THE QUEST FOR 0-17 - YEAR ONE, WEEK THREE

[Malcolm McKesson's illustration of the Jets negotiating to share

Giants Stadium with the Giants in the early 1980s]

{also, if you like how my brain is, support my patreon, which is full of this type of shit}

Two more teams were able to escape the possibility of being sacrificed upon the alter of the dying American Empire this past weekend, with both the Vikings and Falcons scoring their first wins of the young season. This leaves us with five teams still possibly able to establish the 0-17 mark necessary to drive a near final metaphysical nail into the coffin of this American football cartel experiment called the National Football League (a strangely fascistic sounding name, to be honest). Being America was manufactured from existing lands already inhabited by a plethora of peoples with a differing philosophy than the one that showed up, I figured it'd be a good idea to examine spaces this week, specifically the stadiums these last five teams play in. Football teams in America hold localities hostage for new home grounds every decade or so, because our culture is dependent upon this constant and unsustainable notion of newness. I mean, it makes sense according to our American mythology, as these lands - full of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people at the very minimum, likely more - was considered "The New World" when Europeans started probing the coastal waterways like syphilitic penises a half century ago. So let's begin...

New York Giants (0-3; 6 point average margin of defeat) - The New York football Giants are one of the two teams left who have a long history, in the exact basic area they still are. The Giants are four years away from their centennial. Upon their birth, back in 1925, they occupied the old Polo Grounds Stadium, which was actually the third incarnation of that named field, and the home of the original baseball New York Giants. That site was within the city proper, just north of 155th Street, along the Harlem River on the Manhattan Island side. But the city's population was booming, and an open space like that for a new stadium was hard to find, especially since the Yankees had previously built Yankee Stadium across the river in the Bronx already, in the 1920s. Land had all been bought up, and the former Polo Grounds site became land for the city to build another housing project on, which it remains to this day, erected in the 1960s to further segregate society and concentrate poverty into pockets of suffering strategically removed from the more economically booming parts of the city, where America's expanding whiteness had been busy establishing generational wealth as a cultural head start over those packed into the housing blocks of Polo Grounds Towers. The first Super Bowl had yet to be played when the Giants started sharing Yankee Stadium in the falls, for nearly twenty years, beginning in 1956, up until the master planners of America's actual shape decided in the early '70s that Yankee Stadium deserved to be a baseball-only stadium, and New Jersey designed the Meadowlands development entirely to lure an NFL team across the river into Jersey. In 1972, the Giants had agreed to the move, and ground was broke on Giants Stadium. The team was banished to the Yale Bowl in Connecticut for two seasons, and then spent 1975 cohabitating in Shea Stadium with the New York Jets, both of whom were leasing access to the stadium from the New York Mets, who were fleecing the fuck out of the teams. 1976 saw Giants Stadium's astroturf spectacle to suburban sports complexes, even if in the already dense environs of New Jersey. America's racial problems saw a number of "riots" in throughout the 1960s, which - along with media propaganda about the criminal nature of the non-white parts of U.S. cities, and that generational wealth mentioned before - helped contribute to white flight from America's cities. Suburban development and car manufacturing and credit systems whom only part of America's population could access created these highway-dependent zones of sprawling influence. The New York Giants were in New Jersey, at a football-specific creation of a stadium, with one locality building it, absorbing much of the cost, to lure an NFL franchise away from a competing locality. The NFL's growing stature would make this the league's basic methodology for new stadiums moving forward. the Giants won three Super Bowls with Giants Stadium as their home. After a few decades though, Giants Stadium had lost its luster, and was no longer the newness needed to keep America's economic dick hard. So a brand new, younger and more attractive stadium was built like an enormous vagina, near the old wore out whore of a structure, and MetLife Stadium was opened in 2010. That very first season, the Giants amazingly won a fourth Super Bowl title, almost as a reward, as by this time the NFL's cartel of owners operated much more like the old pro wrestling National Wrestling Alliance did in many of their practices, including the blacklisting of someone like Colin Kaepernick for not towing the company line properly. The NFL doesn't yet acknowledge itself as sports entertainment rather than competitive sports, because it's easy enough to make it appear authentic, through the use of modern television, efficient and practiced commentators on broadcasts to echo the perceived realities of the sport, so that all that's necessary is selective enforcement of a burgeoning rulebook, and the cooperation of a few key players to keep the marks watching at home, and filling stadiums locally, so long as they remain new enough to justify the meccas from various suburbs metastasizing in every possible direction from old city nucleuses. The Giants will remain at MetLife Stadium, named after the life insurance company that pays a large sum of money annually to have it named so, for as long as the luster has not worn off the building, perhaps a couple decades if developers are lucky, before some other strategically "renewed" area is developed, once the poors are driven into some other nether metropolitan region, to allow for a newer newness to be manufactured out of old rubble full of ghosts silenced by "progress".

Indianapolis Colts (0-3; 8 point average margin of defeat) - The Colts history is more complicated than simple white flight from urban to suburban, as it took the larger shape of cultural shifts in the larger American map. The team was founded in Baltimore in 1953, where it lived for over three decades. In 1953, Carroll Rosenbloom became majority owner of the new Baltimore Colts franchise. Rosenbloom, the son of immigrants, had amassed the wealth to run a football team, having been sent to sell off a Blue Ridge Overalls Company, in Roanoke, Virginia, not far from me. (And man, do I fucking love overalls; it's in my blood.) Rather than sell off the business, he decided to run it, getting distribution through larger department stores like Sears-Roebuck and J.C. Penney, and acquiring other clothing companies along the way. Rosenbloom was once called "America's Overall King" in the media, though he himself would never be caught in anything less than a suit publicly. The Colts became remarkably successful, with much of that attributed to Rosenbloom's ownership style, and business acumen. The team won three NFL championships before the Super Bowl began, and won the fifth Super Bowl as well, in 1970. By that time, Rosenbloom had become frustrated with Memorial Stadium, and Baltimore city officials' lack of desire to renovate the aging stadium, and Rosenbloom wanted to leave the city. At the same time, Robert Irsay had become wealthy through inheriting his father's heating and air conditioning business. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Hungary, with the surname Israel, which became Americanized as Irsay, allowing for the family to be baptized in America's concepts of whiteness. Irsay bought the estate of Los Angeles Rams' owner Dan Reeves after Reeves' death, and immediately swapped franchises with Rosenbloom, allowing America's Overall King to head off to California to enjoy his twilight years. Irsay was not seen as tactful as Rosenbloom, and his belligerence with Baltimore city over stadium issues was much more heavy-handed. The city refused to spend a lot of public money on renovating the stadium, due to low attendance, and state of Maryland actually teased passing laws allowing the city to seize the Colts under an expanded view of eminent domain (used more often now in order to justify economic development which doesn't necessarily benefit the public so much as key invested members of the public). With fears of this, Irsay accepted a deal to move to Indianapolis, and the club moved in the most overnight-like scenario of a franchise relocation the NFL has ever seen. Indianapolis had built the giant Hoosier Dome (later more commonly known as the RCA Dome, after the electronics giant purchased naming rights) exactly towards the purpose of luring an NFL team away from more established metropolitans to fucking Indianapolis, the only major cluster of concrete and steel beams in the extended corn field that is the state of Indiana. Indiana is not a bastion of diversity, with a large white populace through most of the state (though Indianapolis is an anomaly in that sense), and not even diversity of crops, as America's subsidization of corn crops made the state closer to mono-crop than traditional farming would necessitate in order to support a normal human diet. But most of the corn grown in America is for the manufacture of corn syrup, or for feeding cattle on giant feedlots run by the beef industry. Jim Irsay was 12 when his father bought his way into the NFL and became owner of the Colts. He joined the family business of running the team after graduating from Southern Methodist University in 1982, the family's Jewish roots further laundered into Americanized whiteness, having been raised Catholic, and not even knowing his own Jewish roots until two years after his dad bought the Baltimore Colts. After the club moved to Indianapolis, Irsay became Vice President and General Manager. He took over operations after his dad had a stroke in 1995, and when Robert Irsay passed in 1997, a heated legal battle developed between Jim and his stepmother over his father's estate, with the end result being Jim Irsay became the NFL's youngest owner ever at the time, at the age of 37. And despite Indiana's conservative bent (Mike Pence famously wasting taxpayer money to act indignant about NFL players kneeling during the national anthem there), Jim Irsay donates to Democratic candidates, and even bought the original copy of Jack Kerouac's On The Road. Of course, he's also an extremely wealthy man, who grew up amidst that wealth already established by his father. But after 25 years, the shiny new domed stadium that lured the Colts from Baltimore was outdated already, and needing replacing. Indianapolis knowing full well how this hustle worked, built a new stadium just south, across the railroad tracks, and Lucas Oil Stadium opened in 2008. Interestingly enough, ground was broke on the new stadium in September of 2005, and the Indianapolis Colts won their very first Super Bowl in Indiana that following winter. Another interesting side note is the largest crowd ever in the history of the RCA Dome when it was demolished was WWE's Wrestlemania VIII in 1992. But Jim Irsay's story is also the tale of the ugly side of American whiteness, and wealth and success leading to decadence and dissatisfaction. The grandson of Jewish immigrants, and the son of an industrial heating and cooling tycoon in the midwest, Irsay struggled with alcoholism and alleged drug addictions as well, with a mistress of his overdosing and dying in a house he'd discretely purchased with Colts' money. Irsay went to rehab in 2014, with his daughter Carlie positioning herself as heir apparent of his three daughters, and operating the team in his absence. He is now 62, and that's been a self-indulgent six decades, and once he dies, his three daughters will likely struggle to divide up the franchise into ownership or liquidation into cash through selling it to others who are newer marks in America's great pyramid scheme. Being the team is in Indiana, it's impossible not to note the similarities to old farms which have more value in the land they occupy than the crops they cultivate, and when family elders pass on, the children and grandchildren opt to sell off the land for the money rather than continue to work in the dirt. They might lease the farm to large agribusiness to operate on (which run more farmland in America, by far, than any actual families do, though most of these large corporate agricultural businesses grew from some actual family farm, and maintain the illusion of being "family-run" for marketing purposes. But inevitably, the newer generation wants the cash to indulge themselves in, and the land gets sold off to create more sprawl further outside of cities, where men in $80,000 trucks ride back and forth to office jobs blasting "country" music about dirt roads which no longer actually exist.

Detroit Lions (0-3; 9.33 point average margin of defeat) - The Lions are another old school team, and one that has actually seen two phases of America's wealth movement through spatial relations, with the entirety of that happening while still owned by the same family. the team began as the Portsmouth Spartans in 1930, but struggled, and moved to Detroit, rebranded as the Lions to pair with baseball's Tigers, in 1934. Portsmouth, Ohio, is a neat but desolate little city along the Ohio River, across from Kentucky. There's a couple nice rail yards in that area I like to fuck around in, so I've found myself wandering through Portsmouth about once a year, and it's impossible to imagine the behemoth entity of the NFL giving a fuck about a place like that ever. The Lions played at University of Detroit Stadium for a while, before cohabitating with the Tigers at old Tiger Stadium. Baseball was by far the more popular sport then, so in many cities, football teams leased from baseball teams to play their home games in the fall after baseball season was done for the year. As the NFL grew in stature, absorbing the American Football League, and launching the Super Bowl in the late '60s as a championship game that became an annual cultural event for America, sharing homes with baseball stadiums made less sense. But there wasn't space in cities for giant stadiums, so suburbs were played against major cities to build stadiums. For the Lions, that meant Pontiac, a large northern suburb of Detroit, built a domed stadium, called the Pontiac Silverdome, to pull the team from its namesake city proper, from 1974 up through the turn of the century. William Clay Ford Sr. had purchased the team in 1961, and was instrumental in this political play. He was the youngest son of Henry Ford's only son, Edsel, so fabulously wealthy from his grandfather's automobile manufacturing innovations, which the city of Detroit was built upon. William Clay Ford Sr. actually married the granddaughter of Harvey Firestone, another car-related tycoon, in an American version of royal lineages combining. The Lions were never better than mildly successful though, throughout this entire existence, and the Pontiac Silverdome was the scene of a lot of comical lowlights over the years (outside of Barry Sanders' time there). Like the RCA Dome in Indianapolis, the largest crowd ever at the Silverdome when it was abandoned and fell into disrepair was Wrestlemania III in 1987. And yet, by the end of the 20th century, Ford was able to go back to the city of Detroit, a quarter century after abandoning them, to help convince them of a downtown revitalization project built around a new stadium for the Lions. This was the next phase of American urban development we're currently living through, where after real estate plummeted due to white flight into the suburbs, which continued to sprawl further out, getting too far from the city core, and speculators began buying up urban properties, re-gentrifying them, and displacing whatever poor folks had survived decades of decline and neglect, either through rising rents, property taxes, or just outright evictions to make room for the petit bourgeoisie hipster class to return first, followed by normal bougie types, creating the illusion of revitalization of space, when in actuality it was all just a long land-based speculation game played out at too large to see easily scale. Detroit built Ford Field, right near and not long after building Comerica Park for the Tigers, with both stadiums not far north of the long-neglected downtown and Detroit River riverfront. If you only go downtown, the illusion of progress has been successful, but you best stick to the interstates in and out, to bypass the still abundant poverty in the less glamorous real estate zip codes of Detroit, many of which have become so abandoned and derelict over the decades that entire acres have been demolished and turned into vacant fields lacking city services but still having the gridlock of roads and crumbling sidewalks as reminders of what once was in those spaces. The revitalization has not happened for the football team though, with two of Ford's daughters taking over the team after his death in 2014. The Lions infamously went 0-16 in 2008, the first NFL club to ever do so, thus them still being on this list of non-winning clubs makes them feel like a favorite to go 0-17. But it doesn't seem fair to the fanbase, which includes Neil. And yet, here we are, watching a club spiral through cycles of incompetence, with the same ownership structure for well over half a century, and somehow being able to convince mark ass municipalities to build them giant ass new stadiums every 25 years - the NFL standard. Ford Field opened in 2002, so is a short five years away from that alarm clock starting to buzz with anticipation of something new. And in that time, what have the Lions done to deserve it, if we pretend the meritocracy is real, and what makes America unique? Nothing. But it won't matter. It's not a meritocracy, nor an actual sport, but a shell game for the extremely wealthy to embezzle profit from public funds and manufacture abstract wealth not unlike the way Sheila Ford Hampton's great-grandfather Henry took raw physical materials and built cars, altering the American landscape. But physical materials require physical workers, who at least share minimally in the growth of wealth; abstract manufacturing of wealth, which is the basis of America's prosperity currently, doesn't trickle down, because it doesn't require physical bodies to involve in the process. Thus the underclass grows, larger and hungrier, and one day that rumble of empty bellies is going to be too strong to be silenced when it angrily starts voicing its displeasure, no matter how many private prisons get built at the same time as Ford Fields, and Lucas Oil and MetLife Stadiums.

Jacksonville Jaguars (0-3; 12.67 point average margin of defeat) - The Jacksonville Jaguars are one of the NFL's youngest franchises, only awarded in 1995, to an ownership group led by Wayne Weaver, a shoe company owner whom the NFL had recruited as an owner before, hoping he'd set up a new one in St. Louis, to replace the Rams, who moved back to Los Angeles once their stadium in Missouri wasn't shiny enough anymore. Weaver felt St. Louis was a baseball town, and preferred to locate his franchise in football-mad SEC country, thus Jacksonville was an ideal location. In fact, the city of Jacksonville was location of an annual Florida/Georgia rivalry game, as well as The Gator Bowl, at the stadium named after the bowl game (now called, as dystopianly as possible, the TaxSlayer Gator Bowl). The Citrus Bowl, stadium and bowl game, located in Orlando, had offered a bigger payoff to the two universities for the annual rivalry game. So Jacksonville developed a plan for a major renovation and overhaul of the Gator Bowl Stadium, to keep the game. At first, Georgia didn't care, so the city expanded renovations even further, to get the two schools to agree to continuing the contract from 1997 through 2002. Additionally, the city got more public money involved to woo an NFL team to the city, which had no major sports franchises of that level. Weaver agreed, and the Jacksonville Jaguars were born. The team has played at this Jacksonville Municipal Stadium ever since, though it's not been known as that for most of that time, due to naming rights conventions in American stadiums. In fact, that in itself is a good slice of American economics, as rising cell phone company Alltel purchased naming rights from 1997 to 2006, spending their growing fortunes from a changing telecommunications world. The company actually no longer exists, dissolved by AT&T in 2016. EverBank, a financial services corporation which provides banking services, thus also mortgage loans, which are packaged together as investments as part of their investing services, took over naming rights in 2010. The packaging of home ownership loans as an investment product has directly contributed to previous housing bubble collapses, and is involved in America's currently out of control real estate market, just waiting for something to crash the entire thing. EverBank was based in Jacksonville, but had outgrown that regional footprint due to its investment strategy successes, thus got purchased by TIAA, which technically a non-profit corporation founded by Andrew Carnegie over a century ago, but is structured in such a way that it can own for-profit subsidiaries, which is basically what it does at this point, hence the acquisition of EverBank in 2017. Similarly, Wayne Weaver sold his stake in the NFL, after its value had been firmly established over the course of 15 years, to Shahid Khan in 2011. Khan was an immigrant from Pakistan, born to a middle class family there. Both Shahid's parents were educated, intelligent people, with separate professional careers. Shahid came to America at age 16 to go to college in Illinois. He got a job working in a automotive manufacturing company at the time, studying engineering, and becoming the engineering director for the company after graduating. He saved up money to start his own car parts business, ended up buying his old employer's company, as well as many others, eventually getting a stranglehold on being the primary manufacturer of bumpers for first Toyota trucks, then all Toyota models. So not unlike a later version of Henry Ford, Shahid Khan streamlined business practices to grow his company from $17 million back in the '80s to well nearly $9 billion in sales last year. It was this fortune he used to purchase the Jaguars in 2011, becoming the first ethnic minority to be an NFL owner. This tale fits the neoliberal vision of the American meritocracy, where one doesn't have to be white-appearing to achieve billionaire status and extreme wealth. Of course, this diverse capitalism still doesn't stretch the benefits of wealth across society, with there still being a large amount of underclass required for a single family to hoard so much wealth, in order to have so much laying around they can buy American football teams and English football clubs, and whatever else they want. Going back to wrestling again, for some fucked up reason, Shahid Khan's son - his Jim Irsay - is Tony Khan, who has executive positions with his father's football teams, both American and English, but also has the pet project of starting a wrestling promotion to compete with World Wrestling Entertainment as a brand. This is a much riskier move, because there aren't as many marks out there willing to sink money into a wrestling franchise, which has no expectation to hold its value like a football team would. Both Neil and myself circulated on various wrestling message boards in the earlier days of the internet, and Tony Khan actually apparently was also in those circles, so many of the smart marks who are too extremely online still feel an affinity for All Elite Wrestling, because they tell themselves Tony Khan is one of them. But he's the heir to a billionaire, not some dork from Anywhere, USA. Shahid Khan seems intent on letting his son have whatever he desires though, and Shahid also has the business sensibility to hold onto the Jaguars, just like he has his auto parts business, because he knows it will only grow in value. An NFL franchise is not like the WWE or a wrestling promotion, at least after the NWA was busted up by Vince McMahon in the '80s, because a football team, even if it loses money every season, grows in value, not unlike how the average American family with access to credit and wealth is taught to treat real estate investments. Someone will come along later in the chronological pyramid scheme to buy you out, and you'll get all that you put into it back, plus some.

New York Jets (0-3; 16.67 point average margin of defeat) - The Jets are relevant to that stability of the NFL, at least now, where things are leveled out at 32 teams, and as far as I know, there's no talk of expansion. A dying empire does not expand, it contracts, and we've yet to see that in the NFL. A random google search (since I am not "tapped into" sports radio, thank fucking god) suggest the NFL might expand by two teams, but this seems risky to me, as they've got a pretty good gig right now pitting upcoming cities against former NFL cities and current stadium deals with franchises relocating when necessary. Seems like somebody skips town every couple seasons now, and the places with two teams - Los Angeles and New York - would seem to be the most likely to lose a team should it ever come to it. But not the Jets, or the Giants, right? They've both been there forever. Well forever is not as long as it might seem, and the Jets, to some extent have always been secondary, having been formed as the Titans in 1959, but suffering near failure early on, only to be bought out by a syndicate led by Sonny Werblin, who rebranded the team as the Jets, spent big money to bring Joe Namath to the team, which triggered the Jets winning Super Bowl III, after the AFL/NFL merger. After that merger, and the Super Bowl ushering in the modern era of NFL, the idea of a team collapsing financially has been kicked aside, as other cities or ownership groups are always found to buy into the cartel. One of Werblin's partners, Leon Hess, was part of a group that fell out with Werblin, and Hess ended up using his gas station fortunes to become majority owner. Werblin helped launch the group that built Giants Stadium though, having suffered under the lease conditions of the Jets paying the Mets to play at Shea Stadium beginning in 1964. Even with Giants Stadium opening, the Jets stayed at Shea, until the 1984 season, when they jumped across the river to New Jersey, and shared the stadium of their metropolitan rivals. And when the same complex was the site of a new MetLife Stadium being built, the Jets remained roommates with the Giants, with at least the stadium not bearing the other team's name no more. Perhaps this second class status, which I'm sure Jets fans would argue with me about, might be enough to have the team thrown to the gods of metaphysics, to suffer an 0-17 season, plucking over the first domino towards contraction, and failure of the NFL. But in looking at these stadiums going up whenever some wealthy fucker decides he needs a new playground for his enormously-valued football team, it seems unlikely. The league's financial success is built upon fleecing local governments for as much as it can, and thus when the government of America begins to fail, the foundation for the NFL is quickly removed. Ultimately that's why the NFL won't continue to exist as America goes into decline, because it's entirely dependent upon the pyramid scam of eternal economic growth that all these people's abstract wealths are grown upon. Very little of it is real, though actual physical spaces are developed using government monies of one sort or another, to anchor development projects others jump onto, to spike real estate values in spaces where those values had been sunk previously. It's all a really brilliant way to remain exorbitantly wealthy if you're the great-granddaughter of Henry Ford, or the son of a billionaire like Tony Khan, or heirs to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical company fortunes like the two brothers who own the Jets are. And should it ever come to it, at least now, as the American Empire is propped up by a good cop/bad cop two-party system that desperately wants to maintain that empire, there's always some newer billionaire looking to take their wealth and put it into something that's seemingly going to hold its value, for a generation or two. What a fucking scam. I look forward to it all crashing - not the homes you and I pay a mortgage on, or rent; but the big crash, of these people who live in hidden secure locations and control giant swaths of land in the middle of populated areas where these stadiums are put, the Medieval Churches of our post-modern era of gluttonous consumption of things we have no control over. Gobble it up, you fucks who have your brains fattened with the nutritionless information of professional football minutiae.