like those fucking Falcons.
Pick: Minnesota
Houston (+3) at Tennessee
Poor Bill O’Brien got thrown out on his ass because the league scheduled Houston against the ’85 Bears, all the 80s and 90s 49ers teams and those Jimmy Johnson Cowboys to start the season. I only barely exaggerate. They never had a fuckin’ chance, and now they have decided to toss the regime over even though they still have a decent QB in place in DeShaun Watson, who may not be Mahomes or Lamar Jackson, but, I mean, who is? And he’s not that fucking far off their pace even after they got rid of DeAndre Hopkins. He’s still on pace to go for well over 4,000 yards and around 30TDs, so it’s kind of a weird vibe, like what do they do here? Do they go for a full rebuild or just try to pick it back up on the fly with some fresh coaching blood?
Either way, Tennessee is one of those pain in the ass teams that no one wants to play, especially when you’re going through all that shit. They are boring as hell, but they come out and run Derrick Henry on you all fucking day and then their defense wears you down and then you lose. They have a retread QB who is managing the game for them just fine, I guess, and maybe the other teams just get bored, I don’t fucking know. But Tennessee is kind of a boring dopey ass state anyway, white trash dressed up as “country” but it’s mostly just gross white people bullshit, and I guess this is the team that fits them the best. Boring, old people shit. But it makes money. Welcome to America.
Pick: Tennessee
Washington (+3) at NY Giants
My God, fuck this game. Both of these teams are wretched hives of villainy and shit, representing fanbases that are either run away like the Virginia country Washington fans, fuck I don’t even know what to call them because this shit-ass franchise doesn’t even have a fucking name it is such a soul debacle, or they are shitty Beltway types or worse, FUCKING NEW YAWKAS which are trumped by FUCKING NEW JOISEY degenerates and all of these types are found sniffing around the talk radio filled landscape hellscape that is the NFC East in all of its despicable wrath. Fuck this game and fuck you.
Pick: Giants?
Cleveland (+3.5) at Pittsburgh
From my least favorite division, to my favorite, the hate-filled AFC North, and this is one of the proto-rivalries of the landscape, Cleveland vs Pittsburgh, scum vs scum, Ohio heathens vs Western Pennsylvania Steel and Coal Ghosts because those people don’t fucking exist anymore except at the bottom of an Oxy bender and this isn’t 1880 those fucking mills and mines aren’t opening back up.
So what’s left is just dreary HATE, for your ruined life, for you ugly wife, for your kids on methadone, for your ruined town which is getting FRACKED which sounds a lot like FUCKED and it’s an ugly boiling over kind of Hate, the kind that leads to, well, the shitshow that is America today and the assholes who are running it. But fuck all that, it also means HATE for your neighbor, those fucking Ohio bastards or Pennsylvania Fuckwads, neither of you have a fucking thing except for THIS, this HATE, this GAME, these PROUD Steelers and these FUCKWIT Browns.
Obviously, one quarterback is a rapist, the other might be Ken Stabler’s bastard son, which heh heh heh let’s be honest doesn’t preclude the raping part either. It’s a gross world where assholes like these are left to be heroes to the wraith-like people of the land, clattering their pills against their spiritual bars like hopeless neo-Auschwitz prisoners, which may sound OFFENSIVE but that is the spiritual DESPERATION LEVEL we are talking here. This is Failure Demon Country, this is the DEAD ZONE OF AMERICA and these are its teams and its quarterbacks.
Young Mayfield is still surviving out there, but he’s doing so thanks to a baller running game behind Nick Chubb and Kareem Hunt who did unspeakable things to a woman which were too shitty for EVEN KANSAS CITY PEOPLE but not for Ohio folk, no. They have embraced his degenerate ass with open arms and now will him on to concuss himself against the Steelers defense led by my man Devin Bush, who once purposefully kicked up the logo at Spartan Stadium before going into that game in hostile territory and beating the shit out of those Sparty reprobates and bringing Home the entire goddamn rivalry in one Glorious Movement. Anyway, I love him dearly, and he is a freak of a football player, a bat out of hell linebacker who can go sideline to sideline and the Browns don’t want none of that shit, no sir.
And yet, I have pushed my chips in behind the Browns for some dumbass reason, partly because they are losers and partly because of my affection for Sweet Dan, who can be found chained to a leash in leather garters by obese Cleveland sweathogs who parade him around the stadium before games, “The Little Prince” they call their little English chap and not a one of them can understand a fucking word he says. “Is he retarded?” they always get asked. “Nah, he’s just English” they say.
Anyway, for those reasons I suppose, especially the offensive ones, I am pulling for the Browns to fucking make something of themselves, and they are almost fucking doing it! But calm the fuck down. CALM DOWN. They are facing a master rapist and a stud defender which is the NFL equivalent of having Mick Jagger and Keith Richards or Axl and Slash or some other people who probably raped some, it’s been a very troubling last epoch in culture.
Pick: Steelers
Baltimore (-8) at Philadelphia
The Ravens have Lamar Jackson and the best defense in the league for the 20th year running. The Eagles have a bunch of faded hangover memories of a backup quarterback who isn’t even here anymore and the STAR who is the “real” quarterback might kind of stink a little, it’s starting to look a little dicey that’s all I know.
But the truth is simple here, one team, the Ravens, have figured out who they are and they run that game relentlessly week after week. They might get tripped up here and there but they are mostly a steamroller and will flatten you to the fucking earth if you’re not on your game and ready to match them.
And the other team, the Eagles, are kind of the exact opposite of that, a rudderless team with no real identity besides that faded Super Bowl party, just a collection of dudes who always seem like they should be better than they are but then never are and eventually you’re just a fucking fool if you believe that they are anything other than whatever the fuck amorphous blob of a football team they are.
And that’s exactly what you don’t want to be when a well-oiled, almost OCDishly so, football team like the Harbaugh led Ravens come at you. They know exactly what they’re gonna do to you and then they do it and you probably won’t stop it, definitely not if you’re not steeled like a bunch of Yung Thugs from Sparta hanging out in Thermopylae posing their abs at Xerxes. You come any less than that and the Ravens will just bury you, and so the Eagles get one step further away from The Party.
Pick: Ravens
Cincinnati (+7.5) at Indianapolis
The Young Joe Burrow against the Aged Philip Rivers. There is every chance that Phil date-raped Joe’s Mom and there is every chance that Joe Burrow just left a litany of Dark Stories behind him in Louisiana where the college football team is pretty much representative of Bacchus, with maybe even more goats to be honest. The depraved shit that likely goes down in that football culture is like something out of True Detective probably, and so Joe Burrow is already READY for the NFL culture if you feel me.
But being a Bengal isn’t as much fun as being a Bayou Bengal. The cheerleaders here are actually professional women and not drunk coeds you can drag by the hair into an orgy around a bonfire surrounded by guards wearing pig masks. You can’t even play drunk, not like in the SEC. Shit, Joe used to do shots before each game last year and they won a national championship. 6 shots of SoCo and 6 more at halftime. They won’t even let you drink a goddamn beer on the sideline in the NFL. Not anymore anyway. Ken Stabler is dead. Fuck.
So it is definitely an adjustment for Joe Burrow and these sorts of seasons are always more like Season 0 than Season 1, just get the guy out there and see what you’ve got. So far, he seems to be a dude who will likely be a viable NFL quarterback. But Phil Rivers has already been through all that shit, 45 fucking years ago or whenever the fuck it was he made his debut, and he doesn’t have time to baby this little shit and so he’ll just do what he always does and maybe win the game maybe lose it, but he sure as shit won’t be shown up by this soft cocked little bastard. There is a Right Way of Doing Business, that’s all, and he’ll have to let Burrow know that before the game. Maybe Joe will listen, maybe he will let his mind wander back to the time the entire LSU football team got to sacrifice a live Asian gal to the King in Yellow.
Pick: Colts
Green Bay (-1) at Tampa Bay
Those Packers, those Goddamn Packers, have gone and gotten themselves a fresh set of coaches who have given their lifeblood to the fucking devil and now they have the top scoring offense in the entire NFL. It never fucking ends. Go back to Dr. Bert Fever and his Wrangler Man routine, just a Gunslinger Cockslinger which lasted for a millennia and then gave way to the coming of the antichrist, the Devil Himself, Aaron Rodgers, who populates every fucking commercial in between throwing dead-eyed touchdowns that break the heart of every fan in the entire North Land. It is all too much to take, and yet here we are, in year 2020, and that is Two Thousand and Twenty Years After Lombardi. These fuckers have been at it all this time, Bart Starr is fucking your mom.
Tom Brady, meanwhile, is still leafing through those interior design specs and he’s sick of fighting about the fucking Bone Room and now he wants to talk to Gisele about her plan to eat live monkeys at every meal, apparently there’s a way you can do it where they stay alive and conscious for a really long time, but the last time he ate monkey he had bad nightmares and he wonders if they should try dwarf again. But Gisele says their legs are gamey and they’re all “skull” and it’s just not enough meat for the boys. The fucking trials and tribulations of being a power couple in the Apex of Human Culture.
But of course, Tom is also a legendary NFL quarterback, and he will not let this Tampa Bay team be anything less than what he has built throughout his damn near 20 year career. So he got confused for a moment against the Bears. That shit happens, especially when you accidentally took a Sauna in Uncle Klaus’s special chamber earlier that morning and even though you got out quick, the cries of the others just rang in your head all fucking night and didn’t go away until Gisele let you fuck her while she wore one of your old jerseys and also that mask of yourself that she wore for Halloween that one year and you chased cripples around a garden maze with chainsaws together.
The problem is that even Tom Brady might not be up to dueling with the Goddamn Devil in His Ascendency and let’s face it, the Devil cavorting naked and terrible in our streets is a perfect end to 2020, and this is the Evil Month anyway, October, for all the obvious reasons but also because it is when I was born. A lot of Foul Shit is happening at the same time, and this game might be the worst of it all. People are gonna die. People are gonna get fucked. Probably the same people.
Naturally, I can’t fucking wait for this one.
Pick: Tampa Bay
LA Rams (-3) at San Francisco
The 49ers are fading away on a tide of injuries and maybe even False Promises, the sort of thing that so often takes the Super Bowl loser, once so bright and full of hope, now just chasing a memory that just gets further and further away. Not good times, spiritually, emotionally, physically, any way really for the 49ers who are losing the will to live and that ain’t good this early in the season.
The Rams, on the other hand, quietly keep standing tall this season after being kind of written off as yesterday’s Chiefs. But they are still a solid offensive squad with good coaching minds guiding them and they still have Aaron Donald dominating everyone. He might be the best player in the NFL, offense or defense and that is a hell of a card to hold.
If the 49ers don’t fight back here, this is gonna run away from them in a hurry, but I think they might already be resigned to that, which means the Rams should be able to whip up on their longtime rivals, now both back in Cali, representing two distinct parts of that state that are as different as they are similar, both ensconced in wealth and prestige, but one is Hollywood and fucking crazy people and gang shootings and Latino Heat and the other is wine country, Silicon Valley, some fucking beatniks maybe trying to make San Francisco still a “thing” culturally, and yet, you get the sense that no one really gives a shit about any of it. Either the wider socio-political shit or the football shit, especially the football shit where the Rams are just vagabonds really, having jacked around LA once too often for anyone to really care and even then, they only really ever cared about the Raiders, and the 49ers have always struggled to find a fanbase beyond a bandwagon Joe Montana/Jerry Rice yesteryear shit that was always the polar opposite of the fucked up mutant Raider subculture across the bay. But now the Raiders are gone too, looming like ghosts around both teams who now have only themselves to blame for their shit cultures. But I guess that is so very LA, so very California, where nothing is real and no one is from there.
Pick: Rams
NY Jets (+9.5) at Miami
Are the Jets that bad? Yes. Are the Dolphins that good? Probably not, but the Dolphins did just beat the shit out of the 49ers. But I think that is more the 49ers soul sliding than anything, and I wouldn’t expect it to mean much for the Dolphins, who are still just 2-3 and looking at another losing season in what has become an annual ritual for them, their shoddy culture now looking as faded and as corny as the 1970s it came from.
But the Jets are just fucking awful, man. They tried out Joe Flacco’s corpse and that didn’t work either and now they are just playing for the headsman, and I don’t mean the owner, I mean the dude who chops your fucking head off at the end of a Henry VIII soliloquy.
There’s not that much left to say, especially since I’ve said most of it already and I’d like to keep this thing from ballooning to 6,000 words for fuck’s sake. So let’s just acknowledge that this will be a very bad game between two very bad teams, and saying that, I can’t trust a line that steep.
Pick: Jets (this will fuck me, I know it)
Denver (+9) at New England
What the fuck? I wrote about this game last week. Fuck you, you goddamn motherfuckers trying to wring more gibberish out of me. Go look at last week’s post for that pick. Don’t be lazy you fucks.
Arizona (-1) at Dallas
How humiliating for Jerry Jones and the Cowboys to be underdogs to the Cardinals at home. I mean, the Cardinals have basically been treated like the Cowboys poor step-brother who has to sleep on the porch with a fucking space heater while the Cowboys snuggle up in their Voltron bed surrounded by all their toys.
Good for the Cardinals, who can’t even get a home game against the Cowboys without the Cowboys mouthbreathing fans all descending on Arizona, which, fuck, is probably where they all live anyway. Yeah, Arizona seems EXACTLY like the sort of state and people that the Dallas Cowboys pander to, right? Just a bunch of soulless skeletons shambling through the desert, from one end to the other rattling HOW BOUT DEM COWBOYS, yellow bile and phlegm spitting out with every word from behind browned teeth and oozing meth sores.
Those are your fucking people, Jerry. You fucking hick, pretending to be a man of class and means. You are just a parasite, sprung up on the land and settled down like a leech or a tick, burrowing into the American Psyche and the American Dream, feeding off of it, making people think that YOU are IT instead of the thing draining the life from it. Fuck you and fuck your shitty Walmart ass fans and their goddamn NASCAR souls, and not that shit from 30 years ago, but the shit now where they all look like 22 year old date rapists sipping energy drinks. That’s your America, you fucking fraud, you Trumpian git, you despicable pile of wrinkles and shit. I’d root for the Fucking Devil over you and I have.
The poor Cardinals are always caught in the backwash of the Cowboys disgusting excess, and very rarely build a team of their own that can stand up to these shitheads, but maybe with Kyler Murray tossing bombs and running around, and DeAndre Hopkins catching them, and maybe against the worst fucking defense in the NFL lol that’s right Jerry you witless FUCK. Yeah, maybe those dudes have a chance.
But they are still a work in progress and for as bad as the Cowboys defense has been – again, lol at you Jerry, you FUCKING LOSER – the offense is still Hot Fire for the most part, and Dak Prescott, Ezekiel Elliott and Amari Cooper and CeeDee Lamb have maybe more, a lot more, than just Kyler and DeAndre, and it’s not like the Cardinals have a vast reservoir of spiritual support behind them, see the entire Arizona of it all, which again, is fucking Cowboys country more than anything, and it’s hard to see how the Cardinals win this.
It sucks, but this might actually be a decent matchup for the Cowboys, who will shoot it out with anyone and you might as well shoot it out against a team that looks sort of like you only with smaller guns and no money behind them. That’s a military fiasco just waiting to happen, sort of like if the Mexican Army tried to roll up on the USA. It would maybe get dicey, especially with the support of the border locals, but in the end, you all know it would just be a disgusting massacre, Desert Storm but in America. Anyway, that’s the kind of thing I see happening here.
Pick: Cowboys
Kansas City (-4.5) at Buffalo
Buffalo got taken for a ride by boring ass Tennessee, which kind of exposed them a little bit maybe, but then again, it was a weird Covid game so who the fuck knows? That’s kind of the theme of this whole fucking year. Who the fuck knows? It is a lost year for everyone, really, including me. I have overdosed and been carted off to the hospital like a fucking lunatic, I have continued on in a fucking ridiculous drug binge in a lost year of chaos and madness, and yet other than the one Really Dark Time, I have actually just mostly chilled and read and watched TV and movies and fucked around the virtual world instead of the plague filled real world which has put a damper on my dick game, but I also careen into my 40s so I suppose it was bound to happen sometime.
Anyway, the point is that none of this really matters and we’re all just here for laughs, and I mean that about life overall. Trying to take anything more than that away from it is a recipe for heartbreak and eventually bitter despair. Fuck everything that isn’t you. Just fuck it. Be whoever or whatever you want to be that makes you happy, that makes you feel good even if for a day. I know, I know, JOBS and such, but fuck it, man, that’s just a thing you do in between being you. I don’t know why I got off on this screed other than my birthday is tomorrow, and it will all be very low key of course, but I wouldn’t want anything else anyway. Fuck the pageant, fuck the games, and just roll with what makes you happy, even if that’s just one person, or a couple of people. Fuck it, be comfortable by yourself. Learn to love the animal within, recognize that you are your own best friend, your own lover, your own world. Everyone else is just a fucking prop. lol okay that is starting to sound too sociopathic, and I don’t mean that as hard as it sounds. Love as hard as you can love, people, pets, ideas, art, yourself. And don’t be so fucking afraid all the time. I know it’s hard sometimes and it all feels like TOO FUCKING MUCH, but drill down to what really matters, ask yourself what’s real and then wrap yourself in that like a fucking cocoon. Everything else is just bullshit.
This has nothing to do with this fucking game, but who cares? If you’ve read this far for this long you know the deal. You know what I’m about, and any asshole can write about a football game. I’m trying to talk to you. I hope you listen, maybe think on it, maybe talk about it with other people. I don’t know. But we’re all in this together because we’re not like the others and let’s be Spirit Warriors.
Pick: Kansas City
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