AFC West Preview

Rather than doing a “best case”/”worst case” for the AFC West I’m gonna change it up and tell you why each team will win and why they won’t. These things happen here at Armchair Linebacker, which isn’t exactly a finely tuned race car. It’s more like a stolen rickshaw being driven by a junkie who was just kicked out of an opium den. Things frequently don’t make sense until they do, or they don’t and you go read something else or watch a Youtube vid of a dude opening packages of vintage action figures or whatever the fuck people do in this post-literate age, strange and terrible as it may be.

Shit. Anyway, I suppose I should actually talk about the AFC West, which is a division that’s almost impossible to really call this year. I know, I know, I just said the same thing about the AFC South, but you have to understand that, one, the AFC is a wretched ass of a conference, and two, I’m not any good at this, which begs the question why I’m doing it, but lol look at that junkie pull that rickshaw!

But, really, each team in the AFC West has legitimate reasons to think they can win (or at least semi-legitimate, okay fine, delusionally legitimate in the Raiders case, and also my spell-checker says that “delusionally” isn’t a word but we won’t crumble before the artless lies of that fascism) and also legitimate fears that they may fall completely apart and finish last and consigned to the depths of football hell. Hence the “why they’ll win”/”why they won’t” changeup I’m throwing you. That’s a baseball metaphor in a football blog because I’m just that brilliant.

The Raiders

Why They’ll Win: The Raiders are only a season removed from winning the AFC West and Derek Carr was at least on his way to being an elite quarterback before his inner David Carr, who you’ll all remember or maybe not as the former number one overall pick who was stuck in the spiritual morass of Houston and then slowly eaten to death by giant horseflies and also as Derek’s brother, and by that I mean David is Derek’s brother, not that Derek’s brother ate David like the giant horseflies and yeah, I could have been clearer about that but lol that rickshaw just crashed and now that junkie is pissing himself in the street and these things happen and I just hope that one chick who used to chide me about run-on sentences isn’t reading this.

Why They Won’t Win: No team in the NFL should have as powerful a spiritual and psychic energy as the Raiders. They are the team of Kenny Stabler, of “Just Win Baby”, of a million and one Spirit Warrior psychos channeling their inner Willie Young, and of a fanbase made up of biker degenerates and Mexican tow-truck drivers. They are the motherfucking Raiders and that should mean something. But Kenny Stabler is dead (at 69, naturally), they haven’t won baby in roughly a million years, the odd playoff appearance aside, all those Spirit Warrior psychos are being chased out of the NFL by Sheriff Goodell and his posse of gentrifiers (again, spellcheck is being a little bitch here, which proves that it too is a gentrifier) and that passionate fanbase has been jerked around to the point that they simply don’t give a shit anymore. It’s dark, dudes and lady dudes. It’s real dark.

But that’s what happens when your team is run for decades by a megalomaniacal literal vampire who moved the team to Los Angeles (this is where the spiritual rot began) and then back to Oakland because he was a selfish and capricious old man, which killed that degenerate psycho backbone of psychic energy. And that’s what happens when that vampire is finally staked in the heart, only his even more monstrous son, who is like some horrid hybrid of Donald Trump and a shit-tier Will Ferrell character, takes over and thinks he knows best. Now the team is on its way to Las Vegas, the most spiritually empty and profane place in the world, where no one will care because no one is actually from Vegas and those who are will just spend most of their time trying to con and destroy the Raiders players because that is what people from Vegas do to outsiders, even the wealthy and powerful, especially the wealthy and powerful. It is a blackhole of despair, built on greed and grift, a con of a city. That’s who the Raiders are now, that’s what the Raiders are now. And worse, what’s left of their fans know it by now. My boy and yours, the esteemed Harpo Garza, told me he doesn’t even give a shit anymore. They’ve killed Harpo, one of the Armchair Linebacker OG’s.

Of course, the few remaining Raiders diehards will tell you that it’ll all be different now that Jon Gruden is back, but lol come on man. This is a dude who hasn’t coached in a decade. I mean, at all. He’s spent that time being a dick on Monday Night Football. Shit, why not dig up Howard Cosell and name him coach? Also, and people forget this, Gruden’s reputation as a coaching genius is, uh, somewhat inflated. In 11 years as an NFL coach, his teams won 10 or more games only 4 times. Yes, he won a Super Bowl with the Buccaneers, but he did so after taking over a team already built and brought to the doorstep by Tony Dungy. Afterwards, he basically tanked the Bucs.

But Raiders fans don’t care about that. They’ll tell you that they remember that he was the guy who built the Raiders the last time they were any good, and yeah, maybe. But even then, he only had two winning seasons with the Raiders, and also, that was almost 20 years ago now, which in NFL terms is about the same as having coached 200 years ago.

This is a desperate and terrible gamble, which is fitting given the whole Las Vegas thing. Mark David is a dude on his final throw at 4AM, who’s lost the family fortune, trying to win it all back at once. He’s a literal Mark. He gave Gruden a monster contract, gave him dictatorial powers, and this either works (it won’t) or Mark Davis is going to be sitting in some dark back room having his thumbs broken with a hammer.

The Raiders are a dead team, spiritually and in every other way. Gruden is just robbing them blind before the buzzards in Vegas can pick their corpse clean in the desert. There are no fairy tale endings here, no happy redemption stories. The Raiders were always the true America’s Team, no matter what the soulless corporate whores in Dallas say, and so it’s fitting that they die along with the last ragged and pathetic gasps of the American Dream.

Kansas City Chiefs

Why They’ll Win: The Chiefs are the defending AFC West champs, and they have a ton of young, badass weapons on offense like Tyreek Hill, Kareem Hunt and Travis Kelce. If new quarterback Patrick Mahomes is ready, they should win it again. Mahomes has a monster arm, and with Eric Berry returning from injury on defense, the Chiefs are supposed to be even better than before.

Why They Won’t Win: “Supposed to” is one of the most dangerous phrases in the English language, especially in a sporting context. It is where False Hopes are born and with them the Failure Demons who hook themselves like parasites to the brand new baby. Trust me, I’m a Lions fan. I understand these things.

Mahomes replaces Alex Smith at quarterback, but the truth is that Alex Smith has always been really underrated. Yes, he was a bust when he first entered the league, but he basically taught himself how to be a good quarterback, which is a mental game as much – if not more than – a physical one. He mastered the mental part of it and learned how play the position instead of trying to brute-force it like some young, dumb big-armed kid, which is what Mahomes is. Smith’s been to back-to-back Pro Bowls and led the Chiefs to the playoffs 4 of the last 5 seasons. That is not a dude you just easily replace.

Basically, in sex terms (look, you know what you’re getting here, don’t complain), Smith is that veteran dude who might not be the most physically gifted but who has learned how to work with what he’s got. He knows how to get you off, knows how to make it last, knows how to play the fucking game (literally), and in the end, isn’t that the point? Meanwhile, Mahomes is the rocked-up young dude who pulls just based on his look and then gets you home and ends up dribbling all over your thigh before anything even really gets going. He doesn’t know how to use what he’s got yet and you’re just gonna end up frustrated while he takes the long uber ride home.

And really, the Smith vs. Mahomes thing is what this whole thing boils down to for the Chiefs. I could talk about Eric Berry or the offensive weapons, but in the NFL if you don’t have a quarterback you don’t have jack-shit. It doesn’t matter if Berry can return at 100%, which he probably won’t because Achilles tears are the secret worst injuries, and it doesn’t matter if Hill and Hunt are for real if Mahomes is out there dribbling all over thighs and then mumbling an apology.

Denver Broncos

Why They’ll Win: The Broncos have a new quarterback in Case Keenum, who improbably led the Vikings to the NFC Championship Game last season, and they still have Von Miller on defense. There is just enough residual spiritually and psychic energy from the last time they were good lingering around. And in an open division in which every team has questions, if they can stabilize the quarterback position, they can steal this one.

Why They Won’t Win: John Elway is on the verge of ruining this thing completely. He’s basically like almost every other superstar-turned-exec (Michael Jordan, Isiah Thomas, etc.) who got the job simply because he was so good as a player that he must know how to build a team, right? Only he finds himself in over his head, reveals that his innate talent is an instinctive physical one and not a deliberative mental one, and everything falls apart like that junkie who crashes the rickshaw cart.

The Broncos have gotten progressively worse and worse, Elway hasn’t been able to find a quarterback, and meanwhile, the defense, who really carried the team when they were winning, has become more and more ordinary. Von Miller isn’t really “Von Miller” anymore, and this is how 12-4 becomes 9-7 becomes 5-11 becomes whatever shitass record the Broncos have this season.

Keenum did a good job for the Vikings last season, but you have to remember, this is a dude who’s been a journeyman his whole career. Last season was the aberration, not the rule, and so counting on him to resurrect things and save Elway’s reputation is perhaps maybe dumb as fuck. I’m not saying that it can’t happen, just that it probably won’t.

I wish I had more to say here, something clever perhaps, but really, it just comes down to whether they get Career Renaissance Keenum or Journeyman Keenum. One gives them a chance to win a division in flux, the other will get them last place.

San Diego Chargers

Why They’ll Win: In a league full of questions and turmoil, the Chargers have one important thing: Philip Rivers. I know, I know, holding Rivers up as a pinnacle of stability seems lol as fuck, but Rivers has been consistently good for more than a decade now. No, he hasn’t been the A+ dude he thinks of himself as, and yes, he’s still a tremendous dick, but what he has been is a solid B to B+ dude and let’s face it, being a tremendous dick is not exactly a disqualifying trait for an NFL quarterback. Lions fans will absolutely hate me for this, but he is basically the AFC version of Matthew Stafford, only he’s been doing it longer.

The sad reality is that is not a quarterback who is going to lead you to the promised land all by himself like a Tom Brady or an Aaron Rodgers. And relax, you jackals, Stafford could still up his game and get there. Rivers, though, won’t. He is what he is, and worse, he’s on the downside of his career. But, this is the “Why They’ll Win” section, and in a division full of more questions than answers, he’s the one safe bet. If Mahomes is dribbling on thighs and Keenum goes back to being, well, Case Keenum, while the Raiders dig their hole in the desert, then Rivers and the Chargers are going to win by default. They’re the team with the least amount of questions, and sometimes that’s all it comes down to.

They also have Joey Bosa and Melvin Ingram to rush the quarterback. Both are Pro Bowlers, and along with Casey Hayward at cornerback, give the Chargers a great foundation on defense. Take them and take Rivers being Rivers and the Chargers probably have enough to steal the AFC West.

Why They Won’t Win: Rivers is a huge dick, and “winner” is not exactly the word people would use to describe him. Even if he can lead the Chargers to an almost flukish division title, that’s about as far as they’re gonna get with him.

Meanwhile, the Chargers have been hit hard by injuries already and the goddamn season hasn’t even started. Hunter Henry, the heir to now-retired Antonio Gates, is out for the season and Jason Verrett, Casey Hayward’s CB partner, is out now too. This is not how you want to start things.

The Chargers also have maybe the NFL’s worst home-field advantage. No one cares about them in Los Angeles. I mean, nobody in Los Angeles really cares about anything, but they almost go out of their way not to care about the Chargers. This creates two problems: the NFL is so competitive that any sort of disadvantage could cripple you, and two, it creates a sort of spiritual and psychic energy void for the Chargers and you know how I feel about that. Am I a ridiculous idiot? Yes, of course. But you’re the one reading this so what does that make you?

Shit, now I’m attacking you for no reason, so this is probably a good place to stop.

FINAL JUDGMENT:

1. Chargers 10-6

2. Chiefs 9-7

3. Broncos 6-10

4. Raiders A Howling, a Mad Void of the Soul filled only by its own Emptiness and the Failed Dreams of the Damned

Loving the Bad Guy

The NFL needs villains. It always has. Those Raiders teams of the ‘70s are as big a part of the fabric of the NFL’s identity as any other great team, from that era or any other. They were mythic biker renegades from the grungy part of Valhalla, sent to terrorize mortals and pistol whip squares. They were glorious, and they perfectly captured an era – dirty, long hairs with drunken love in their hearts and iron hate at the end of their fists. They were the ‘70s in all its savage, ugly, stinking beauty – decaying monsters dying even as they fought like hell to live for just one more frenetic, glorious second, human supernovae at the heart of a cultural supernova.

I’m starting to get carried away here. The point is that the NFL needs villains almost more than it needs heroes, and if you can’t tell by my rapturous intro, to some people - a lot of people – those villains are actually the heroes of the story. After all, the Cowboys were America’s team. But those Raiders were America’s team. I won’t explain what that means because you either understand completely what I’m saying, or you don’t and not even God can help you sort it out.

These days, the heroes and villains of the NFL are more sordid than ever. And that’s only all too appropriate given the strange and terrible times in which we live. No one knows who’s evil and who’s good until someone gets tossed out of an elevator unconscious. Everything is magnified and under the magnifying glass everything gets distorted, myths are laid bare and all we’re left with are bullshit narratives. It’s easy to vilify someone like Ray Rice, but it gets harder when someone like Ndamukong Suh gets busted by the Great Eye In The Sky stomping – or gently stepping, depending on your perspective and rooting interests – on a fallen Golden Boy.

Everything becomes slippery then, and that word – perspective – becomes all that matters, and when that happens, nothing really matters. You pick your sides based on what you want to believe, and really, nothing could be more fitting in this twitter age of deep tribalism and outrage for outrage’s sake than that.

But it also reinforces that weird NFL world in which heroes are villains and villains are heroes and nobody really knows what the hell is going on. That is when the NFL is both at its best and its nauseatingly worst. The noise gets turned up, Joe Buck starts hooting like a chimp on angel dust, and the only thing you’re left to conclude is that everyone is secretly an asshole or a monster, and in that decayed wasteland of the human condition, you just pick whichever monster you like best and hope he doesn’t embarrass you by maiming a loved one or, you know, deflating footballs like a coward.

And that brings us to the strange case of the New England Patriots, who exist in that sort of zombie purgatory between good and evil. Everyone hates them, and why not? They do scandalous shit that isn’t even cool, they win all the goddamn time and they have a quarterback who seems like some sort of golden ice king, untouchable and terrible, both easily mockable and somehow infallible. And the whole thing is led by some ogre in sack-cloth who holds everyone in the world, from the media to the fans to his players to his own family, in open contempt. It is a weird situation and I understand why people don’t like it. The Patriots are easy to hate, and so most people do the easy thing and hate them.

But the Patriots are fascinating to me, and I don’t hate them. I am totally biased here, largely because I am a huge Michigan dude and thus for tribal reasons, Tom Brady is my guy. That is the easy take, and you’re not wrong. But where everyone else sees a model-boning, Uggs-wearing, frost-prince, I see a dude with an almost sociopathic need to win, a heart of fire beneath the frozen surface that never stops beating, burning him up from within and making him into a psychotic jackass on the field. But he’s the good kind of psychotic jackass, I think, the kind that wins and the kind that wins simply because he has to, because he can’t not. I can respect a man like that even if nobody else does. I get it, I do. He is not an easy man to love because he looks like everything you’re supposed to hate these days and he’d rather chill in a wine bar in Aspen than hang out at Lowe’s with Peyton Manning.

But he’s also a dude who wins and keeps on winning even though the Patriots seem less and less talented every year. Every year seems like the End for the Patriots, doesn’t it? Everyone licks their chops, sneers and waits for Brady to meltdown or get his knees chopped off by some crusader of justice, but it never happens, and every year that he survives, that he thrives, it seems like he gets crankier on the field, both his sneer and the fans’ sneer grows and everyone hates him even more. But I can appreciate and respect a man like that, a man whose sneer says “Fuck you, come at me, bros . . . you will miss.”

And everyone does miss and Tom Brady goes to another Super Bowl. I think I like him the more people hate him, tribalism aside, probably because I’m a contrarian, but also because people are dumb. Tom Brady is great because he wants this shit more than you’ve wanted anything in your lives. I see him and I see those Raiders teams of the 70s. Beneath all the noise, beneath the biker gang mystique, beneath the Uggs and Giseles, there is an almost psychotic need to win, and for me, that trumps everything else. Because they don’t care whether you love them or hate them. You are beneath them, and they are just there to win. Get with the program or get the fuck out of the way.

But it’s not just Brady. It’s also Bill Belichick. Together, they are what make the Patriots truly fascinating, fitting villains for our times. Brady is the golden, smooth exterior, the rich veneer hiding a decaying interior, dragging the Patriots to glory even while the rest of the team struggles to rise above the barest mediocrity, living off the reputation of those that came before, depending on Brady to carry them through one more game, one more season. And Belichick is the ugly, Dick Cheneyish ogre behind the scenes, keeping things going with ruthless and grim precision. He is a monster, a human being utterly without redemption, shuffling along in his hobo sweatshirts, scowling at everyone and everything, from the media to the sun and the moon and down to his own shriveled heart. He is easy to hate, and he doesn’t give a fuck.

There is something admirable in that, though, isn’t there? It’s easy to hate people who don’t care if you hate them. It’s easy, but who cares? There is no worth in despising people who actively ask for it.

Compare that to someone like Peyton Manning, a dude who desperately wants to be seen as both a winner and a good guy, but whose true colors come out whenever he fails. He’ll throw anyone and everyone under the boss – remember his “our liquored up kicker” line when he was with the Colts? – and then he’ll go right back to shaking hands and doing his middle-manager at Lowe’s routine that the Nascar masses lap right up. That is the sort of dude who is easy for me to hate.

And then you have dudes like Ndamukong Suh, who end up neither deserving my hate nor my love, because they become almost tragic figures, deserving something closer to pity. They can’t decide whether they want to embrace being the hero or the villain. Suh seems like he wants to embrace his villainous nature, but he can’t let himself truly run with it, and so he sort of vascillates between that “Fuck you, so what?” attitude and the “I’m really a good guy, I swear…” attitude, and the result is a sort of mushy incompetence, an ass-kicker who never really embraces the “Win or Die” attitude that is so essential to becoming a truly successful NFL villain.

I’ll take dudes like Brady and Belichick, who understand they are the villains, but don’t give a fuck. That’s what those old Raiders teams used to do, and that’s what these Patriots do.

I know that comparison sounds ridiculous, but think about it. The Raiders used to do all manner of petty shit to gain an edge – remember Fred Biletnikoff’s stickum? – and that’s what the Patriots under Belichick have done.

The Raiders used to grease their jerseys. They had bowls full of amphetamines in the locker room. Their trainer shot dudes up with adrenaline extracted from the glands of corpses (!!!) They did whatever they had to win, no matter how petty or crazy. Sound familiar?

Sure, Belichick isn’t shooting his dudes up with corpse adrenaline (probably not, anyway) but he will deploy spies, he will deflate some footballs. They are schemes that seem almost hilariously incompetent, almost Austin Powersish in their parody of super-villainy, and who knows if they actually help? But Belichick doesn’t give a fuck. He does it anyway because even if there is only a .00001% chance that they help him, it’s worth it to him. And why not? After all, he doesn’t give a shit if he gets caught. The NFL will slap the Patriots with some symbolic penalty, Belichick will shrug and shuffle back to his lab to cook up something heinous with Brady. They just don’t care. Either what the NFL thinks or what you, the fan, thinks.

I, for one, actually find that refreshing. The NFL sucks. It is a horrible organization and anyone who tells it to fuck off is okay by me. The enemy of my enemy and all that. And most fans are drooling idiots, obsessed with horse’s ass talk-radio bullshit. Always remember, the Dallas Cowboys are the most popular team in all the land. Fuck what the fans think.

The Patriots are cheating jerks, but they own that shit. All they want to do is win. Everything else is just noise, and I’m good with anyone who understands that. That’s what those old Raiders teams knew, and that’s what Brady and Belichick’s Patriots know. That’s why I’ll be rooting for the Patriots in yet another Super Bowl and why, damn it, I’ll say it . . . I’m a Patriots fan. Fuck you.