We’re in that weird time of year when games start happening on random days, like there are always Saturday games in late December, and of course the Thursday games as everyone searches for programming in the holidays, but this year there is a game on a fucking Wednesday that is actually part of last week’s games and not this week’s, which is getting into some DeLoreon hijinks with Doc Brown and his teenage boy slave or whatever the fuck they had going on there, and it becomes hard to know when one week ends and another begins and shit, the NFL is on junkie time, the NFL is up at weird hours, running on speed and adrenaline at 4 AM and maybe they’ll crash in a cave like a fucking bear for 4 days and then it’s Christmas, and anyway, I am coming to you off of a 3-10-1 week with one game outstanding which I’ll probably edit before throwing this out in the world, but I am starting writing this already on late Tuesday/early Wednesday because like the NFL, I am also on junkie time. Now let’s get ready for more of that fuckin’ football!!!
Detroit (+3) at Chicago
My god, they finally did it. Lady Ford acknowledged the woeful cries of a tortured and beaten fanbase and just fucking fired everyone. Fat Matt Patricia is now free to spread his girth into whatever town will take him next where he will be a lowly assistant who lives in motel rooms and rapes the maids or the daughters of vacationers, the fucking villain. Bob Quinn will go back to playing Madden and screaming through his headset at teenage boys who are beating the piss out of him on a daily basis and then he’ll get yelled at by his mom for breaking the drywall with his baseball bat during a temper tantrum and thank god we don’t have to deal with or hear from these ungodly fuckers ever again. They were the worst ever to come to Detroit and take a try at running this cursed franchise and that is saying something. Morally bereft, hated by all, and incompetent. That’s not a good way to go through life and even the usual shitters get patted on the back and called good men as they get fired, or they are prickly assholes who are at least competent up until a point where it just gets too tiresome like a Jim Harbaugh act and everything breaks down, but rarely do you get this all encompassing hellstorm of unlikability and incompetence raining down on everyone, and that’s what happened to the Lions because of course it does.
But now that the snakes and rapists are gone, you still have to gather up a staff to finish the season, and the Lions, naturally, are fucking that up. I mean, you know you’re gonna fire everyone, but you need interim dudes to step in and grimly run the thing to its end before you can start a real search, but the Lions aren’t even doing that. No one is in charge, the players are left to run whores and set up drug dens all over town if they’re brave enough to even go outside anyway with plague victims dying on the streets. They probably can’t even get a pizza delivered right now without a zombie trying to storm their front doors and they don’t have anyone to turn to, Rod Wood or whoever the Ford’s appendage du jour is, doesn’t give a fuck about the players, they are just headaches for him right now, and so the only thing the boys can do is hope that The Great Willie Young shows up like a fucking Terminator all crackling in lightning and shit, and takes charge of this thing.
Look, dudes and lady dudes, this whole thing is a thunderous mess that just gets Lionsier every day. By the time this gets out into the wild, I assume someone will have been named an interim zookeeper, but for right now, everything is just chaos, a vortex of noise and insanity happening during a time when people are afraid to even open their front door because a Skeleton might saunter in without a mask. I have no idea what the Fords will do, and I suspect that it will likely be a fiasco simply because that is all these fucking clowns know how to do these days. The Model T’s aren’t humming off the assembly line anymore, everything is a fucking Edsel now and shit, at least the government is willing to rob the people of what little they have left to cut checks to the Fords so that they can go on INFLUENCING society with their financial brilliance.
New beginnings always come with Hope, but Hope is for suckers when it comes to this team. Everything has to be taken in with a cynical eye because the thing is on you to prove to us that we should even give a shit about this fucking thing. You have expended all of our goodwill and now we’re half feral street rats ready to eat you from your ankles on up as soon as you give us a reason to do so. Patience and Trust have been obliterated, fucked around one time too many, and now you will be swarmed by this street pack and fucking devoured if you don’t come out of this on fire running with purpose.
The problem, of course, is that nothing like that is likely to happen, and so we’re all just gonna end up yelling at each other about who or what needs to happen and everyone will be fucking miserable as the new dudes in charge try their hardest to get something going against the extraordinary weight of failure that is pushing back against them, a runaway train made up of a history of failure combined with a terrified fear of the future. How do you deal with something like that? I don’t know.
We can tell ourselves and each other that we have to be rational and patient and let this thing work itself out without smothering it in its infancy with our Lions Madness, but we have been through this so many times in so many ways that it’s impossible to hold back the tide of cynicism and disgust at the first fuckup. Like abused puppies we’re just gonna snap and growl until someone proves to us that they can be trusted.
I have no idea what this means for Matthew Stafford who at 32 is not even remotely old in this new age of QBs playing into their 40s by tapping into the nutritionist guided world of eating unwanted babies from the Indian subcontinent or whatever the fuck they are doing to keep in the game for longer than ever before. But it also begs the question of whether Stafford himself has to finally take accountability for all this bullshit. Franchise quarterbacks are hard to find, it’s really a matter of timing and luck more than anything, so whoever steps into the hellstorm of Lions football is going to have to address that question first and foremost, and then it will likely be a brutal years long build to whatever passes for acceptable around here, and like I said, no one has the time or patience for any of that.
So these are dark days for the Detroit Lions, strange and terrible times indeed, and the franchise is essentially a man who has lost his job staggering naked in the street, drunk as fuck and hollering at anyone who will hear him until he finally gets picked up by the police and thrown in the drunk tank for the night. Morning means starting over, but for now, it’s just a full on release and it’s howling into the rainy night, screaming curses at God, taking swings at the world while shitting yourself. That’s Lions football right now, and it just goes on.
Pick: Bears
Cincinnati (+11.5) at Miami
Miami stuffed the hapless Jets and Cincinnati isn’t winning another game this year after losing Joe Burrow to a claymore grenade or whatever the fuck destroyed his knee in every direction. So, it’s pretty easy to just call this one for the Dolphins, who are back in the I Don’t Know About These Dudes territory which means that I can’t tell if they are actually a pretty good team or whether they just picked up some smoke and mirrors, probably from the cokeheads and crackheads on the beach and on the streets.
Their defense has seemed like one of those bend but don’t break deals which means they give up a lot of yardage but keep their opponents from scoring on them at will, but that sort of defense tends to be a mirage as eventually that thing is gonna fucking break and then where are you, running down the street snorting blow you just stole from your dealer and he’s gonna fucking kill you when he catches you. But for now, at least you are high and in the moment and nothing else matters.
That’s where the Dolphins are right now, high as fuck on those Miami streets, knowing somewhere beneath the fog that someone is coming to get them, but for now the only move is to do more drugs and hope that something ridiculous happens, like you win the lottery and can move out of state to avoid your enraged dealer who is balls deep in your wife because she can’t respect you and your coke dick and that is what they call collateral damage. She’s with him now, and he might keep her around for a few days, just fuck the shit out of her and toss her to his friends before they bury her body somewhere in the Everglades. It’s not a great scene, really, but at least you hit that lotto and can blow it all on whores and more drugs up north and ride the party just long enough to forget what a horrific person you are and what a mess you made of your life, and then a trans hooker slits your throat for eight dollars in your wallet because they need to get money for the surgery and you couldn’t even be decent enough to stuff your wallet with all that lotto money, you cheap piece of shit.
Pick: Miami
Indianapolis (-3.5) at Houston
I applaud and thank the Texans for disemboweling my Lions on Thanksgiving, which allowed the Fords to carry out yet another massacre on their conscience. It might pale in comparison to the millions that died because Old Man Ford wrote a book about the Jews he didn’t like and some Germans read it and thought he made sense, but firing Matt Patricia and Bob Quinn wouldn’t have happened if the Texans didn’t play their role. So, yes, I salute them.
Philip Rivers is listed as Questionable because he stubbed his fucking toe, which could definitely be an issue for the Colts. My guess is that he tried to kick a hobo in the ass, literally in the ass, and his toe got stuck and that poor hobo was sodomized by a fucking toe so he had a right to break it when he clenched his buttocks around it and twisted it until it broke which is also how he got revenge on that uncle who was molesting him and that gave him serious issues and that is why he is now a hobo.
A sluggish run game won’t save the Colts if Rivers can’t go, and even if he does, he is still Philip Rivers and it’s hard to see him driving this team to a playoff run even if they have the wins to get there. This is supposed to be his sad year where he just fucks up a lot because he’s old and he gets mad at the football and, well, this isn’t the first time he tried to rip the laces off of a brown plaything.
And the Texans are not a bad team, really. They are just a team that got fucked by the schedule right from go. There is still enough there for them to play a nasty sort of spoiler for teams as the year winds down. The Patriot Way failed here just like it has failed everywhere when Tom Brady hasn’t been involved, so maybe this could be a good way to spark some junkyard dog like energy to get some momentum for whoever is coming in to take over. Or they could roll over and call it a season and spend most of their time indoors with their loved ones or sycophants or whoever is leeching money off them while the zombies claw at the doors from the plague infected landscape. I think there is enough spark, though, left in dudes like JJ Watt to start playing for the future by winning some meaningless games here, and DeShaun Watson is a legit NFL QB star child, so I think I will roll with Houston.
Pick: Houston
Jacksonville (+10) at Minnesota
Changing it up, going with Skynyrd instead of the Durst. Also, it seems like blogger is not playing nice with some of y'all's phones or devices and you can't see these videos but trust that I am putting them here.
Pick: Minnesota
Las Vegas (-8.5) at NY Jets
The Raiders were fucking thrashed by the Falcons, so maybe things are still under construction in Vegas with Jon Gruden. There’s no time like this year to have a season where you work out your issues and let the wins and losses come as they may, and maybe that is what is going on with the Raiders. I don’t know, I can’t get a good read on them even this far into the season. Maybe that’s partially due to my own levels of shookness about them leaving Oakland which was a fucking terrible thing, to piss all over such a glorious legacy of Spirit Warrior Football that, yes, had been grasping for any kind of connection to those glory days for a while now, but still, the Raiders and their fans could own that mystique at their core level, their identity level, and always have something to point to and chase as a way to live.
But, the Raiders can’t look to that core for inspiration because they fucking abandoned it for a ghost town in the desert where plague zombies rattle the doors of the casinos and hotels trying to get in to devour whatever is left of the American Dream and themselves, and that is probably not an identity you want to be branding yourself with.
So this is a sort of lost in space season for the Raiders, not sure what planet they belong to, a team in transition, and hey, wouldn’t be wild if an entire football team decided to transition from men to women at once just to make some sort of statement about identity and shit I will get right the fuck off this track before I get run over by the cancellation train. Sometimes, my thoughts and the words lead me into places and problems impossible to resolve.
Anyway, the point is that the Raiders are completely lacking in any sort of cultural identity, which I keep hammering home, and the really shitty thing is that even when they do get a chance to create one, it will almost certainly be an ugly dystopian thing which will serve as a mockery for everything that the Raiders once were. Listen, Vegas may be a degenerate town and the Raiders of old were certainly degenerates, but Vegas’ degeneracy is one of desperate falseness, of people being conned out of their lives and swallowed by the maw of American Consumerist Hell Pit, a place where the whole thing is a joke and a hustle designed to fleece you, the darkest and yet truest symbol of America itself. The old Oakland degeneracy was based in real degeneracy for its own sake, for dirty living with no respect for the law or for the grifters who profit from exploiting it all. The Old Raiders were crackheads and junkies just trying to get through to the next day and without having to answer for anything. The New Raiders are the dealers and pimps who prey off those kinds of people. It’s a tragic scene. And yet, it is still better than being a New York Jet.
Pick: Raiders
New Orleans (-3) at Atlanta
Last week, I wrote about how cruel it was of the NFL to set Atlanta up with their two New Orleans games sandwiching what was probably an ass kicking by the Raiders, but instead the Falcons decided to eviscerate the Raiders and their second swing at the Saints suddenly looks completely different. Sure, that game was probably a weird glitch in this weird glitch of a year, but the line shrank to only three points suggesting that the Falcons had convinced some big money movers that they were making a move here.
Of course, that move comes too little, too late, but you still want to gather up some momentum when you think you have the goods talent wise but just need a new maestro to guide them. They are 4-2 after ditching the cursed body of Dan Quinn, who they probably had to have shipped to New Orleans so a witch doctor could formally remove the curse from the team and make sure it stayed attached to Quinn’s bloated corpse before they shoved it off into the Mississippi at 3AM one morning.
And now New Orleans is coming to collect for disposing of Quinn, having already dropped the Falcons once and looking set to do it again. But the fucking Falcons might decide they’ve paid enough and are gonna renege on their deal, which is a very dangerous thing to do when dealing with witch doctors. But people are stupid and arrogant, especially men, and sometimes stupid arrogance is enough to carry you places you have no business being. Just witness the state of this glorious union we find ourselves living in now. Dumb and mean is easy to sneer at, but hard to stop when it gets on a roll and comes knocking at your door.
But while being dumb and mean is enough to allow you to bully most others, it doesn’t work when it comes up against someone with their shit together and a willingness to put your dumb ass down. And the Saints are probably composed enough to withstand the nakedly emotional attack of the dumb and arrogant, who are down to not wearing a shirt with ripped up jeans as they drunkenly try to fight a mob and the bouncers who are carrying them out by the waist kicking and screaming.
Pick: Saints
Cleveland (+5.5) at Tennessee
Cleveland is solidly in this thing at 8-3, which is surprising even to me who is on record the last couple of seasons as thinking they were a team ready to finally break out from the horror show slum infested by the likes of the Lions. I’m not sure whether it’s a strong 8-3, probably not, with Baker Mayfield not quite hitting his stride as he chases his inner Stabler. But 8-3 is still 8-3 and means they have the inside track for a wild card which might as well be a mission to Mars for most Browns fans who have known only misery and dismay these many years since Art Modell up and walked off with the original team.
The Titans, on the other hand, seem to be a more solid 8-3, having shown they could withstand the loss of Taylor Lewan to keep their boring yet effective machine marching on week after week. It is a tough football team, mentally as much as anything, which is the hardest sort of trick to pull off in the NFL, but the surest way to ensure that you have a ground floor that is higher than most other team’s ceilings and you can stand comfortably on it and fight even when things look shitty. They are not a pretty team, certainly not a team who anyone really wants to see or who the league is probably gonna pull shenanigans for, but they’ve built something of a culture there and that culture is the sort of thing that can sustain a team.
The Titans are likely to win the AFC South, giving succor to their hillbilly fan base, who are not even the cool hillbillies who hunt city folk and play the banjo but fake nouveau riche hillbillies who wear cheap rhinestone shit and are essentially the inbred cousins of the Jersey Shore type of trash people, just classless buffoons with loud ugly opinions and an appreciation for the Fake Country shit of Nashville and the Peyton Mannings of the world, trim cut white trash who have cleaned themselves up and work as managers at the Home Depot and wear MAGA hats to their race rally picnics or whatever the fuck they do for fun. Fuck them and fuck their football team, but still, there are too many of them and they will always be around to disillusion the rest of us.
Pick: Titans
NY Giants (-11) at Seattle
I was accused recently of being too hard on the Seahawks which baffles me as I have continuously called them the best team in the NFC West and talked up Russell Wilson’s ass as being underrated, but that just goes to show you how paranoid and miserable most fans are about their teams and the people who talk about them. It’s easy to see everyone else as the enemy and become wildly defensive of your team because, the truth is, is that most people really are just looking for a reason to tear down The Other, but I think this is misplaced here because, as I have said, I think I have been very fair, almost appreciative, of the Seahawks.
But anyway, I don’t want to devolve into having to defend myself from everyone’s hair trigger emotional responses, and so I’ll just say again that I think the Seahawks are a very good football team who tend to go overlooked year after year, and yet, when the time comes, they are almost always there at the playoff table and have to be taken seriously.
Really, the Seahawks would probably get more praise and recognition if they had actually won back to back Super Bowls, which they should have done if not for that epic what the fuck were you thinking moment when they threw that interception at the goalline to lose to the Patriots that second year. They kind of never recovered from that from a public relations point of view, which is a shame because they are always right there and always a threat to pull another championship season off, which would make three in the last decade instead of only two, which changes things significantly from an optics standpoint even if it shouldn’t. But that is just the way the mass opinion game works, always riding on the edge of a hair sliver to be read in wildly different ways based on a single moment.
And so the Seahawks find themselves sitting atop the NFC West in what is probably the best version of the NFC West since its inception, with every team being at least solid, and only injuries and those hair slivers dividing each team from one another. The Cardinals time is probably too early, the 49ers are best by injuries and the Rams time is probably a hair too late, but every one of those teams can change the narrative with a single emotional push. It’s just that the Seahawks seem to be the one team sitting at just the right moment with the least amount of injuries and that will probably be enough to set themselves up in a good position heading into the playoffs.
The Giants, of course, are horrible trash and there is really nothing worth saying about them as they careen listlessly once again, ready to crash into whatever rocks that are waiting to claim and wreck them for good, sending them to the bottom of an ocean of despair. And yet, amazingly, that is still enough to have them tied for first place in the comically horrific NFC East this season, which may well see their “champion” stumble ass backwards into the playoffs at 6-10. So rarely has it been the case that a team is simultaneously playing for nothing and for everything at the same time. It is an extremely fucked up situation, one which is likely to end in an embarrassing fiasco in the first round of the playoffs, but you have to admit, if any team could somehow win the Super Bowl on the heels of a 6 win season, it would be the Giants, who always win the damn thing when they’re not supposed to.
Still, that is a bridge too far in terms of ridiculousness to even seriously consider, it just is that it is technically still on the table, which marks the whole thing as absurd and an embarrassing look for the NFL. So hopefully the Seahawks can just kick these assholes farther away from the table they have no business sitting at, but then again, it would be funny to see the NFL played so ridiculously, their whole system rendered a farce as the crippled Giants steal another title while their Mookish fans take to the streets and give each other the plague. But really, I just wish they would all go away.
Pick: Seattle
LA Rams (-3) at Arizona
Another big game in the NFC West as the playoff picture starts to take shape. Both teams really need a win here. The Rams can put some distance between themselves and everyone else in second place as they jockey for a wild card, and the Cardinals can keep pace with a win. If the Cardinals lose, they are suddenly just a 6-6 also-ran who probably need another season or two to break through, which is disappointing because at times this season they have looked like a team that truly belongs.
And if the Rams lose, its suddenly an ugly dogfight the rest of the season for a Wild Card which may slip away from everyone if they drag each other down, but probably not since the NFC East is trash and the Vikings and Bears are not exactly making a serious play for a spot, leaving the two wild cards to come down to the second place finishers in both the South and the West no matter how much of a slugfest this turns out to be.
I wouldn’t count out Arizona, not with Kyler Murray running Kliff Kingsbury’s offense, which is really a case of two cocky college dudes spitting fire at the stodgy old pros of the NFL. And certainly not without DeAndre Hopkins as a legit number one receiver, which is really all you need in today’s NFL to keep pace with the rest of the race car teams out there. Especially playing down there in the desert, where it’s always warm enough to play aerial street ball and not have to get conservative and slug it out in the icy cold like most northern teams have to adapt to when it gets to this part of the year when the football becomes little more than a rock encased in ice that can only be lobbed in an approximate direction.
But the Rams are underrated too, much like the rest of the division, and being LA vagabonds themselves, they are not unfamiliar with having to fight off desert coyotes to get home in the middle of the night. Aaron Donald will be waiting with open arms like an angry bear waiting to thrash Kyler Murray whenever he dares to keep the ball, and the Rams have enough offensively, even with Todd Gurley in Atlanta, to beat down the doors of the stucco houses in the Arizona streets, hewn from the rocks and inhabited by Apache ghosts. Those Apache ghosts are not protective spirits of the Arizona people, but their haunters, always there to remind them that they stole that fucking land from them and genocided their people, which is probably why Arizona always seems to be spiritually bereft, struggling to create anything lasting or winning in a desert cursed by blood and broken promises.
Still, the Apache ghosts are not likely to help the interloper Rams, who are just really more of the same, but will be there as sort of trickster spirits who could decide to help one team or the other simply for the fun of it. That makes this a tough game to call, as I have a rule that you don’t ever mess with trickster Apache spirits and you just recuse yourself with the understanding that they will do what they will and all you can do is keep your head down and hope you don’t get eaten by a shape shifter or some shit. So I will make a pick, but I am not endorsing it with my own blood or spirit because I don’t need that kind of spiritual headache.
Pick: Rams
Philadelphia (+8.5) at Green Bay
The Eagles couldn’t even hang on to the joke version of first place in the NFC East, so they are pretty much a disaster team, which completes a stumbling kind of fall from the moment they won the Super Bowl a few years ago. Everyone has always sort of expected them to get back to that, but I think it’s probably over and anything that will happen will have to come with some significant changes. That may include going out and getting a new QB since Carson Wentz has never really recovered from being soul shook by Nick Foles stealing his Super Bowl moment from him. He’s an interception machine and that is the sort of thing vulture Eagles fans will be able to easily identify and from there pick his bones clean.
It is an unforgiving city, Philly, which eats its own as much as outsiders, just an insatiable carnivorous city of Mooks and ugly stereotypes. The City of Brotherly Love has always been kind of a hilarious oxymoron of a nickname, heavy on everyone being moronic oxen anyway. It’s probably fitting, though, since to be honest, I think Philly is always more comfortable being a loser and shitting on itself than it is being a winner because that would require some cleaning up and self-respect and fuck you if you think you’re gonna get any of that shit here. It’s all fuck your grandma and then make her eat old batteries while you laugh with Sully and piss on her corpse.
The Devil, of course, is more than happy to make deals with these hooligans and will gladly take a win against them in return for their ability to hurl more insults on the dead and cut themselves in fits of self-loathing. All they want is the permission to hate, and The Devil is more than willing to let them.
The Packers, of course, have basically sewn up the NFC North yet again, an impressive bounce back for a franchise that looked like it might finally be reeling from old age, but it turns out they just needed a fresh infusion of ideas from a young coach like Matt LaFleur, who is actually a little more than two weeks younger from me and also hails from the great state of Michigan. And believe me, men of my age and in this state are more than willing to make deals with The Devil as long as it ensures the party rolls on another few years. We came of age when Kid Rock was talking about cumming all over your wife and Eminem was a young shit talker extraordinaire setting fire to the streets of Detroit. We are a brazenly degenerate generation and have no qualms about hanging with The Devil.
And The Devil likes to hang with younger voices, younger energies, because they are easy to compel and suggest, easy to lead in to self-destructive worlds of Poor Choices and easy women. So as long as The Devil has someone youthful to kick it with, the drinks will continue to flow, lives will be corrupted and everyone will have a whole lot of fucking fun before it all collapses and it comes time to beg for forgiveness from the Dad above. But that time is not yet there for the Packers, and they will continue to roll on in this Hell on Earth, The Devil safely on their side.
Pick: Packers
New England (+1.5) at LA Chargers
The Patriots have ripped wins away from both the Ravens and the Cardinals in two of the last three weeks, but its hard to say what’s going on with the Ravens who seem like a team in the midst of a COVID related freefall, and the Cardinals are still young and ripe for a tripping up. Still, taken in tandem, there are signs of life for the Patriots, who just need to stumble their way to respectability to help Little Bill Belichick save some of his legacy, or at least enough face to continue to employ his children and sycophants including his horse who, let’s not forget, he is trying to get seated in the Senate, and that may sound far fetched, but listen, Mitch McConnell is pretty much open to anything so long as it corrupts the very nature of Democracy and lines his turtled pants with gold doubloons.
The Chargers are a soulless also-ran playing out the string of their miserable existence in a city that wants nothing to do with them even if people could leave their houses in the hills long enough to do anything other than wrap pillows around their heads trying to drown out the sound of coyotes howling in the streets outside. It is a bad scene, spiritually, and to be honest, the Chargers players are probably more worried about their homes and families being eaten by wildfires than anything happening in the football world right now. They probably needed to get the fuck out of San Diego, but they probably should have either gone South and tried to become Mexico’s NFL team, which at least would have had a shot at instilling a sort of weird and unique energy if enough Mexicans could be convinced the NFL wasn’t a fucking joke. Or maybe they would have been better off claiming Las Vegas, branding themselves as the ephemeral American team of the 2020s, appealing to tourists and junkie gamblers in a perverse sort of relationship that, while toxic, would at least be kind of entertaining for a while, like living with a drunk who fucks really good even if she does end up trying to break a lamp over your head at least once a week and even ran you over with her car that one time. Shit, it’s better than this soulless vagabond life they have going for them now.
They are going nowhere from a football or a culture standpoint, and even Little Bill is competent enough to handle losers like this. He may have been exposed as just another Parcells acolyte who lucked into riding the coattails of the greatest NFL quarterback ever, but shit, that is still better than what most of these incompetent jackasses are, dudes in charge of franchises simply because the NFL is a revolving door of good ol’ boy inbreeding, in which the same names and faces are recycled again and again and everything stays the status quo and is assumed as the “best of the best” because it’s the NFL and no one questions that shit even though a true outsider with vision is always capable of taking charge of one of these teams and blitzing the rest of the simple minded idiots who have always run things. The NFL is a lazy and arrogant league and thus, the laziest and most arrogant are always sitting at the head of the table, feeding off the scraps of sycophants and acolytes who aren’t interested in innovation but in propping up the status quo, lending a false legitimacy to the “Pro Style” which is always dominant because no one has the balls to challenge it. It’s an easy system to exploit, a lazy system, and Little Bill has been around long enough to know how to work it for its last few drops of credibility conferring “common thinking.”
Pick: Patriots
Denver (+13.5) at Kansas City
Who even knows what in the fuck is going on with Denver’s QB situation. John Elway has almost certainly considered coming out of retirement for just a few weeks, which would be funny as fuck and also sad, but these dudes have a hypercompetitive aspect to their personalities that fools them into thinking they can fight forever. That is a very Spirit Warrior kind of thing even if John Elway doesn’t exactly scream Spirit Warrior. But you have to respect the Play Until You Die sickness of these kinds of dudes. Then again, Elway hasn’t actually done any of this so maybe I am just inventing something here.
Yet, it’s not hard to imagine that dude who famously flung his old ass body towards a first down to win a Super Bowl in the twilight of a career which had been infamous for never reaching the mountaintop at least consider the idea of strapping up at 60 years old. Always remember that he went out a warrior champion which is the only way for these types of dudes. I don’t much like him for reasons I can’t even quite articulate, but I think I respect him.
Still, his team is gonna be steamrolled by the Chiefs who not only have a quarterback but the best quarterback in the game today. You never know when you’re gonna get a dude like Patrick Mahomes. You can draft him in the first round, but there is a difference between being a first round quarterback like Matthew Stafford and a dude who fucking blows up into a sun scorched superbomb of a player. And especially when that player, like Mahomes, was never really the Big Dick, all potential, but thought to be raw playing in a system favorable to QB’s at Texas Tech. But man did this dude deliver.
Elway himself was a can’t miss kind of QB, and even he took years and years to finally get it right, to match up enough Spirit Warrior energy with his talent to create a Hall of Famer. But Mahomes was a risk, a boom or bust type of candidate who boomed like the thundergods of old. The Chiefs and their wretched fans have to be thankful every day that he somehow fell into their laps. Remember, this was a pretty damn good team with Alex Smith running the show at QB. Mahomes just took them to a whole new stratosphere.
It drives me nuts, somewhat, that a team can get that lucky, to have both the system and the players, to turn themselves into a perennial juggernaut. Is it luck or is it truly a matter of establishing a culture at a deeper level? It’s hard to say sometimes, and as it is the case with New England, often what seems to be a perfect marriage is really more of a case of one partner propping up the other. I’m not so sure that is true in Kansas City, who somehow seem to just get better even when they have to shed players, like Alex Smith or Kareem Hunt. Remember, nobody knew that Mahomes would burst like this supernova.
But for whatever the reason, the Chiefs remain the NFL’s alpha dog and are in prime position to turn this thing into a dynasty. And Mahomes is only 25 years old, which given today’s chemically/nutritionally/baby’s blood altered NFL QB lifespan, means he can run this show for another 20 years if he wants. That is fucking crazy to consider and it’s just a shame that it has to be wasted on the ogre people who cheer for this team.
Pick: Chiefs
Buffalo (Pick Em) at San Francisco
A toss up game here as far as Vegas is concerned. The Bills are firmly entrenched at the top of the AFC East while the 49ers, beset by injuries, languish at the bottom of the NFC West, so really, this shows that Vegas is not sold at all on the Bills.
But the Bills have found a way to win more often than not and the 49ers, while still dangerous given that they have built a culture of winning, are still beset by a million injuries. And they can’t even play in San Francisco due to COVID restrictions making everything a fucking farce. Forced to play their home games in Arizona, it is a supremely weird season, and It’s hard to see the 49ers sustaining any sort of energy, especially against a team pushing towards the playoffs.
It’s been a hard road back to respectability for OJ’s Bills, and they probably deserve more respect than they are getting, but they are still the Bills and as OJ has proven, they don’t tend to do well when dropped into the West with its statuesque white women and waiters fucking them on the side while shiftless layabouts like Kato Kaelin get stoned in the shed and don’t notice what is even happening while people get brutally murdered. But the fucking gloves didn’t fit and somehow the Bills walked away with their freedom and a 49ers team screaming in impotent outrage at the whole zoo of it all can’t do much to stop it.
Pick: Bills
Washington (+7) at Pittsburgh
I am still not sold on the Steelers, who will probably get caught out in the open and exposed by the Chiefs. But for now, their rapist quarterback is free to wander whatever fields he wishes, jerking off and leering at open windows. None of your wives or daughters are safe with this monster on the prowl. And its not like Dan Snyder’s boys are gonna do anything to get in his way. So this is an easy pick, Steelers continue to roll. But there has to come a time when they get exposed, right?
I’m not so sure how they are keeping up this undefeated run, but it is a nice treat for a fanbase which is probably half gone down the rabbit hole of Oxy addictions as the coal and steel mills sit silent and everyone tries to transition to this new world in which no one has a job and robots do all the other jobs and when the plague lifts, I think the scene is going to be incredibly ugly, an entire people ruined and left behind, not sure where their identity even lies anymore, addicted to Fear and Loathing as much as the Oxy, blaming The Other and a world which has rapidly left you behind.
Those people deserve to have something good in their lives, and if it is a stupid football team, then so be it. I just hope that they can somehow process who the real bad guys are and who is really exploiting them and their pain and not get caught up in the ugliness of blaming The Other, which is the easy thing to do. The hard thing is to recognize that the American Way of life and its consumerist demands are the real thing keeping you down. The steel mills are all closed, but the money isn’t being sucked out by evil foreigners but by the people you trusted to look after everything, the bosses and kingpins who share money with the factory owners even while the factories get shut down, everyone getting theirs while you lose because you were naïve enough to believe in the promises of the American Way. But at least you got the Steelers.
Pick: Steelers
Dallas (+7.5) at Baltimore
The Ravens have kind of collapsed in a COViD nightmare, and I don’t know how in the hell this will shake out for them. It’s looking increasingly likely that they will be the one NFL team dragged out of contention by the plague. Still, they should have enough dignity and poise to handle the jackass circus of Jerry Jones.
I’ve written a ton about Jones and the Cowboys and I will probably write a million more words, but it is fitting that they are floundering in this 2020 hellscape, the perfect team to represent this diseased and rotten year. Jerry Jones is a miserable old prick who has fucked around and fucked up to the point that his team is a national laughing stock and he has no choice but to eat all of it.
Idiots like this can never recognize or admit when it is over. Just witness the Trump of it all right now. They just fiddle while their empire burns around them. Jerry Jones has offered nothing to the world except bombast and early success built off of the sociopathic genius of Jimmy Johnson. He has lorded over a team that perennially shits itself, and has acquired enough power to essentially be the dude who runs the NFL. Which, of course, has become spiritually sterile and not fun for anyone. He has ruined the Cowboys and he has ruined the most popular sports league in the country.
I will always revel in his losses, cheer for his embarrassment, as I imagine a world free of the Jerry Jones’, a world of Spirit Warriors and people ready for the fun of the heart of football, and not this corporate monstrosity, with its stale aura, lifeless millionaires playing out an increasingly controlled sport dictated by dudes like Jerry Jones. He has helped suck the fun out of football, and so his team losing and losing in a way that exposes the whole thing as incompetent, appeals to me.
I don’t know what the COVID zombies have cooked up for this game, but what I do know is that Jerry Jones is a fucking corny jackass and he must be relentlessly exposed at every opportunity. The culture of the NFL moving forward demands it. The culture of the country moving forward demands it. Trump is defeated, and now it is time to take the rest of the trash out.
Pick: Baltimore
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