The Eagles are the defending Super Bowl champs, which makes
them the obvious favorites in the NFC East, but the problem with that is this:
the Eagles, as representatives of Philadelphia, are bound to fuck it all up.
Maybe that’s not fair, and maybe the Eagles win changed an
entire city’s psychic energy, but I doubt it. That is a lot of history to have
to change. I mean, this is a city that was basically replaced twice over as the
preeminent American city: by New York, and then by Washington as the nation’s
capital. It’s very history is an inferiority complex. The reason It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is
such a good show is because it’s true. It’s the only real show that Philly
could produce. Sure, The Cosby Show worked
too but that’s because the universe already knew and understood that Bill Cosby
was a wild rape-fiend.
All of this is to say that there is something inherent in
the character of Philadelphia that causes everyone to fuck-up. Sure, they might
transcend it for one beautiful moment, but that just makes the tragedy of it
all the more acute. They’re like white trash who wins the lottery and then
blows it all on bullshit before ending up worse off than before, being sued by
multiple relatives, kids in jail for organizing bum fights or whatever bullshit
they think rich people are supposed to do, horrible, horrible.
This transcends the actual football talent of the Eagles,
which should be considerable. They have a burgeoning star at quarterback in
Carson Wentz, but Wentz also tore both his ACL and his LCL, which famously
opened the door for Nick Foles to win the Super Bowl. This seems like it should
be a luxury – two good quarterbacks – but it really isn’t.
Start with Wentz, who really only did it for ¾ of a season.
He’s not really proven in that sense, and who knows how he’s gonna come back
from that knee injury. Foles, meanwhile, is a career journeyman who was ready
to retire only a couple of years ago. Yeah, he won the Super Bowl, but that
seems like sort of a miracle exception rather than the rule. Relying on him for
a full season probably isn’t gonna work out. And then there’s this: Foles
winning the Super Bowl means that there will be controversy here no matter
what. There is no way to get this kind of psychic energy right. Wentz should be
the man, but is he really? Foles was the man for a day, but is he really the
man? Both believe they are, both have fans and surely players on the team and
in the coaching staff who think they are, and that sort of thing is what leads
to Mac, Dennis and Charlie bickering in the bar while Sweet Dee makes a fool of
herself and Frank gets caught importing Vietnamese hookers. It’s Always Sunny
indeed.
One more thing: no team has repeated as NFC East champion in
14 years. That’s pretty fucking crazy. The last team to do it was actually the
Eagles, which sounds like a good omen until you realize that team was the one
that ended with Donovan McNabb puking all over the field as they lost the Super
Bowl. Now that’s Philadelphia.
So, who will actually win the division if not the Eagles?
Well, that’s where things get tricky. The Eagles might still win this damn
thing by default. The Giants are fucked. Let’s just get that out of the way
immediately. They bottomed out last season in the sort of “let’s just burn this
thing to the ground and start over” season that teams have to go through every
now and then. It was a transition year, only the Giants insanely decided not to
actually transition and kept Eli Manning around instead of drafting a new
quarterback. This, uh, this won’t work. Not only is Eli shit from a butt now,
but he’ll forever represent the Giants of the past, and as long as he’s around,
the Giants will be stuck between two worlds, and in this purgatory there is
nothing but misery and despair.
The one saving grace for the Giants is that they drafted
Saquon Barkley, who I think is the Real Deal. He’s a physical freak who can do
things on the field that are ghostly reminders of, yes, I’m gonna say it, Barry
Sanders. Like Barry, he had games where he could never quite get going, but to
be honest, I’m gonna blame a lot of that on Penn State’s horrid offensive line.
I watched them enough times to know that it really wasn’t his fault. But, like
Barry, he also had games where it was clear that he was in another league, that
he belonged to a class of athlete that comes along once in a generation – if we’re
lucky.
That’s all well and good for the Giants, but here’s the
thing: today’s NFL isn’t really geared towards allowing a running back to
dominate like back in the day. It’s a passing league, and while Barkley is a
great receiver out of the backfield, his impact is limited simply by what the
NFL is now. The Giants are sort of like a dude who grows up in the country, say
Montana, where there is nothing but open roads for miles and miles. All his
life he’s dreamed of owning a Ferrari, of getting out on those roads and
blasting off at 220 mph, of transcending the limits this world and society puts
on him. He moves to the city, gets rich, and is finally in a position to buy
that Ferrari. He does, only now he lives in the cramped city and can’t really
drive it anywhere. His neighbors see it and go “Holy shit, that’s amazing!” but
all he can really do is pull it out and shine it up for them. Maybe he can
drive it to the corner store at 15 mph, but that’s about it and what’s the
point? That’s the Giants with Saquon Barkley. He’s a beautiful Ferrari meant
for a different place, a different age. He’s a tragedy and he hasn’t even
played a game.
The Redskins are an insipid franchise. All name controversies
aside – and I know you don’t want me to start Discoursing here – they’re owned
by a dude who’s little better than a sleazy used car-salesman, a caricature of
a rich dude who spends most of his time looking for ways to fuck over his own fans,
most famously illustrated by that time he sued an old lady over her season
tickets or whatever the fuck dumb reason it was. Dan Snyder has pissed away a
culture, an entire psychic destiny, and replaced it with his own sleazy
failure. Raven Mack, beloved founder emeritus of Armchair Linebacker, was
completely chased away from football by Snyder. My boy Paul had the same thing
happen. The Redskins are doomed as long as Dan Snyder owns the team.
They’re also changing quarterbacks this season. Out is Kirk
Cousins, who I have my own hate-boner for, owing largely to tribal reasons. In
is Alex Smith, formerly of the Chiefs, who I just said the other day is
underrated. But doesn’t this kind of feel like a lateral move? I mean, the only
real reason the Redskins traded Cousins is because they didn’t want to commit
to him long term. So, they turned around and picked up Alex Smith and then
committed to him long term. The only problem is that Smith is almost five years
older than Cousins, so unless the Redskins really, really hated Kirk Cousins – certainly
possible given my own feelings about the dude – this is a move that seems
puzzling. And even if Smith is better, it’s likely to only be fractionally,
hence the whole lateral move thing. And since the Redskins went 7-9 last year,
a lateral move isn’t exactly a good thing. Maybe they go 8-8 now, but so what?
And then there’s the Cowboys. My God, the Cowboys. I was
dreading writing about them – still am – because it’s really hard for me to
encapsulate the full terrordome of feelings I have about the Cowboys. I’ll try
anyway.
I have always hated the Cowboys. This is because I am a
decent human being buried beneath the degenerate surface – hence my charm. This
is because they represent a sort of America that is revolting to me, nakedly
greedy and repulsive, hidden beneath a clean-faced salesman’s smile. The Cowboys
are truly America’s Team in the sense that they have always been the team of the
hidden ugliness of America. I know I said the Raiders were the true America’s
Team, and I meant it, but to be honest, Las Vegas doesn’t really need the
Raiders because it already has a team: the Dallas Cowboys.
The Cowboys are – and always have been – the Las Vegas of
teams. They are a team of bright lights, luring people in with the promise and
aching memory of the American Dream. But it is a twisted and perverted form of the
American Dream. Beneath the bright lights and welcoming exterior, the glitz and
the glamor, is a sort of mean, naked greed, the team of an oil baron. Hell,
even their cheerleaders are basically just well-worn Vegas showgirls.
Even the team’s own history mirrors a sort of contemptible
version of American history. They began small, as underdogs, and quickly rose
to power and glory behind a sort of Puritan sociopathy embodied in the team’s
head-coach, the cold and repressed Tom Landry. That sort of Grant Wood American Gothic dude appealed to the “plain”,
“hardworking” and “clean” image that Americans long-loved to think about
themselves. But there is a sort of cold ruthlessness beneath all that, the sort
of clinical, almost viper-like way of viewing the world that is the true heart
of the American Dream – you take what you can, and you don’t stop taking until
you die, and you do it in a way that allows you to clothe it all in a sort of
self-righteous missionary zeal. That was Tom Landry and that was the Dallas
Cowboys as they became America’s Team.
It is an Americana that I find personally distasteful, ugly
and destructive, but eventually the American Dream itself became ragged, frayed
by reality, by the Truth that it is rotten and ugly inside. And so Tom Landry
gave way to Jimmy Johnson, a sort of slicker, more nakedly ambitious version of
America. He fit perfectly with the times. Once the Holy American Mission was exposed
for what it really was, the hucksters and the self-righteous, the hypocritical
holier-than-thou types simply dropped the mask and became Gordon Gecko, they
became Wall Street, and that was Jimmy Johnson. He was just nakedly ruthless,
cruel and greedy, and the Cowboys rose again in a sort of corrupted version of
the American Dream. It was always bound to end badly, and ugly, because without
that “clean” façade, you just had the naked truth, horrible and macabre. And
like Gordon Gecko, the need for the veneer caught up with Jimmy Johnson and he
was run out of town.
And who replaced him? Barry Switzer, a degenerate hillbilly,
corrupt in his own way, who rode the excess of the dying last burst of the
American Dream through the 90s, inhaling its fumes and careening without care
or understanding that things had gotten Too Fucked Up to further glory. But
good times don’t last forever, which should be the lesson of the Clintonian
era. Back then, we were just careening towards oblivion with a smile on our faces,
without a care, because we were America and America – and America’s Team – has to
live forever, right? Nobody cared that it had already been corrupted years earlier,
hell that it was born corrupt, and that over the years, the carefully crafted veneer,
the con that we played on ourselves forever and ever was stripped away piece by
piece until finally it all collapsed, weighed down by naked greed and a fatal
misunderstanding of the real thing that made it all great in the first place:
regular, hard-working people who were willing to believe the con because it
allowed them to dream something greater than themselves, allowed them to
imagine a world in which they too could be Tom Landry, rich and clean, strong
and powerful, righteous before God and the world. It was a con that said you
could have it all without sacrificing your basic decency, your human dignity.
But that’s just not real, at least not in the America that
we have collectively built for ourselves, and it’s not real for the Cowboys
either, who exist after The Fall as sort of a grotesque caricature of America
and themselves. Jerry Jones is the perfect man to own the Cowboys. He is grotesque,
a carnie’s version of a success, a slick manipulator who uses his own wealth,
his own oil money, which these days is almost literally blood money, to remain
in power. It is a gross cartoon of power, though, a poor man’s version of a rich
man, a stupid person’s version of a smart man, loud and crass, ruling through
naked fiat. Sound familiar?
The thing is that Jerry Jones doesn’t just own the Dallas
Cowboys. He owns the NFL. It is his league. He is the most powerful owner – and
thus the most powerful man – in the NFL. Roger Goodell is his useful idiot, an
instrument, a lever of power that Jones can pull without having to look Trumpian
himself. But just look at the NFL. Look at how obscenely gross it has become
over the years. Look at how it treats its own players, treats the fans, treats
everyone. It is a debased league run by con men, a Las Vegas of a league
designed with nothing other than taking your money in mind. It is a Las Vegas of
a league run by a Las Vegas of a man in a Las Vegas of a country. This is America
now. It is the country of Donald Trump, the country of Jerry Jones, the country
of the Dallas Cowboys. After all this time, they really are America’s Team.
Naturally, they’re also losers. They haven’t really won
anything in over twenty years – again, sound familiar? – despite all the
bellicose thundering and the shrill bleating which only serves to underscore
their own failure. Jerry Jones, for all his power, for all his bullshit
swagger, is a Failure. He fired Jimmy Johnson because he had to prove that it
was all about him, that he was the one who built the Cowboys. And he’s failed.
Jerry Jones ain’t shit, and nobody should be afraid of his old, hillbilly ass.
Fuck him.
Under Jason Garrett, who is little more than Jones’ boy, the
Cowboys have only had three winning seasons, only two playoff appearances, and
have won only one goddamn playoff game. Naturally, that win was the game
against the Lions – sigh – but even that travesty, in which the Lions were gangbanged
into a sort of feral stupor by the NFL’s secret police, AKA Jerry Jones’ secret
police, only highlights how pathetic and flimsy that single victory really was.
The Cowboys are a team of nothing, ruled by men of no worth, no account,
swaggering their way through the world as if they are supposed to matter. The
only problem is that no one really believes it anymore.
This season, the Cowboys are relying on Dak Prescott to prove
that he’s not just another flash-in-the-pan after spending over a decade
watching Tony Romo try to prove the same thing. Not Quite Good Enough is a
terrible phrase in the NFL, a painful phrase, and it will kill you. They’re
also hopeful that Ezekiel Elliott comes back and runs wild after being
suspended for being a piece of trash and beating the shit out of his girlfriend.
This is dark, but I suppose fitting for America’s Team in the Year of Our Lord
2018.
If they get both Prescott and Elliott rolling, then the
Cowboys will probably win the division. But it will be a hollow victory, owing
as much to the Eagles own psychic despair as anything else. And it will be a
victory that probably won’t mean anything given the Cowboys inability to do anything
at all in the playoffs since Troy Aikman could still read. In the end, the
Cowboys will be just good enough, just powerful enough, just rich enough to still
pretend. But you have to remember, pretending is all they have left. And
everyone knows it.
Final Judgment:
1. Cowboys 11-5
2. Eagles 10-6
3. Redskins 7-9
4. Giants 5-11
