NFL Playoff Quarterback Power Rankings

My initial idea for this week was to rank the teams based on spiritual energies or whatever and by “my idea” I mean I got it from friend of the blog @LowFashionLover. The only problem, I decided, is that it would just be a rehash of my gibberish from the last 4 months or whatever. I mean, this is basically what I did every week with the Gambling For Sanity shit, so I decided I’d do something else instead of explain why the Cowboys are rotten soul ass for the 20^th time.

And lo, my playoff quarterback power rankings were born. These are based on a combination of factors – how good they were this season, how good they’ve been over their career, what they’ve won, what they’ve lost, and of course, the intangible Spirit Warrior quality which isn’t something I just made up but a vital component – perhaps the vital component – in any competitive endeavor or honest life.

12. Lamar Jackson - Baltimore

I assume Lamar Jackson is gonna start for Baltimore since Joe Flacco has finally been drowned in the Baltimore harbor or wherever the hell he fucked off to, and that’s a good thing for Baltimore since their offense only started to click with Jackson and his legs. The problem is, at least right now, there’s not much more to Jackson than those legs, and baby, that’s a hard way to win in the playoffs.

Of course, Lamar Jackson has never done anything either. Sure, he won the Heisman at Louisville, but we’re talking Advanced Concussion Ball here. One bad hit, one twist of the leg by some dirty asshole at the bottom of a pile, and Lamar Jackson is basically useless. So it’s the bottom of the rankings for him. At least for now. I like the dude, and I think he has Spirit Warrior potential, but the world is not fair, especially to Potential Spirit Warriors, who it enjoys snuffing out before they can realize that potential. I mean, shit, just look at me.

11. Dak Prescott – Dallas

Dak Prescott was sort of a sensation as a rookie, but no one has really liked him since. Sure, the Cowboys are back in the playoffs, but that has more to do with the NFL East collapsing en masse than anything the Cowboys did, and more specifically, anything that Prescott did. If Alex Smith had stayed healthy and The Eagles didn’t Philadelphia all over the fuckin’ place, the Cowboys would have finished third and everyone would want Dak kicked out of town. Jerry Jones would have had him buried in an oilfield or some shit or sold into slavery to some rubber tree plantation down in Brazil or Indonesia. They still do that shit, and you best believe Jerry Jones is involved somehow.

Anyway, that’s obviously a rotten spiritual situation, and it’s hard to see Dak Prescott overcoming any of that. Of course, there’s also the fact that the motherfucker is named Dak, which sounds like some futuristic lacrosse player. Just rotten energy all around for this dude. If he didn’t have Ezekiel Elliott to hand off to every game, this shit would get really dark really fast. Some would say that having to rely on a violent lady beater to go through life is already really dark, but shit, welcome to the NFL.

10. Mitchell Trubisky – Chicago

I don’t trust Mitch aka QB10 yet, and more importantly, I know that Bears fans don’t trust him. This is as much because of their woeful history at quarterback as it is anything to do with him personally, but those are the psychic environs he finds himself in. It’s not his fault that the Bears quarterback list reads Jim McMahon and then, uh, Rex Grossman? Kyle Orton? Erik Kramer? Fuck, man. Fuck!

Trubisky has made obvious progress so far, and probably just had the best Bears quarterback season in forever, but again, that’s more about the Bears than him. He is a number one overall pick, so the talent is there, but how the fuck are you gonna back a BEARS QUARTERBACK in the playoffs, especially one who has never won a goddamn thing? There are probably better years ahead for Trubisky, but for now, this dude is still out of his element.

9. Whoever the Fuck the Eagles QB Is

I’m still not sure if the Eagles are gonna go with wunderkind-turned-battery throwing target Carson Wentz, or the dude who won the Super Bowl last year, Nick Foles. This is partly because the Eagles don’t seem to know themselves, and partly because I’m not bothering to find out. Obviously, that means that this isn’t exactly an ideal situation.

Wentz is good, or at least should be good, but Eagles fans seem to be blaming too much of the team’s problems on him, which is probably mostly because Eagles fans are by and large irrational ogres. But this is how a dude’s spiritual energy gets ruined, especially a dude who spent his college years playing second tier ball in North Dakota. This motherfucker is like the farm stud with a big dick who gets off the bus all wide eyed and then gets fucked, both literally and spiritually, into oblivion by the big city pimps. He’s still got a hard dick right now, and he’s off buying muscle cars and making records with Reed Rothchild, but he’s only one year away from turning tricks in a parking lot for hateful Eagles fans that just want to jump him and leave him laying in his own blood to cover for their own self-loathing.

Nick Foles, on the other hand, has a mediocre dick, he’s spent most of his career as the pizza boy in fuck scenes who watches wide eyed as the real stars get the job done, and no one really expected much from him. But then Wentz couldn’t get it up, Foles had to step in, and shocked everyone by fucking good enough to win an AVN award last year.

That means he’s always gonna be hovering just over Wentz’s shoulder, which is not a good thing for Wentz’s spiritual energy or for the Eagles, for that matter. It may seem like a good thing, to have a backup who won the fucking Super Bowl, but it really isn’t. It just meant that the pressure was on Wentz to be fucking perfect this season, and when he wasn’t, Eagles fans tore him apart. They either had to ride with Wentz or Foles, and they chose neither and it’s fucked them.

The problem with turning to Foles is that while he may be the stud for the day, he still just has a mediocre dick. He just managed to have the fuck of his life at the right time. That’s all. Now when he can’t get it up or ends up splooging all over himself, or dribbling on a teammate’s thigh as they think “What the fuck?” Eagles fans are gonna turn on his ass HARD. And then what do they have? A small-dicked loser and a broken big dick that can’t get hard anymore. That’s life in the Big City, I guess. The only reason they’re this high on the list is because Wentz still does have a big dick and because of what happened with Foles last season. 9^th is a position of respect in this case.

8. Jared Goff – Rams

I like Jared Goff. He’s obviously good, and by this point on the list, they’re all pretty good. The problem is that I don’t know if you can trust him. There is just something missing, something indefinable, something ineffable (fuck you, Alex.) I don’t know what it is.

He’s never won anything, obviously, so it’s hard to give him any credit spiritually, and while he’s been good, he hasn’t been great. This is completely unfair, really. I just looked at his numbers again and they’re great, okay? But the thing is, is that I don’t know how much of that is him and how much of it is the Rams and Sean McVay. It feels like this is a system type thing more than a quarterback transcending himself and his team to be great. This doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense at all. I understand this. This is utter gibberish. But I feel like if you swapped Goff with, say, Matthew Stafford, you’d get the same result.

Now this is where we start arguing about Stafford, but I don’t want to do that. From one angle, that should speak well for Goff. I mean, Matthew Stafford is pretty good, right? But from another angle, Stafford is who he is, a talented dude who’s never won a goddamn thing. BUT THAT’S BECAUSE OF HIS TEAM, you scream at me, and that’s sort of the point. I feel like Goff might be similar. He’s a good quarterback, but he’s not a quarterback who’s capable of transcending his team. Just like Stafford. So, yeah, Stafford would do well in Los Angeles while Goff would lose with the Lions. That means they are good enough quarterbacks to win with, but not so good that they can carry you over the hump like, say, Brady or Russell Wilson.

Then again, maybe Goff is that guy. Who knows? That’s sort of the point. We don’t know right now, and we won’t know until he does the damn thing. Is this fair? No. Is it ridiculous? Yes. Will I look like an idiot when this is all said and done? Probably. But welcome to Armchair Linebacker.

7. DeShaun Watson – Houston

Wait . . . what? DeShaun Watson ahead of Goff? Yes. I know this probably doesn’t make sense to you, but here’s my rationale: DeShaun Watson won a Heisman and a national championship in college. The dude has done it before. Sure, not on this level, but being a winner is something that travels. That is good spiritual energy.

And, I mean, if you look at the numbers, he’s basically in Goff’s league there too. But he also runs well, and is a weapon that way. I’m ready to say that Watson is a better quarterback by just about any metric.

The problem, of course, is that he doesn’t have a huge body of work, an entire career to fall back on, to make people confident that he’s truly The Man. That’s really the only thing keeping him from being higher on this list. (And don’t get me started on people who think “higher” means like 9^th or 10^th instead of 4^th or 5^th, which they would call “lower.” They do this all the time when it comes to seeding in the NCAA tournament and it drives me fucking nuts. The argument is that, well, 10 is higher than 7 so should be called a “higher” seed or ranking. This is fucking preposterous. It should be called a “lower” seed or ranking because that is what the number signifies. In this case and in seeding cases, 10 is lower than 7. This shouldn’t be hard for people, but it is and it makes me SEETHE.) Anyway… uh, yeah. That’s it for this dude.

6. Philip Rivers – Chargers

Philip Rivers has had a long and productive career, and when it’s over, he’ll probably go down as being underrated. The problem with Ol’ Phil, of course, is that he’s a colossal asshole and a dude who always blows it in the end. I’ve compared him more than once to Matthew Stafford, and… yeah, that still holds true. Go back and read what I wrote in the Jared Goff section. That all applies to Rivers. The difference is that Rivers has a fucking decade and a half on Goff, and has proven over and over again that he is an upper tier NFL quarterback. Conversely, he’s also proven that he’s exactly what I fear both Stafford and Goff are – good, but not good enough.

In one respect, I feel like I should swap him and Goff, because Goff at least has a chance to prove me wrong. But in another respect, I feel like Rivers maybe deserves the benefit of the doubt. I mean, for all the shit I’ve talked about him, for as big an asshole as he is, you just can’t kill this fucker. He never goes away. And if he manages to win it all this year, all of that noise changes for him. I mean, I don’t think it will, but who’s to say?

If Jared Goff has Philip Rivers’ career, he should be ecstatic. But he should also be disappointed. This is a weird as fuck dynamic, but that’s sports, baby. In the end, I’m sticking Rivers here because it feels wrong to put him behind the two young dudes, but there’s no way that you can put him any higher than this, right? This is who he is. He’s number 6. That is Philip Rivers and it always will be. Jared Goff is number 8 right now. He has a chance to be number 1 someday, but probably not today.

5. Andrew Luck

This is probably too high. Fuck, it’s almost certainly too high, but here’s the thing: everyone kind of shit on Andrew Luck and wrote him off before this season. Some people even said he was finished, his career over due to injury. He responded by dragging the Colts to the playoffs and throwing for over 4,500 yards, with 39 touchdowns. That is a hell of an answer, and gives him some spiritual credibility that the dudes behind him just can’t match.

Maybe he is Rivers. I don’t know. But his career kind of hits the sweet spot between Rivers and Goff in that he’s done it more times than Goff, but hasn’t been ghettoized like Rivers. There’s also this: the Colts are not a good team. Not at all. Yet here they are, in the playoffs. If you swapped Goff with Luck, what would it look like? Luck would almost certainly be the golden boy as he led the Rams to the same sort of season they had this year, maybe even better. While Goff and the Colts probably would have a losing record. That’s my take and I’m sticking to it.

Sure, Luck may sound like Andre the Giant is fucking his throat every time he talks, and sure, he can’t grow facial hair without looking like he posts on Reddit, but you can’t deny that this dude rose up this season and proved something. People like to shit on him for never really earning all the slobbering praise he gets, but fuck it, I think he’s the real deal. He’s just on a shitty team, that’s all. The difference? He can actually transcend his team’s shittiness to drag them to the playoffs. Not many dudes can do that.

4. Drew Brees

Brees probably deserves to be a little higher, but fuck him. There is something spiritually rotten about him. People just never really notice because it’s balanced out by the spiritual richness of New Orleans. But the dude is a shit-smeared torture advocate. Torture advocates are dudes who live their lives in fear. They are cowards. So, yes, Drew Brees is a coward. He’s also a million years old.

Still, I’m not gonna deny that the dude is one of the best quarterbacks ever. He’s thrown for a million yards – check that, he’s thrown for the most yards in NFL history. That’s right. EVER. He’s also won a Super Bowl. The dude is a legend. I’m not gonna deny any of that. That should make him, at worst, second on this list. But I’ll say it again: fuck him.

There’s also this: the Saints have always been pretty inconsistent under Brees. They’ve had 5 losing seasons, 6 in which they never got above .500, and I’m gonna put it out there: it’s because Drew Brees is a spiritually bereft coward. Fuck him.

3. Russell Wilson – Seattle

I said before the season that Russell Wilson was a top 4 quarterback in the NFL. I also said that the Seahawks would finally collapse because they gutted their team and left Wilson hanging. All he did was lead them back to the playoffs. That shows me something. That shows me something huge.

He’s never been a huge OMG STATS guy, but his numbers are always good enough, he’s won a Super Bowl, should have won another if not for the most LOL WHAT ARE THEY DOING plays in sports history, and, again, he’s proven that he’s one of those extremely rare dude who can carry a shitty team all the way with him. I have nothing else to say here.

2. Patrick Mahomes – Kansas City

The dude just had a wild fucking year. 50 touchdowns. I mean, goddamn. He’s the MVP. He’s The Man. One problem: as a great man once said, to be The Man, you’ve gotta beat The Man WHOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

1. Tom Brady – New England

And Tom Brady is indisputably The Man.

For all the fun I’ve had with Brady this season, for all the American Pyscho histrionics, you can’t deny the dude. It’s easy to say that he’s spiritually corrupt because of all the obvious affectations and sociopath ridiculousness, but this dude is a wild OG Warrior deep at heart. He is that one in a million motherfucker who will sacrifice everything, including basic decency, to win. This is a dude who would fuck over his own baby to win a game of Old Maid. This motherfucker is a menace, a danger to society, but he is also who I would pick to lead Earth against an alien invasion.

You also have to remember this: the Patriots and Chiefs already played once this season. Who won? Brady and the Patriots. That’s right. If you come at the king, you best not miss, son. Until Mahomes can overthrow Brady, he can’t be number one on this list. Hell, even if he does do it, he’s probably still not number one. This is because Tom Brady is number one all time. He’s the Greatest.

Of course, The Greatest is also at an age where he’s starting to have to synthesize virgin blood in a lab in order to keep going without crumbling into dust in the light and being dragged shrieking to the hell that surely awaits him. Everything ends. Everything dies. And Tom Brady can see The End. The motherfucker can feel it. When he goes, and he’ll go soon, it will be an epic disaster, a noisy and dishonorable end. This is not a dude who will die quietly on his throne. This is a dude who will die raving incoherently covered in his own shit because he can’t control his bowels anymore while his servants loot the castle and his kingdom disintegrates into unholy ruin. It will be a goddamn scene, an utter fiasco that will leave all of New England dead, a ruined crater of human filth, their ghostly shrieks and wails reaching to the heavens, ignored by a disgusted god who will send them all to the gnarliest depths of hell.

That’s all coming for Tom Brady. But the thing is, is that he knows that. He feels it. And that’s just gonna make him even crazier and harder to beat. He’s gonna hang on with everything he’s got, and no motherfucker named Pat is gonna take that from him while he still has his wits, while he’s still Tom Fucking Brady. The man is a Force unto Himself, a spirit that defies things like morality, unbound by human measures of decency. He will absolutely kill Patrick Mahomes entire family if he feels threatened and he’ll get away with it too. Who’s gonna stop him? You with your petty humanity? No. The only thing that will stop Tom Brady is the inexorable erosion of Time itself, its humbling and dispassionate march which trods us all down, turning humanity into little more than a barren desert, unseen by the boots that keep marching, marching, marching . . . to Time, Tom Brady is nothing, the gods are nothing. To Time, even itself is nothing, an utter irrelevance, and in the end, it will crush itself too and we will all disappear, our very dust, our souls, into a black hole, and none of this will have mattered or have even happened. The universe is fucking wild. But the last voice to shriek in defiance as it bends and twists and is disintegrated by Time and that black hole will belong to Tom Brady. And that’s why he’s the Greatest. Now and Forever.

Where The Hell Are We? Part 7: Quarterbacks

 (I’ve decided to do a pre-draft series taking a look at the Lions position by position while I’m still upbeat and motivated and before being a Lions fan leaves me feeling depressed and incapable of stringing words together besides “fuck” and “this”. Each section will take a brief (lol sure) look at the team’s history at the position/notable players/etc., a look at more recent years and, finally, the situation as it stands today on the eve of the draft. I’ll do something like two a week, starting with the defensive line and ending with quarterback. And lo and behold, we've arrived today at quarterback.. Consider this a quasi-draft preview/history lesson/idiot gibberish. Cool? Cool.)

Ancient History Because I Believe in Psychic Energies and Dear God Especially Here: I can barely even handle writing this section because . . . JESUS CHRIST! The story of the Detroit Lions at quarterback is the story of the franchise itself, just full of failed hopes and misery and failure demons and every other kind of demon in hell, just constantly gnawing at our souls, punishing us for something truly heinous we must have done in another life. Maybe Lions fans are the collective souls of the entire Nazi party reincarnated. Who knows? You could be Hitler.

Anyway, shit, we’ve already veered into wild ranting and idiot gibberish, so clearly this is going to go well. It all starts, of course, with Bobby Layne. If you just read that in the voice of Vincent Price, I don’t blame you because there’s no bigger spectral ghoul in our absurd history than Bobby Layne.

It has nothing to do with Bobby Layne as a player. Well it does, and it doesn’t. It does because he’s the one Hall of Fame quarterback we have in our history, the leader of those 1950s teams that stand as the high-water mark in Lions history, just before the crest broke and a great tidal wave of misery washed back on us all. Horrible, horrible. And it doesn’t, because despite all of that, despite what should stand forever in our minds as a perpetual reminder of glory, Bobby Layne’s name to us is dark and full of terrors because he’s the one who infamously cursed the Lions to a half century of failure when they traded him to the Steelers.

Naturally, this is kind of absurd. I mean, Christ, nattering about ancient curses is something none of us should allow to happen, and yet . . . and yet . . . 50 years of misery and failure has stretched to 60, and how long, Bobby? How long must we endure for your hissy fit?

And it was a hissy fit. That’s because the whole legend of Bobby Layne has kind of been twisted to the point where everyone believes the Lions ineptly traded away their franchise player in his prime, and thus deserved everything that befell them. To most people, the whole Bobby Layne saga is just example number one of the Lions being the Same Ol’ Lions lol amirite that we’ve all heard so many fucking times in our lives. But the truth is that Bobby Layne was already on the decline when the Lions traded him away and within a couple of years he was basically finished. Did they trade him too soon? Eh. Maybe a year too early. But that is hardly GUILTY YOUR HONOR kind of evidence worthy of a 60-year curse.

Still, Bobby Layne was a Hall of Fame quarterback for the Lions, and he deserves to be remembered as such. Unfortunately, he’ll always be remembered as the genesis for everything we know and loathe about this goddamn team. That is a hell of a legacy to leave, but it shouldn’t really be that surprising. I mean, after all, this is a franchise in which it is practically a requirement to leave a legacy tinged with tragedy and deep psychic scars for all its Hall of Famers.

It’s sad that, for the most part, Bobby Layne’s very name has been reduced to something of a psychic bogeyman, a dirty word people barely dare to even whisper when they talk about the Lions. It is insane and it is ridiculous, but “insane” and “ridiculous” pretty much sum up being a fan of this goddamn team.

After Bobby Layne and before Matthew Stafford was literally 50 years of absurd failure, the sort of thing that Browns fans are only beginning to understand. Every single quarterback who the Lions threw out there failed, some more tragically and ridiculously than others. Instead of talking about all of them one by one like Arya Stark reciting her death list, I’ll just focus on five tragedies in particular.

After nearly 30 years of wandering in the desert, relying on names like Jeff Komlo and Gary Danielson to combat Bobby Layne’s psychic five finger death touch, the Lions said fuck it and went big, drafting Chuck Long in the first round in 1986. He was supposed to be the Answer. Finally. Naturally, he basically played one horrible season and then flamed out of the league. Next!

Only a few years after drafting Long – and a year after drafting Barry Sanders – the Lions decided to try to take a spiritual flamethrower to Bobby Layne by drafting Heisman winner Andre Ware. The idea was to pair him with fellow Heisman winner Barry Sanders and create an unstoppable run-and-shoot offensive juggernaut. It turns out, though, that Andre Ware was just a product of a crazy Houston offense in college, the sort of dude we’d dismiss as a “system quarterback” if he came out today, like one of those Texas Tech quarterbacks who throws for 5,000 yards and doesn’t even get drafted. Back then, nobody knew better, and so of course the Lions were the team that got to learn the lesson. Andre Ware played a total of 14 games over 4 years, starting only 6. Next!

Nearly a decade went by before the Lions tried to draft their next franchise quarterback. His name? Joey Harrington. Next!!!

Okay fine, “next” was named Matthew Stafford, and that’s worked out pretty well. Finally. But we’re not done with the tragedies and there’s a couple more I want to talk about, a couple of players who weren’t horrible busts but still contributed their own painful psychic wounds to our collective psyche.

We’ll start with Greg Landry, who arrived only about a decade after Bobby Layne left and before anyone really even understood the hell that was about to come down on this team and its fans. Landry was legit good, a true double threat passer/runner who was headed for legit stardom. He might have even been the best player in the entire league in 1971. Things could have been much, much different for us, but then Greg Landry ruined his knee, he never quite came back, and he hung around for years as just a ghost of himself, a cruel mockery of what we might have had. The Lions spent so much time, and wasted so many years, trying to chase that ghost, that it’s Greg Landry’s ghost who might actually be responsible for our misery, not Bobby Layne’s. If the Lions had just mercilessly tossed Landry aside and started over as soon as his knee was doomed to hell, maybe, just maybe, they could have pulled out of their tailspin. But they didn’t, they kept deluding themselves into believing Landry could come back, and by the time they finally decided to give up the ghost it was too late and the Forever Rot had already set in. Bobby Layne is a dick.

And finally, there is Scott Mitchell, who I’m including because he taunted us like a cruel desert mirage in that crazy 1995 season, which saw him put up huge numbers and convince us that our search had finally ended. Naturally, he melted down so hideously in the playoff game that year against the Eagles (spoiler alert: the Lions lost) that he never recovered, neither did the Lions, and we were left eating sand again and weeping blood tears in our spiritual Sahara.

This parade of failure demons is not a legacy that anyone should have to deal with, and so it’s honestly no surprise that so many of us have had such a hard time trusting in Matthew Stafford. We’re like a dog that’s been beaten since he was a puppy. Our new owners seem like they might be nice. Hell, they’ve treated us pretty well for years now. But all it takes is one bad thing, one raised voice, one rolled up newspaper, one interception or offseason weight gain, and we’re pissing ourselves and baring our teeth. It’s just monstrous, it’s not fair, and we can’t help it. It’s not our fault. It’s not our fault. It’s not our fault.

Recent History: I already mentioned Joey Blue Skies or Joey Sunshine or whatever the fuck his stupid nickname was, and let’s face it, his particular scar still burns bright on our flesh so there’s no need to reopen that wound.

After him, Jon Kitna was at least tolerable for a year or two, but then he got caught up in The Horror of 2008 and died during the Bataan Death March of 0-16. Dan Orlovsky and Daunte Culpepper died with him, and when it was all over we were left with the number one pick in the draft, which was spent – wisely, for the first goddamn time – on Matthew Stafford.

I’ve already used the beaten dog analogy to describe our relationship with Matthew Stafford. But it’s deeper than that. We’re so beaten, so fucking afraid, that nobody can discuss Matthew Stafford rationally. He’s a flashpoint for Lions fans. You either give into The Fear and irrationally curse him, riding him unfairly and making him die for all of the Lions sins – and god knows that’s a lot – or you reflexively get defensive and refuse to consider even the mildest criticism of him. It’s a shitty discourse that has no winners. It’s like nuclear fucking war. The only way to win is not to play, which perhaps helps to explain why I threw up my hands for several years and refused to take part.

But here I am, and I’m struggling to find the best way to talk about Matthew Stafford. And so I’m going to do the cowardly thing and punt here. I’m going to do a positional season preview – again! – just before the season starts, when everything is settled and we know who’s actually on the team, and I promise I’ll deal with it all then. I might even devote an entire piece to just untangling this whole mess. Because there’s a lot to say about Matthew Stafford, and before I can do that, I have to be able to rationally sort out my own feelings about him. And those feelings are complicated. They are. And that’s okay to admit. That’s the first step for all of us, I think, the only way forward. We have to be willing to acknowledge, if only to ourselves, that we’re all both right and wrong about Matthew Stafford, that the past has fucked us up so much that it’s nearly impossible for us to treat him the way he deserves to be treated, on his own merits. Matthew Stafford belongs to something far bigger and far deeper than just himself. That’s unfair. It really is, but it’s also reality. How do we untangle him from that? Can we? Should we even try? I don’t know, and that’s one of the biggest things we all need to deal with. I look forward – kind of – to trying to help us do it.

Where We Are Right Now: This is the easiest part of this whole damn preview or overview or whatever the hell you want to call it. Matthew Stafford is The Guy, and that’s that. There’s no point in even speculating about anything else. He’s the franchise, for better or worse, he’s paid like it, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.

The only intrigue here lies in the backup. I like Jake Rudock. I can also admit that I like him mostly for tribal reasons and for fond memories of his one year in Ann Arbor. Believe me, about halfway through that one season I never believed in a million years I would say that because he was awful. That owed more than anything to his unfamiliarity with a new system and a new complicated playbook which he only began to learn literally a month or two before the start of the season.

The second half of that season, though, saw Rudock explode and by the time Michigan finished whipping up on Florida in their bowl game, he was arguably the team’s MVP and had played himself into an NFL draft pick. He’s not the most physically talented, but he’s smart as hell, he has an almost supernatural sense of calm, and he’s in many ways the ideal NFL backup. But he’s also not an NFL starter, and through that lens, it doesn’t really make sense to call him “the ideal NFL backup.” I mean, if he can’t be The Man, then what’s the point? Either he never plays or he’s forced into action and we’re all calling our priests for our last confession. How is any of that ideal?

Still, I might be underselling him, especially because he seems to be a valued trade asset, which means at least somebody out there thinks he can be The Man, or at least The Temporary Man, which I guess is like a gigolo or something? I don’t know. All I know is that’s where his real value to the Lions lies. They know they can get something for him, and so I expect them to do just that, and soon. Probably on draft day itself.

That’s also why the Lions just signed Matt Cassel, who’s pretty much an old man at this point, but he’s an old man that’s also had a least the idea of success in the NFL, which makes him the ideal NFL backup in a completely different way than Rudock and shit, I’m not making sense anymore.

But anyway, to hell with all that. Cassel was the dude who took over for Tom Brady that one year when Brady was lost for the season. He led the Patriots to an 11-5 record. They missed the playoffs that year, but you can see from the record that was more a weird fluke than anything. 11-5 teams don’t miss the playoffs. That season made Cassel a hot commodity, and he signed with the Chiefs, where he briefly tantalized with a single Pro Bowl season before retreating back into the world of backup and part time starter. He’ll be 36 this season, which makes this a purely temporary situation, and if the Lions want to develop someone like Rudock, then Cassel isn’t the dude. But they’re also all-in with Stafford, which means there’s not a whole lot of sense in developing anyone behind him right now. They just need a capable veteran who can step in if disaster strikes. That’s Matt Cassel. Of course, if disaster strikes, it really won’t matter and the only quarterback we’ll be talking about is Bobby Layne again and his damn ghost. Would somebody please call a fucking exorcist?